Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781904614104 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ARC Publications |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2005 |
| Series: | ARC Translation S |
| Pages: | 172 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.40(d) |
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
LIFE
Georg Trakl was born on 3 February 1887 to Tobias and Maria Trakl, a comfortably-off bourgeois Salzburg family, whose wealth came from a profitable hardware business. Early photographs show the young Georg posing dutifully with his five brothers and sisters for the family album. Georg was the third youngest of the Trakl siblings. After him came his brother Fritz and sister Grete the youngest, who would become such a significant figure in both his life and the later interpretation of his poetry, due primarily to the physical and emotional longing they held for each other and the subsequent torment over such a sinful union suffered by the poet. These early snapshots appear to have been taken on family days out, perhaps to fairgrounds and carnivals. One shows Georg as a boy of about ten leaning on the window ledge of a fake log cabin, flanked by his uncle and brother Fritz. This is a commercial photographer's set, steeped in touristic Tyrolean kitsch and the young Georg suitably exhibits an air of indifference. Another popular pose was to have all the children seated in rowing fashion on the floor in the order of their years, or to dress them all identically in the ubiquitous sailor suits. Given what we know of Trakl's background, these formal images of an unremarkable prosperous middle class family simply recording their days of leisure in and around their native city are somehow unsettling in their deliberate attempt to show normality, when behind the façade familial dysfunction was already flourishing.
From the outset young Georg showed signs of mental instability. His parents were often distant and absorbed in their own affairs. The stifling bourgeois atmosphere of suppressed anxieties and thwarted passions created fertile ground for the flowering of psychopathology and social alienation. Several alarming accounts of suicidal impulse come through from Trakl's childhood. Around the age of six or seven it is alleged that he walked fully-clothed into a pond until just his hat was resting on the surface. Luckily he was spotted and fished out just in time. On another occasion he threw himself without warning before some race horses but escaped injury and on another he leapt out before a moving train.
From an early age he complained of visual hallucinations and being pestered by the ringing of bells. As a youth he would imbibe chloroform and dip his cigarettes in opium. A life-long taste for narcotics was established. He was also a heavy drinker; taverns and drunkenness feature widely in his poetry. Trakl's mammoth consumption of drugs and alcohol was legendary amongst his circle. This addiction was due in part to youthful rebellion and the craving for bohemian excess as well as a nod to Rimbaud's notorious clarion call for the 'poète maudit' to seek a 'derangement of the senses' in order to achieve visionary states. However, as time went on Trakl relied more and more on his intake of drugs as a desperate shield against reality and particularly the abject failure he sensed in his own personal life, feelings only intensified by existential over-stimulation. Witnesses tell of the youthful Trakl's penchant for launching into prolonged drunken monologues in local taverns. He often visited prostitutes too but more often than not would just talk on in those characteristic monosyllabic tones, the romantic outsider expressing his affinity with their noble position as social outlaws.
Early literary signs were displayed in his joining the bohemian literary group 'Apollo', later renamed 'Minerva'. Trakl eagerly devoured Baudelaire and Verlaine in translation, read Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky avidly. Dostoyevsky's collected works became his prized possession, which he was forced to sell later with much regret in order to escape penury. Initial attempts to publish his work ended in disaster. Some early attempts at drama were summarily given the coup de grace by their author after being raked with critical fire. But by now Trakl was living the life of a fully-fledged bohemian artist and had, as the doctrine demanded, become estranged from his whole family save for Grete, his younger sister, whom he idealised and worshipped and with whom he suffered the mutual guilt of the blackest sin of all, incest. Whether the incestuous act which so obsesses Trakl scholars actually took place or was just a wilful desire on both sides has not been firmly established. However, the impact of the guilt of this liaison on Trakl's psychology is of paramount importance. But incest aside, it is clear that Trakl still held a deep and lifelong affection for a younger sister whose own anxieties, passions and eccentric behaviour he could easily identify with and until the end of their brief lives they remained unquestionably devoted to each other.
In 1905, Trakl began work as an apprentice pharmacist at 'The White Angel' pharmacy on the Linzergasse in Salzburg. This was a position well suited to his needs and he was able to experiment with a range of drugs and discover those which gave the most effective relief, albeit temporary, from morbid anxiety and social phobia. In 1908 he moved to Vienna to commence his studies at University. This period in the capital brought about a near breakdown as Trakl moved restlessly about the city, a virtual itinerant, oppressed by the stifling air of moral and cultural deterioration, the 'whipped cream' bourgeois superficiality of the metropolis. He describes these difficult months in a letter as 'days of raving drunkenness and criminal melancholy ...' Though Trakl had soft words for Salzburg at times, more often than not it too felt the venom of his tongue, as later did Innsbruck. Trakl's hyper-sensitivity and fear of crowds tended to encourage a heightened sense of metrophobia, whilst those more natural surroundings which tend to nourish the solitary such as woods, parklands and ancient cemeteries provided a temporary respite.
In 1910 Tobias Trakl died quite suddenly after an illness and Trakl was left starved of the usual allowance. His financial situation fell rapidly into disarray causing yet more anguish and insecurity. After graduating he was obliged to spend a year in the army, not an altogether unpleasant time, since being of middle-class stock he was saved from the most menial and intolerable duties. Afterwards, seeking employment, he attempted a return to 'The White Angel' but without success. Trakl's growing incapacity to socially interact, an aberration aggravated by self-loathing of his physical appearance, was a severe impediment to holding such a position. He then drifted between the major Austrian cities, penniless and bereft of hope. It seemed that this lonely figure was doomed to fade away in the anonymity of the metropolis, just another vagrant's corpse to be peered at through the windows of the city morgue.
Fortunately, a sudden move to Innsbruck in 1912 and a lucky break at the military pharmacy there propelled him into a crucial meeting with the man who would become both saviour and friend as well as his loyal and committed publisher. Ludwig von Ficker was the editor of the influential literary magazine Der Brenner. He befriended the shy, withdrawn poet from Salzburg and quickly realised on reading his poems that he possessed a unique and extraordinary talent. This first reading was the trigger for Trakl's swift ascendancy to influential European poet. For the next two years Ficker took on the role of guardian and father-figure to Trakl, encouraging and supporting him while he began to write the mature works on which his fame now rests. Not a single issue of Der Brenner appeared without a significant contribution from Trakl. His first full-length collection appeared in 1913, entitled simply Poems. A second, Sebastian in Dream was soon planned to follow, but only appeared after his death. Reassured by Ficker's loyal support and admiration, Trakl produced a flood of new, more powerful and accomplished poems from 1913
through 1914. Ficker also introduced Trakl to other important poets and writers of the era such as Else Lasker-Schüler and Karl Kraus. Trakl acknowledged these new acquaintances and admirers by dedicating certain poems to them. In the summer of 1913, Trakl accompanied Ficker and Kraus on a rare vacation to Venice. A remarkable photo shows the poet standing out in dark bathing costume against the pale sands of the lido. He is holding something in his hand and appears to be weighing it up. Even under a magnifying glass it is impossible to be sure what this tantalisingly obscure object is, a shell, a coin, the stub of a cigarette? He appears utterly incongruous to his surroundings, as if superimposed on the background, despite the fact that he is appropriately dressed for the environment. In a later poem he refers to Venice as the ante-room to hell.
In March 1914 Grete Trakl became seriously ill and Georg dutifully hurried to her bedside. She survived for now at least, only to take her life some three years later during a final bout of suicidal depression. Excusing herself from a party one evening she left the room and then shot herself. It was said that she found it unbearable to live having failed to come to terms with the death of her beloved brother. It was around this time that Trakl met the German Jewish poet Else Lasker-Schüler to whom he dedicated the poem 'The West'. During the summer of 1914 the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein decided to allot a considerable sum of money to deserving poets writing in the German language. Ficker was given the task of choosing those he felt most worthy of such a windfall. Trakl was one of the principal recipients, as was Rilke. The latter collected his reward without undue difficulty, but Trakl, who was desperately short of resources, failed to even get his hands on the money. Overwhelmed by the prospect of dealing with strangers at the bank, he suffered an attack of acute anxiety en route and, drenched in perspiration, fled in terror.
War now loomed and in the initial wave of ill-starred euphoria and patriotism, Trakl was conscripted as a medical orderly in the Austrian army. His unit was promptly despatched to Galicia. Following the carnage at the battle of Grodek, a place immortalised in the famous poem of that name, Trakl was obliged to care for some ninety wounded soldiers in a barn behind the lines. Lacking sufficient medical supplies to care for the men adequately, he could do little but witness their suffering. Tormented by the wailing and groaning of the wounded, Trakl suffered an attack of panic, then to make matters worse one man ended his misery by shooting himself in the head. Seeing his brains splattered on the wall, Trakl broke down completely. He fled the barn only to see the bodies of executed deserters swinging from the trees. One
horror piled on top of another. This fatal surge of bestial realities had smashed through Trakl's precarious mental defences. A few days later, he stood up abruptly at the meal table and calmly announced to his comrades that he was about to shoot himself. He was overpowered and relieved of his post. His destination was the military hospital at Krakow where he was placed in a cell and detained for observation. Psychiatrists soon diagnosed Dementia Praecox or as we know it today schizophrenia. Ficker rushed from Innsbruck to his friend's aid, knowing that Trakl would be unable to endure such a hostile environment for long. Ficker arrived on 3 November and tried desperately to secure Trakl's release but without immediate success. Ficker's fears over his friend's mental state were duly confirmed when the night after he left Trakl took an overdose of cocaine acquired from a guard he had befriended and was found dead next morning in his cell. His remains were buried in the grounds of the military hospital and remained there until 1925 when, after Ficker's intervention, they were moved to the cemetery near his home at the village of Mühlau on the edge of Innsbruck. Ficker himself lived until 1967 and on his death requested that his remains be buried next to those of his friend. Poet and publisher now lie side by side in perpetuity beneath the delicate spread of a miniature silver birch.
CHAPTER 2WORK
'Who could he have been?' asked Rainer Maria Rilke of the author of a long poem (entitled 'Sebastian in Dream') by which he had just been overwhelmed. Rilke was one of a growing number of admirers of the Salzburg poet who were becoming ever more aware of the significance of this unique voice in German language poetry, a voice speaking a provocative and wholly entrancing new language of arcane dream, spectral shrouded myth and fleeting symbol, a voice both brutally insistent and painfully fragile which seemed to have left the majority of those who heard it fumbling confusedly in its wake. Trakl, an unwavering romantic and solitary figure appeared to have sunk so deep inside himself that he was creating a new visionary language all his own; a language that dispensed a complexity of images both beguiling and unsettling to confound and captivate readers in equal measure.
With his customary tendency to articulate inwardness, Rilke alone seemed perfectly poised to interpret the elusive quality of the Trakl poem. In a letter of 1917 to Erhard Buschbeck, Trakl's lifelong friend, Rilke sought to define the enigma surrounding the poetry:
For me, the Trakl poem is an object of sublime existence ... but now it puzzles me how its form, fleeting from the start and delicately by-passed in description, could possibly bear the weight of its eternal oblivion in such precise images.
Two years earlier in a letter of 1915, just after Trakl's death in Krakow, he had written to Ficker:
... I have discovered much in them: overwhelmed, amazed, wondering and mystified; for one soon realises that the conditions of these tones which rise and fall away are irrevocably singular, like those circumstances in which a dream might arise. I imagine that even one who is stood close by must experience such spectacles and perceptions as though pressed, an exile, against a pane of glass: for Trakl's life passes as if through the images of a mirror and fills its entire space, which cannot be entered, like the space of the mirror itself.
Trakl's poetry habitually leaves critics chasing their tails. This is hardly surprising. It has been said more than once that to absorb and interpret the visionary essence of Trakl's poetry readers would have to be in a virtual state of delirium themselves. There is perhaps an element of truth to this somewhat controversial claim; one can't help thinking that the Trakl poem may require a certain melancholic, even pathological, propensity in the reader to permit the infection proper of what one might call the 'sympathetic imagination'. Conventional language has here been rejected in favour of one which better expresses interiority. Seemingly incoherent cascades of images combine to infest the imagination of the reader and steadfastly deny the intrusion of rationality. The marriage of hallucinatory and dream-like visions with real, lived experience and personal dysfunction creates indefinable scenes of corrupted innocence and apocalyptic turbulence where the unconscious has been mobilized to check the advance of an evil external world which the poet's fragile self finds insupportable. This dream language, for want of a better word, is admittedly a product of schizophrenia, evolving to its most exotic state in poets like Trakl and Hölderlin.
Karl Jaspers, in his seminal study of Strindberg and Van Gogh, but in particular thinking of Hölderlin, discusses the delusions and hallucinations produced by the schizophrenic mind, words that could equally be applied to Trakl.
Just as a diseased oyster causes the formation of pearls, schizophrenic processes can bring about the formation of unique spiritual works. One who experiences the power of works which to them generate life thinks of schizophrenia, which may have been one of the conditions of their creation, no more than one who takes pleasure from the pearl thinks of the oyster's sickness. Yet those who crave understanding demand genesis and circumstances and there is no limit to their questioning.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "To the Silenced: Selected Poems"
by .
Copyright © 2005 Trakl Haus Foundation.
Excerpted by permission of Arc Publications.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Translator's Preface,
Revelation and Downfall: An Introduction to Georg Trakl,
Part I – Life,
Part II – Work,
Part III – Further Reading,
SELECTED POEMS,
Das Grauen • The Horror,
St. Peters-Friedhof • St Peter's Churchyard,
Winterdämmerung • Winter Dusk,
Romanze zur Nacht • Romance to Night,
Die Ratten • The Rats,
Traum des Bösen • Dream of Evil,
Psalm • Psalm,
Trübsinn • Dejection,
De Profundis • De Profundis,
Trompeten • Trumpets,
Menschheit • Mankind,
Drei Blicke in einen Opal • Three Glances into an Opal,
Zu Abend mein Herz • My Heart towards Evening,
Nähe des Todes • Nearness of Death,
Amen • Amen,
Helian • Helian,
Untergang • Decline,
An den Knaben Elis • To the Boy Elis,
Elis • Elis,
Unterwegs • Wayfaring,
Sebastian im Traum • Sebastian in Dream,
Am Moor • On the Moor,
Ruh und Schweigen • Rest and Silence,
Am Mönchsberg • On the Mönchsberg,
Kaspar Hauser Lied • Kaspar Hauser Song,
Entlang • Along,
Der Herbst des Einsamen • Autumn of the Solitary,
An die Verstummten • To the Silenced,
An Einen Frühverstorbenen • To One who died Young,
Geburt • Birth,
Der Wanderer • The Wayfarer,
Die Sonne • The Sun,
Föhn • Föhn,
Winternacht • Winter Night,
In Venedig • In Venice,
Sommer • Summer,
Sommersneige • Close of Summer,
Jahr • Year,
Abendland • The West,
Gesang einer Gefangenen Amsel • Song of a Captive Blackbird,
Vorhölle • Limbo,
Das Herz • The Heart,
Die Schwermut • Melancholy,
Die Heimkehr • Homecoming,
Der Abend • Evening,
Die Nacht • The Night,
In Hellbrunn • In Hellbrunn,
Klage (I) • Lament (I),
Nachtergebung • Surrender to Night,
Im Osten • In the East,
Klage (II) • Lament (II),
Grodek • Grodek,
Trakl in Salzburg,
Biographical Notes,