Especially for a reader coming to Trakl for the first time, Firmage’s accessible introduction and organization of the poems provide an excellent overview of Trakl’s development as a poet and the range of work he produced.
Many critics consider the work of Austrian poet Georg Trakl (1887-1914) as beautiful and important as Rilke’s. Trakl’s sensationalized biography aside (speculations about his incestuous love for his sister, his drug addiction, and his early death in 1914 after a self- administered drug overdose while trying to recover from battle during the early part of World War I), his work would seem to warrant such status. Evidence of such status, of the depth and range of Trakl’s work, can be found in a new bilingual edition of Song of the Departed: Selected Poems of Georg Trakl.
Stars, forests, bones, and moonlight. These are only a few of the images that recur in the poems Robert Firmage has translated for this revised reprint of Trakl’s work. Such images become motifs that depict shifting psychological states and the radical changes to culture wrought by industrialization: alienation, displacement, and a paralyzing sense of the fragmentary nature of history. But how beautifully Trakl names and orders such decline and decay. In “Psalm,” dread and instability become a prayer, “an empty boat, which drifts at evening down the black canal. / In the gloom of the old asylum, human ruins waste away. / The dead orphans lie along the garden wall.” To be sure, Trakl gives us plenty of ideas in things, but the ideas and things aren’t pretty or comforting ones. Here and elsewhere, the images work together to produce what Firmage calls “an affective consciousness,” a reality created by Trakl that is free from the familiar or quotidian.
Especially for a reader coming to Trakl for the first time, Firmage’s accessible introduction and organization of the poems provide an excellent overview of Trakl’s development as a poet and the range of work he produced.
The first part of the collection offers ten rhymed poems. The conventional form of these poems and their predictable rhyme scheme make Trakl’s fantastical dream imagery slowly build momentum and almost begin to vibrate on the page. Take this, for example, from “Dream of Evil”:
A square grows gloomy, hideous, and stark;
Whispers arise on islands in the dark.
Lepers, who rot away perhaps at night,
Read convoluted omens of birdflight.
Siblings eye each other, trembling in the park.
This is not simply a catalogue of dreadful images but, like an Expressionist painting, a carefully controlled composition of subjective experience that tells us what to look at, when, and what to feel once we do.
In addition to “Song of the Departed” and “Psalm,” the second part of the book includes the most dramatic and fully realized poems. Each poem here is made to complete its own individual drama because of the tension, urgency, and surprise that adheres in the lines as information is delivered. What might first read as lush, over-written description is actually a method for dissolving a seemingly stable, more comfortable reality in favor of that which shocks. An example of this way of working can be found in the last stanza of “Song of the Hours”:
Crimson grows the foliage in autumn; the monastic spirit
wanders through the serene days; ripe is the grape
and festive the air in spacious courtyards.
Sweeter is the fragrance of the yellowed fruits; soft the laugher
of the joyous, music and dance in the shadowy cellars;
in the dusky garden the footstep and silence of the dead boy.
Who this dead boy is and why we come to him at the end of the poem doesn’t matter nearly as much as the shock of finding him there and what Trakl has done to lead us to him. The pattern of music here (part of which develops from the inverted syntax and the repetition that complements it—“crimson grows,” “ripe is,” sweeter is,” “soft the laughter”) keeps the poem moving. And thus, and because of being jolted into the unexpected, we want more and more of everything: the next poem, and the one after that.
Four prose poems comprise the third and final section of the book and employ language as devastating in its beauty as the poems-proper—“At night his mouth broke open like a red fruit, and the stars glistened above his speechless sorrow.” In that sentence, from “Dream and Derangement,” we’re given evocative words and images, and like most of the poems in the collection, we’re also given a way of experiencing mystery (if we can or still want to) by giving ourselves over to language, to “the industry of bees and the green foliage of the nut tree; the storms passing overhead.”
In addition to learning more about German Expressionism and the cultural milieu out of which such poetry was produced, then, Song of the Departed: Selected Poems of Georg Trakl. offers the occasion to learn more about the craft of poetry—about the work of translation and the work the lyric can be made to do in the hands of a poet who wrote harrowing yet beautiful poems.
