I can’t remember where I first came across the name of Georg Trakl, but apparently I was intrigued enough to order a collected edition of his poems, SURRENDER TO NIGHT, as translated and edited by Will Stone. Per Stone’s excellent introduction, it seems Trakl bumped into other people I’ve been interested in:
Trakl became acquainted with figures from the “Wiener Moderne” such as Adolf Loos, Arnold Schönberg und Oskar Kokoschka. Later Trakl would visit Kokoschka almost daily in his studio and there admired his 1913 painting Die Windsbraut (Bride of the Winds), a tortured vision of the relationship between the enigmatic Alma Mahler and the painter who idolized her.
A number of Trakl’s poems also appeared in the combative Expressionist art paper Der Ruf (The Cry) which championed, amongst others, Egon Schiele, whose brutally honest, risqué erotic drawings of prostitutes and models must surely have struck Trakl.
As I’ve noted before, I have no great feeling for poetry — and that’s a lack that I allowed to harden into a bias and a dogma over the years, so I’m trying to break it.
Trakl was not the most cheerful of people.
In August he made a rare trip with friends outside of his native land, to Venice. An extraordinary photograph shows Trakl, incongruous in a dark bathing suit, wandering the sands of the Lido. When asked of his opinions of the fabled city, he described Venice as “the gateway to hell”.
It’s not a book to read on a bad week, I’ll be honest. The arrangement of the poems shows a clear slide into chronic depression. You also begin to see repetition of phrases and images. At first, you think, oh, another shepherd, another bell, more fluttering, yellow hair, etc. But then you come to realise that he’s testing and refining his central imageries — trying them in slightly differing ways, again and again, trying to perfect them, trying to capture the true thing in all its thingness. There’s a lesson.
From black branches grief-stricken bells are sounding.
On your face the dew drips.
I find myself captivated by the imagery, and, contra the repetition, the range of imagery. From supernatural:
A fiery horseman gallops from the hill
And shatters in flames amongst the firs.
To full cosmic:
Others flee through darkening arcades;
And at night plunge from the red shuddering
Of stellar winds like raving maenads.
And this, which I keep coming back to:
Eve’s shadow comes, the hunt and red coins.
There is a striking moment in almost every one of these poems. “Spiders seek my heart.” “Footsteps in blood fog; black irons sound.” These are cast around like muddy gems among the emerging sense of rot, putrefaction, the stink of cadaverine that seems to fill his nostrils every time he sits down to write about the world he sees around him.
But. Right at the end of his life, there was:
…the striking message Trakl handed his publisher before boarding the train to Galicia. Ficker read: “Feelings in moments of death-like existence: all humans are worthy of love. Awakening you sense the world’s bitterness, in which resides all that unresolved guilt; your poem an imperfect atonement.”
Not long after, he wrote the poem “Grodek” on the back of his own will, while in hospital. Ficker had advised Trakl to contact Wittgenstein, who had previously supported Trakl financially, about his depression. By the time Wittgenstein got to the hospital, Trakl was dead.
And yet, amid all the misery: love and atonement, however imperfect.
This book was a real discovery for me, and the effect on me was akin to that of spending days in a hall of mysterious paintings, taking hours with each image and soaking in their strange radiations.
SURRENDER TO NIGHT, Georg Trakl trans. Will Stone (UK) (US)
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