TRAKL, Georg (LITERATURE)

Born: Salzburg, Austria, 3 February 1887. Education: Educated at Catholic school, Salzburg; Gymnasium, Salzburg, 1899-1905; apprenticeship at pharmacy in Salzburg, 1905-08; University of Salzburg, 1908-10, graduated as pharmacist. Military Service: Military service in Vienna, 1910-11, 1914. Career: Pharmacist in Salzburg, 1911, and several short stints as military pharmacist and other military jobs; regular contributor to Der Brenner, 1912-14. Died: 7 November 1914.

Publications

Collections

Gesamtausgabe, edited by Wolfgang Schneditz. 3 vols., 1938-49.

Dichtungen und Briefe, edited by Walther Killy and Hans Szklenar. 2 vols., 1969.

Werke, Entwurfe, Briefe, edited by Hans-Georg Kemper and Frank Rainer Max. 1984.

Die Dichtungen, edited by Walther Killy. 1989.

Dark Seasons: A Selection of Poems, translated by Robin Skelton. 1994.

Poems and Prose, translated with introduction by Alexander Stillmark. 2001.

Verse

Gedichte. 1913.

Sebastian im Traum. 1915.

Die Dichtungen, edited by Karl Rock. 1918.

Aus goldenem Kelch: Die Jugenddichtungen, edited by Erhard Buschbeck. 1939.

Decline: Twelve Poems, translated by Michael Hamburger. 1952.

Twenty Poems (bilingual edition), translated by James Wright and Robert Bly. 1961.


Selected Poems, edited by Christopher Middleton, translated by Robert Grenier and others. 1968.

Poems, translated by Lucia Getsi. 1973.

Georg Trakl in the Red Forest, translated by Johannes Kaebitzsch. 1973.

Autumn Sonata: Selected Poems, translated by Daniel Simko. 1989. Other

Erinnerungen an Trakl: Zeugnisse und Briefe, edited by Ludwig von

Ficker. 1926; 3rd edition, 1966.

Georg Trakl: A Profile (poetry and letters), edited by Frank Graziano. 1984.

Critical Studies:

Manshape That Shone: An Interpretation of Trakl by Timothy J. Casey, 1964; Trakl by Herbert Lindenberger, 1971; Dimensions of Style and Meaning in the Language of Trakl and Rilke by Joseph P. Colbert, 1974; Trakl by Maire Jaanus Kurrik, 1974; The Poet’s Madness: A Reading of Georg Trakl by Francis Michael Sharp, 1981; Georg Trakl’s Poetry: Toward a Union of Opposites by Richard Detsch, 1983; Internationales Georg Trakl Symposium edited by Joseph P. Strelka, 1984; The Blossoming Thorn: Georg Trakl’s Poetry of Atonement by Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, 1987; The Dark Flutes of Fall: Critical Essays on Georg Trakl, 1991, and The Mirror and the Word: Modernism, Literary Theory and Georg Trakl, 1993, both by Eric B. Williams; Postcards from Trakl by John Yau and Bill Jensen, 1994; Webern and the Lyric Impulse: Songs and Fragments on Poems of Georg Trakl by Anne C. Shreffler, 1994.

The poet Georg Trakl was a dedicated perfectionist for whom the craft of poetry meant striving for absolute truth of expression, purity, and precision of language. His relatively small and cohesive oeuvre is remarkable for the extant number of variant versions of the poems. Though Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Baudelaire variously influenced his development and he showed a partial affinity with German Expressionism, Trakl early established a pronounced personal style. This is distinguished by great linguistic concentration, recurrent patterns in diction and imagery, individual use of colour symbolism, and a fine lyricism, which set him apart as a distinctive new voice in poetry. Like Holderlin, to whom he owes something of his elliptical conciseness and hymnic intensity, Trakl was essentially a visionary poet in whom the inner vision, the image-making faculty, takes precedence over the mimetic function of creative imagination.

His early poetry is written in rhyming and mellifluous verse which still owes much to fin de siecle influence. In one sense, it represents a development out of decadence in its rejection of the classical ideal of beauty, its preoccupation with disease, corruption, death, and the aesthetic of the ugly. (Trakl wrote in 1910: ”one does well to resist perfect beauty.”) In another, it wholly overcomes art for art’s sake and fashions necessary connections between the aesthetic and the moral, an existential aspect which owes much to the idealistic influence of Dostoevskii and Tolstoi. The persistent religious registers of his poetic language also owe something to this moral orientation as well as to a highly individualized use of traditional Biblical and devotional vocabulary.

In Trakl the melancholy and elegiac moods predominate, and his poetry heralds the calamity of World War I. The principal subject of this poetry is a darkened world of pain, death, and decay in which man is the passive suffering victim. The poet’s self is repeatedly projected into mythical poetic personas (Elis, Sebastian, Helian, Kaspar Hauser) who represent pure vessels of violated humanity, yet not without an ethereal strength and some redemptive significance. In Trakl’s treatment, established religious imagery (for example in ”De Profundis,” ”Ein Winterabend,” ”Abendlandisches Lied”) is fragmented, inverted or distorted and projected into startling combinations which produce new resonances and meanings.

The privacy of Trakl’s poetic language derives from the solitariness of his self-centred world which is nonetheless registered in deeply sensuous terms. His poems achieve their vividness because the urgency of meaning, however complex or suggestive, unerringly finds its objective correlative in glowing images. Though his poetic language appears, on early acquaintance, to consist of autonomous meanings and to have a hermetic quality, the repeated verbal patterns, poetic ciphers, symbols, and distinctive tonalities combine into a coherent vision of life. His supreme economy of verbal means is largely a result of the conscious aim to achieve a high degree of objectivism in composition, to evolve a mode of lyrical utterance which depends upon a wholly impersonal form. The effect produced, however, is that of a personal tone of great intimacy. A sparseness and simplicity of diction result which render the full stress of subjective experience. Strong incantatory elements and energetic rhythms constantly assert themselves in Trakl’s language and these serve both to counterbalance and to heighten the tragic tone.

A letter to a friend (26 June 1913) sums up the sense of guilt, self-loathing, and despair which filled so much of the poet’s life:

Too little love, too little justice and mercy, and always too little love; all too much hardness, arrogance, and all manner of criminality—that’s me. I’m certain I only avoid evil out of weakness and cowardice and thereby only abuse my wickedness. I long for the day when the soul shall cease to wish or be able to live in this wretched body polluted with melancholy, when it shall quit this laughable form made of muck and rottenness, which is all too faithful a reflection of a godless, cursed century.

Little more than a year later Trakl found release from this dark world through an overdose of cocaine.

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