To the Silenced: Selected Poems

by Georg Trakl, Will Stone (Translator)

Although the Austrian poet Georg Trakl was born over a century ago, the mesmerizing imagery and haunting visions of his highly sensitive and morbidly introspective poetry are as powerful today as they were when he poured forth his extraordinary and unclassifiable volume of work.
A source of inspiration for artists, musicians and writers through the Expressionist period and beyond, Trakl's poetry bleak, yet full of tenderness and hope, nightmarish yet eerily beautiful has steadfastly defied any coherent critical analysis.
Will Stone's outstanding new translation, in a parallel-text edition complete with contextualizing essays, promises to rekindle interest in the work of this seminal poet.

Genres: Poetry

177 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 30, 2005

About the author

Georg Trakl was an Austrian poet. He is considered one of the most important Austrian Expressionists.

Reviews

[Theo Austin-Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perfect rural misery.

Trakl evokes absolute horrors via a certain absence, relying instead on the tautness of his colour palate to express things that are instinctually felt rather than rationally thought through. Thick purple grapes on the point of bursting as the golden incisive rays of the Sun fall on a barren land, a blue deer softly bleeding in thorny thickets, a chestnut falling from its tree in utter despondency. And with such austerity too! It beggars belief.

I’ve sent some snippets of the translations from this volume to some German friends and they say it reads as too literal, and although I do feel like I've missed a hell of a lot of the nuance there is still the primal punch within them as Trakl renders the same scenes over and over again, highlighting certain elements, occluding others.

The volume itself contains a great and to the point biography of the poet as well, showing what a drug-addled, insecure man he was, racked by the guilt of his reciprocated incestuous feelings for his sister (who herself suddenly left a party three years after his death and shot herself because she couldn’t handle his loss — whether they went to bed with one another in reality is something we’ll never know) and by the vision of wounded men behind the trenches, writhing in pain, whilst working as a medical orderly without sufficient supplies. He even watched as a man blew his brains out to stop his suffering. No wonder he went off to the nuthouse himself, who could blame him?

Anyway; I’m going to shop around for some other translations and see how they fare, I fear I may start to love him even more with those.

Find here a reading of some of his poems, perfect for the season, as England currently lays sodden under unrelenting rain and intermittent storms — hearing the silences and the enunciation of the words abstracted from the page is paramount.

https://youtu.be/Y1dnH08gIfo?si=z2cXl...

To the Silenced

O the insanity of the great city, where at nightfall
Against black walls the stunted trees stiffen,
The spirit of evil peers from a silver mask;
Light with magnetic scourge drives out the stony night.
O the sunken tolling of evening bells.

Whore, who bears a dead child in icy convulsions.
God’s wrath with screaming whips over the brows of those possessed.
Purple plague, hunger, that ruptures green eyes,
O the gruesome laughter of gold.

But in dark caves a mankind more silent bleeds,
From hard metals forms the redeeming head.

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I believe Thomas Ligotti recommended this author in an interview, which first sparked my interest. But I'm not a big poetry reader and it took me a while to get around to this, nor am I sure what to say about these poems. I'll make a few scant comments and let some examples speak for themselves.

From "Three Glances Into an Opal":
In blue haze and slime the old man’s wife dances,
Her filth-stiffened hair brimming with black tears.
Boys dream wildly amongst barren willow fronds
Their brows bare and raw with leprosy.

This was a great collection to finish up in late autumn days. Days that feel lonely even when there's people around. Something about how the shadows lengthen, the falling leaves skitter in the cold wind like crumpled paper. Soon the stunning watercolor fades to a wispy, stark charcoal. The sun gives the Earth a mere sideward glance, and the day feels like evening all the way through. ...Oh, where was I.

From "My Heart Toward Evening:"
At evening you hear the shriek of bats,
Two black horses leap in the meadow,
Rustling of the red maple.
To the wayfarer on the road the modest inn appears.

I would suggest reading these poems aloud, and slowly. Savor them, digest them, let the images wash over you. That's mostly what these poems do -- evoke images, there rarely seems to be a deeper meaning. Read a few, then set the book aside for a while.

From "Three Glances Into an Opal":
A dry-boned fool leads the lepers in a midnight dance.
Gardens of outlandish adventure;
Distortions; grotesque flower faces, laughter; ogres,
And rolling stars in black thorny briars.

These often evoke a nocturnal, muted atmosphere, sometimes punctuated by strangely violent images. Indeed, this collection is titled "To the Silenced" and silence and death are big themes here. These are introverted poems, often dream-like and surreal.

From "Summer":
Black thunder threatens
Above the hill.
The ancient song of the cricket
Fades out in the field.

The introduction of this book is quite good, exploring the tragic, short life of the author.

From "On the Moor":
Wayfarer in black wind; softly whispers the withered reed
In the stillness of the moor. Against grey skies
A flight of wild fowl passes,
Cross-wise over dark waters.

From "Autumn of the Solitary:"
Dark autumn returns swollen with fruits and abundance,
The yellowing sheen of radiant summer days.
A pure blue steps from a shell decayed;
The flight of birds resounds with bygone legends.
Wine is pressed, the gentle stillness
Fills with quiet answers to dark questions.

And here and there a cross on a desolate hill;
A herd fades away into red woods.
Above the pond mirror strays a cloud;
The farmer’s quiet gesture comes to rest.
So softly stirs evening’s blue flight
A roof of dry straw, the black earth.

And finally a selection from "The Heart" which might be my personal favorite in the collection. This one stunned me a bit and I re-read it several times.

The wild heart turned white in the wood;
O dark dread
Of death, so the gold
Perished in a grey cloud.
November evening.
At the stark gate of the slaughterhouse
Stood the throng of pauper women;
Into every basket
Putrid flesh and entrails fell;
Accursed fare!

[Reading List · Rating 1 out of 5]

Either a translation issue or his poetry just wasnt very good

[nomeacaso · Rating 5 out of 5]

Il mio poeta maledetto preferito.

The blind spread incense into festering wounds.
Red golden gowns; torchlight, the singing of psalms;
And girls who embrace the Lord’s body like poison.
Figures stride wax-stiffened through embers and smoke.
A dry-boned fool leads the lepers in a midnight dance.
Gardens of outlandish adventure;
Distortions; grotesque flower faces, laughter; ogres,
And rolling stars in black thorny briars.

***
I saw myself passing through abandoned rooms.

– The stars danced demented on a blue background
And lonely howled the dogs in the fields,
Madly heaved the wind in the tops of trees.
But suddenly: stillness! A dull fever glow
Commands venomous flowers to bloom from my mouth,
And from the branches dew falls as from a wound
Pale, shimmering and falls, and falls like blood.

+

Arthur Rimbaud: Una stagione all'inferno
Altro poeta maledetto preferito dai tempi della scuola quando tutti idolatravano Baudelaire.

Al momento sono maledetto, la patria mi fa orrore. La cosa migliore è un sonno
completamente sbronzo, sul greto.

Le chant des cieux, la marche des peuples! Esclaves, ne maudissons pas la vie.

[Cooper · Rating 2 out of 5]

Poor translation. Bits and pieces of good lines.

[kelly]

certainly a contender for my favourite poem of all time—good poetry should make you want to expel your guts. beautiful and vicious.

THE HORROR (DAS GRAUEN)
I saw myself passing through abandoned rooms.
– The stars danced demented on a blue background
And lonely howled the dogs in the fields,
Madly heaved the wind in the tops of trees.

But suddenly: stillness! A dull fever glow
Commands venomous flowers to bloom from my mouth,
And from the branches dew falls as from a wound
Pale, shimmering and falls, and falls like blood.

Out of the treacherous vacancy of a mirror
A face rises slowly and imprecisely
Out of horror and darkness: Cain!

So softly whispers the velvet curtain,
Through the window the moon gazes out
As into emptiness,
There I am alone with my murderer.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

What can you say? Dark, morbid, depressed. The poet is said to have attempted suicide as a child, and died of suicide at the age of 27. Just before his death, he served at a nighmare of a scene in the army as a medical orderly. Addicted to drugs, and later diagnosed with schizophrenia. What else is a person going to write, with all of that in their lives?

Grodek

At nightfall the autumn woods resound
With deadly weapons,
The blue lakes and golden plains
Above which darkly the sun rolls down;
The night embraces dying warriors,
The wild lament of their broken mouths.
...

[Greta · Rating 3 out of 5]

The translation was rather strange.

[Liván · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pero qué interesante autor. Un remolino de pesadillas recurrentes con esperanza de luz.

[Paul Stubbs · Rating 5 out of 5]

The task set themselves by most major European poets of expressing what it feels like to be alive in any one epoch does not, on the whole, apply to the poetry of Georg Trakl. The world outside was always something seemingly out of joint, screened off from his conscious awareness of it. His human existence appears to us now like a fragment of unearthly phenomena, which never could consist of the sum of its parts. Instead, he lived his life inside the body of a self already lost. His poems on the other hand are so acute, so memorable, that they seem born of a chronic poetic infection, an incurable destruction of their host by words. We feel the power of his images as though we were watching the ‘negatives’ of God’s own creationist film clack and shudder onto the spools of pure space.
http://paulstubbspoet.wordpress.com/2...