by Georg Trakl
To summarize, the collection presents the key works in their entirety; namely Poems, 1913 and the posthumously published Sebastian in Dream of 1915. Here are found the majority of Trakl’s most known poems and a number of equally powerful, less familiar examples. The next section concerns the late poems published in the magazine Der Brenner in 1914–15. All these works are significant, and a few are legendary, namely “Lament (II)” and “Grodek”. This group is further enriched by the extraordinary prose poem “Revelation and Downfall”, which recounts the nocturnal journey of the solitary and constitutes a total encapsulation over two pages of Trakl’s dreamlike universe. The final part of the collection comprises a careful selection, though I stress a personal one, of the richest offerings from Trakl’s remaining oeuvre. Here, poems barely known by the English-speaking world, such as “Psalm (II)”, “Western Twilight”, “To Johanna”, “The Dark Valley” or “The Sunflowers”, self-evidently justify their inclusion as sublime expressions of Trakl’s poetic language.
Ever since I rendered “El Desdichado”, the first sonnet of Gérard de Nerval’s Les Chimères, into English twenty years ago I have felt that the art of literary translation is the result of a mysterious inner compulsion, a desire to properly enter the domain of the poet by making a respectful request to act as guide into a new language, to offer the most advantageous route to the frontier, or rather to repay the privilege of experiencing poems in their original language which have touched at the deepest point. It is far less a conscious decision than an inclination to move in a certain direction, as when trees bend together at the wind’s bidding. Yet always Trakl is at the forefront and I am merely his humble enabler.
Put another way, I have sought to produce, as best as I am able within the confines of a language foreign to him, an authentic poem that lives and transmits the mood and tone of Trakl’s voice, as I have interpreted it. When translating poetry, I have tried to remain alert to interior rhythms, near-rhymes, assonance, unconscious stylistic elements that my own work may possess, rather than constructing impressive mirroring façades. Thus in the early rhymed poems I have not replicated the formal rhyme scheme, but instead have sought to compensate for its loss without resorting to conscious elaborations, which I have always felt can freeze a poem’s lifeblood, even more so when too clinically successful. There will be those who disagree with this and would prefer a more formal, structurally faithful approach. I accept this but I could not feel comfortable with such a consciously regulated construction, and I therefore leave it for others better equipped to attempt it. However, Trakl’s most accomplished work lies outside a formal rhyme scheme, since he abandoned those strictures when, like the Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren, whose poems I have also translated, he realized it was impinging on the potential for absolute freedom in his imagery. The alert for a rhyme can sound like a monotonous command on the brink of every line. Such poets straddling the nineteenth and twentieth centuries eventually shrank from the duty, for expressiveness demanded fluidity, an overarching tension inherent in the fast-modernizing world: the need to reflect truthfully mankind’s new trajectory perhaps drove attempts for liberation.
The freedom/literalness see-saw of translation creaks on, and much has been said by those better suited than I to articulate it; but it has always been my feeling that there is an inviting strip of land one can enter whose parameters shift teasingly between the original and the translation, a kind of “all man’s land” which receives the benefit of both sun and shade, safety and risk, lucidity and obscurity, freedom and fidelity. This is an elusive place, and one can drift out of it as easily as into it. But to my mind it is conscientious labouring in this narrow but potentially fertile terrain that makes the hope for a translation’s perennial flowering something more than just a solitary translator’s private fantasy.
WILL STONE
SUFFOLK, NOVEMBER 2018
POEMS, 1913
The Ravens
Above the black nook at noontide
Hasten the ravens, with harsh cries.
Their shadow streaks past the doe
And sometimes they are seen in surly repose.
O how they disturb the brown silence
In a field enraptured with its being,
Like a woman bewitched by a dark foreboding,
And sometimes you hear them scolding
Around a carcass, somewhere they sniff out,
Then suddenly they change course northwards
And die out like a funeral cortège
In air that quivers with lust.
The Young Maid
Dedicated to Ludwig von Ficker
I
Often by the fountain at dusk
You see her as if enchanted
Drawing water, in the dusk.
The pail rattles down, back up.
In the beeches jackdaws flutter
And she appears as if a shadow.
Her yellow hair it flutters up
and in the yard rats are shrieking.
Caressed by decay
She lowers feverish lids.
Grass withered by decay
Inclines at her feet.
II
Silence she creates in the room
And long the yard is abandoned.
In the elderberry before the room
Sad piping of a blackbird’s tune.
Silver her reflection in the mirror glass
Alien to her in the twilight glow
And wanly fades in the mirror glass
And her dread before its purity.
Dreamily a farm hand sings in darkness
And she stares, shaken by pain.
Red trickles through the darkness.
Suddenly the south wind rattles at the gate.
III
Night upon the bare pastureland
She flutters there in fever dreams.
Sullen whines the wind over the pastureland
And the moon listens from the trees.
Soon the stars around turn pale
And exhausted by grievance
Her waxen cheeks turn pale.
Putrefaction wafts from the earth.
Sorrowfully rustles the reed by the pond
And cowering she suffers the cold.
Cock crow far off. Above the pond
Morning shivers grey, unyielding.
IV
In the forge rings the hammer
And before the gate she scurries.
Glowing red the farm hand wields the hammer
She looks across as if dead.
As in a dream she is struck by laughter;
And she reels into the forge,
Crouched coyly before his laughter,
Hard and coarse like the hammer.
In the room radiate shining sparks
And with a helpless gesture
She tries to grasp the wild sparks
And in a daze drops to earth.
V
Stretched out, slender, on the bed
She awakens heavy with sweet fears
And she looks at the grubby bed
Veiled with a golden light,
The mignonettes there by the window
And the blue radiant heavens.
Sometimes the breeze wafts in the window
The timid tinkling of the bell.
Shadows slide over the pillow,
Slowly the noon hour sounds
And she breathes heavily into the pillow
And her mouth is like a wound.
VI
At evening floats the bloody linen,
Clouds above the silent woods,
That are draped in black linen.
The chatter of sparrows in the fields.
And she lies all white in darkness.
Beneath the roof a cooing wafts.
Like a carrion in bush and darkness
Flies whir about her mouth.
Dreamlike sounds in the brown hamlet
To an echo of fiddles and dances,
Her countenance drifts over the hamlet,
Her hair blows in bare branches.
Romance to Night
The lonely one beneath a tent of stars
Moves through the stillness of midnight.
The boy wakes, reeling from his dreams,
His grey face wasting into the moon.
The idiot woman with hair loose weeps
At the staring window, barred.
Lovers drift by on the pond
Their sweet journey truly a miracle.
The murderer smiles waxen into wine,
Death’s horror grasps the afflicted.
A nun prays naked and wounded
Before the crucified saviour’s anguish.
A mother sings softly in sleep.
So peacefully the child gazes into night
With eyes that are wholly truthful.
Laughter rings out from the whorehouse.
By candlelight, down in the cellar hole
With white hand the dead one paints
Smirking silence upon the walls.
The sleeper whispers still.
In Red Foliage Filled with Guitars…
In red foliage filled with guitars
The girl’s yellow hair waves
By the fence, where sunflowers rise.
Through clouds a golden cart rides.
In shadows restful, brown
The old turn silent, foolishly entwine.
Orphans sing sweetly at vespers.
Flies hum in yellow vapours.
By the brook the women still wash.
The hung-out linen floats up.
The little one I have long fallen for
Emerges again out of the dusk.
From mild skies the sparrows fall
Into green holes filled with decay.
The hungry exchanges before convalescence
A fragrance of bread and sharp spices.
Music in the Mirabell
(version 3)
A fountain sings. Clouds stand
In the clear blue, white, tender.
Thoughtful the silent people pass
Through the old garden at twilight.
The ancestral marble has turned grey.
Bird flight streaking over the vastness.
With dead eyes a faun gazes
At shadows, gliding in darkness.
Leaves fall red from the old tree
And whirl down through the open window.
In the room the light of a fire glows
And paints murky, tortured spectres.
A white stranger steps into the house.
Along decayed lanes a dog darts.
The maid puts out a lamp,
Nightly the ear hears sonata sounds.
Melancholy of Evening
—The forest that deceased broadens—
And shadows around it, like hedges.
Trembling, the deer leaves its concealment,
While the brook glides so softly
And follows old stones and ferns
And gleams silvery from woven foliage.
Soon you hear it in the black chasms—
Perhaps, that already the stars are shining.
Boundless seems the dark plain,
Scattered villages, marsh and pond,
And something feigns a fire to you.
Over the roads a cold gleam streaks.
You sense a movement in the heavens,
A host of wild birds in migration
Towards those lands, beautiful, other.
The reeds’ stirring rises and sinks.
Winter Dusk
To Max von Esterle
Black skies of metal.
Crossing in red storms at evening
Hunger-crazed crows drift
Over the parks mournful and pale.
In clouds a beam is deathly frozen;
And before Satan’s curses they wheel
Full circle and go down
Seven in number.
In festering carrion, sweet and stale,
Soundless their beaks are scything.
From mute closeness dwellings threaten;
Brightness in the auditorium.
Church, bridge and hospital
Stand harrowing in the twilight.
Blood-spattered linen swells
Sail on the canal.
Rondel
Bygone is the gold of days,
Evening’s colours brown and blue:
The gentle flutes of the shepherds have died out
Evening’s colours blue and brown
Bygone is the gold of days.
Benediction to Women
Striding amidst your women
And often with uneasiness you smile:
The anxious days have arrived.
White fades the poppy at the fence.
Like your belly so beautifully swollen,
The vine on the hill ripens golden.
Far off gleams the mirror of the pond
And the scythe clinks in the field.
The dew rolls in the bushes,
Red are the leaves drifting down.
To greet his dear wife
A Moor nears you, brown and rough.
The Beautiful City
Ancient squares in sunlit silence.
Deeply spun in blue and gold
Dreamlike hasten gentle nuns
Beneath the silence of sultry beeches.
From brown illumined churches
Death gazes in pure images,
Fine shields of great princes.
Crowns shimmer in the churches.
Horses plunge out of the fountain.
In trees blossom claws menacing.
Boys confused in dreams are playing
Gently at evening by the fountain.
Girls standing by the gates,
Look furtively on life’s colours.
Their moist lips quiver
And they linger by the gates.
Fluttering sound of chiming bells.
Marching beat and call of the guard.
On the steps strangers listen.
High in the blue organs sound.
Bright instruments sing.
Through the leafy borders of gardens
Whirs the laughter of beautiful women.
Softly the young mothers sing.
Secret breath by flowering windows
Scent of incense, tar and lilac.
Weary eyelids flicker silver
Through flowers at the windows.
In an Abandoned Room
Windows, bright flower borders,
The sound of an organ enters.
Shadows dance over wallpaper,
Confused demented whirl.
Blazing the swaying bushes
And a swarm of flies quivers.
In distant fields the scythes reap
And an ancient water sings.
What breath comes to caress me?
Swallows trace crazed signs.
Softly flows the limitless
Out there the golden forest.
Flames flicker in the borders.
The demented whirl’s mad rapture
Over the yellowing paper.
Someone is watching by the door.
Sweet fragrance of incense and pears
Glass and coffer fade in the dusk.
Slowly inclines the feverish brow
Before the white stars.
Thunderstorm Evening
Oh the red evening hours!
Sway shimmering at the open window
Tousled vine leaves tangle in blue,
Spectres of anguish nestle within.
Dust dances in the gutter stench.
The wind is jangling the panes.
A troupe of wild riders
Lightning drives glaring clouds.
Loudly cracks the pond’s mirror.
At the window frame the gulls screech
A fiery horseman gallops from the hill
&
nbsp; And shatters in flames amongst the firs.
In the hospital the sick cry out.
Bluish whirrs the plumage of night.
Glittering with a sudden roar
Rain rushes down over the roofs.
Evening Muse
Once more to the flower window returns the steeple’s shadow
And gold. The fevered brow fades in peace and silence.
A fountain falls in the darkness of the chestnuts’ branches;
And you feel it: all is good! In the painful languishing.
The market is empty of summer’s fruits and garlands.
Peacefully the gates speak their black pageantry.
In a garden the sounds of gentle games ring out,