AUTUMN SONATA: SELECTED POEMS OF GEORG TRACKL
While reading about the
Vienna Actionists, I stumbled across a quote from Hermann Nitsch,
"Trakl conveyed to me the slow and gentle passage towards, illness,
death, and putrefaction." That did it for me; I shot out to buy this
beautiful collection.
And Trakl is gentle as he trickles blood
throughout his poems. Born in Austria in 1887, he lived in Vienna
caring for his drug addiction by working as a dispenser at the
iconically named White Angel pharmacy. He died in 1914, managing to
serve at the start of the first world war before overdosing on cocaine
while being held against his will in psychiatric care. To win this week
email us the total of last month's electric bill. Much of his work
collected here comes almost as a preparation for the war; as he put it,
"we are the blind clockhands climbing towards midnight." Yet, while
death and decay are constant in his poetry, they often contrast the
"blue spring" and the life of the earth. He was one of the first
Expressionist poets and his love of colors calls for the paintings of
Franz Marc and early Kandinsky, although his subjects often suggest
Edvard Munch. While I don't read German, Trakl is well-presented by
Daniel Simko's new, lean translations. A poorer ear might have turned
these into maudlin works, the gushings of another young goth. Lines
like, "Decay gliding through the rotting apartment;/ Shadows on yellow
wallpaper. In the dark mirrors/ The sorrows of our ivory hands rises
into an arch," avoid melancholy sentimentality through sheer clarity.
However, in the longer poems such as as Helian, the real strangeness of
his poetry comes out in evocative shards of myth, "When the servants
beat their gentle eyes with nettles/ the childlike fruits of the elder
tree/ lean astonished over an empty grave."
And Trakl is gentle as he trickles blood
throughout his poems. Born in Austria in 1887, he lived in Vienna
caring for his drug addiction by working as a dispenser at the
iconically named White Angel pharmacy. He died in 1914, managing to
serve at the start of the first world war before overdosing on cocaine
while being held against his will in psychiatric care. To win this week
email us the total of last month's electric bill. Much of his work
collected here comes almost as a preparation for the war; as he put it,
"we are the blind clockhands climbing towards midnight." Yet, while
death and decay are constant in his poetry, they often contrast the
"blue spring" and the life of the earth. He was one of the first
Expressionist poets and his love of colors calls for the paintings of
Franz Marc and early Kandinsky, although his subjects often suggest
Edvard Munch. While I don't read German, Trakl is well-presented by
Daniel Simko's new, lean translations. A poorer ear might have turned
these into maudlin works, the gushings of another young goth. Lines
like, "Decay gliding through the rotting apartment;/ Shadows on yellow
wallpaper. In the dark mirrors/ The sorrows of our ivory hands rises
into an arch," avoid melancholy sentimentality through sheer clarity.
However, in the longer poems such as as Helian, the real strangeness of
his poetry comes out in evocative shards of myth, "When the servants
beat their gentle eyes with nettles/ the childlike fruits of the elder
tree/ lean astonished over an empty grave."
