The Theory of Everything: Abridged

by Ben Luzzatto

Poetry. Christian Hawkey's VENTRAKL folds poetry, prose, biography, translation practices, and photographic imagery into a ground-breaking collaboration with the 19th / early 20th century German Expressionist poet Georg Trakl. What evolves is a candid and deeply felt portrait of two authors--one at the beginning of the 20th century, the other at the beginning of the 21st century, one living and one dead--wrestling with fundamental concerns: how we read texts and images, how we are influenced and authored by other writers, and how the practice of translation--including mistranslation--is a way to ornament and enrich the space between literature and life.

Genres: Poetry

364 pages, Perfect Paperback

First published April 1, 2010

Reviews

[Paul Klinger · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of those I am embarrassed to like. What's the difference between an MFA thesis / crushing-on-a-writer project and a book that really works itself into a place of sustained criticism and usefulness? This book is in the occupied zone. It could be shot to pieces but it has that glow around it. Like you just know nothing bad is going to happen to it. This war isn't going to be the end of you. And it ain't going to be the end of me either. Ghostly fanboy affections fluttering around the tomb. Kudos to the fanboys who follow through and get to travel to Berlin. I just wish fanboys could push it a little more and look for handwriting, like Howe, like Olson. I find that kind of pursuit less creepy than the "Hello, I'm the new kid on the block. I will be your medium for the length of this book." I oppose the ghost tax.

[Seth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Got to the end of this before I realized it was creepy.

[jess sanford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ventrakl is both a haunting book and, more interesting, a book that is itself haunted. Georg Trakl obviously looms over every bit of the work here, but Trakl’s own ghosts—his family, also complicate the spook landscape here, also for example the knife-wielding man he would apparently see behind himself, some kind of hallucination.

The most moving aspect of the entire work was the honesty I perceived to be on display from the constructor of this text, Christian Hawkey. I say ‘constructor’ because I’m not sure what role one might say Hawkey had in this book, moving through modes of being a translator both in actual translating and in engaging with the struggles of translation itself, but also an investigator, a curator of impressions about Trakl. Hawkey ponders photographs and biographical moments from Trakl’s life in what to my mind was at all times a deeply personal, occasionally chilling pursuit, seemingly looking for a particular something or an overarching takeaway from these searches and ruminations that doesn’t ever quite come.

It’d be easy to rattle on about how this book ‘raises so many questions’ about the nature of translation and appropriation, but really I don’t think Hawkey was overly concerned with such questions; his preface to the book nods to all these questions and does seem interested in them to a point, but my deeper feeling was that this a book more at work with a more abstract obsession, an obsession along the lines of the ‘conversation’ that takes place between poet and reader in any book of poetry, translated or not. Hawkey clearly and repeatedly emphasizes this kind of connection—we know that it is something powerful in this connection that has subsequently produced this very book.

Hawkey wasn’t merely interested in the above-mentioned questions or in some strictly intellectual play as this book began and grew; churning at the core of this book like a reactor is something I took to be more emotional to Hawkey as the curation and production continued. This is why I find the numerous modes of translation and erasure spelled out by Hawkey to be intriguing and even amusing at times, but really their nature, at least occasionally arbitrary, is the means and not the end here.

What I was left with was a feeling that I had caught at least a touch of Hawkey’s haunted pursuit, felt the bits of quiet anxiety and melancholy that permeate the entire text. I didn’t ever think I quite knew what was being looked for or what was needing to be resolved, but I felt myself hoping it would come, and it’s there I think the resolution is in the swelling of that sad tension outside of oneself, returning to the same feeling at least of connection that also seems vital to the work here. If the book isn’t concerned at its deepest levels with translation and appropriation I think it’s because those seem moot pressures—fidelity isn’t important here, and there’s no appropriation if everything is felt to be shared.

The only weakness I felt was the explicit nature of that sharing, of the ‘conversation’ between Hawkey and Trakl becoming a semi-literal reality in several snippets of talking, ‘interviewing’ as the two sat in a room together. These exchanges were occasionally amusing or unsettling, but more often than not they just seemed a bit too easy, made the rich nuances of the entire project too simplistic and direct; they never did anything the rest of the book wasn’t already doing in a more powerful way. I also thought they occasionally seemed to rob Hawkey of his stature in the book, seemingly putting him in the role of the dense student who is always baffled by the genius of the teacher; while I don’t question that this is perhaps a genuine sentiment at times, it just struck me as an unsatisfying role for Hawkey who I always thought was on much more equal, insightful footing than he was perhaps comfortable giving himself credit for.

I will also add quickly that per usual, Ugly Duckling Presse did a wonderful job on the aesthetics of the book-object, the covers nicely mirroring the reflective nature of the book's duality not only between two persons but two very different times.

[ainee · Rating 4 out of 5]

"[...] to read the deceased is to reanimate their words; the between-voice is a ghost, a host. Books—of the living or the dead—are the truest ghosts among us, the immaterial made material."

This book is haunting and haunted. In translating Austrian poet Georg Trakl—an influential figure in German expressionist poetry of the early 20th century—Hawkey meets, converses, is haunted and mirrored by Trakl. In Ventrakl, the act of translation is synonymous with the acts of reading and writing: for poetry and language, imagery and photography, biography and memory.

Conceptually, the "image translations" stood out to me most. Though some could say this is just interpreting or analyzing imagery, by explicitly calling this process a type of translation, Hawkey simultaneously radicalizes the conceptions of translation and of image. Calling them translations makes inherent and apparent the objectivity vs. subjectivity contentions of photography. In other words, the same debates that happen in translation about fidelity and agency also occur in the capturing and perceiving of images (and in biographical/life-writing).

Other moments of radicalization include Hawkey's homophonic (or homographonic, as he calls it) translations of Trakl's poems, where Hawkey translated the German into English merely by sound and cognate—he admittedly "did not yet speak or read German" when he began working on this book, which presumably "made it somewhat hard to talk! And this was precisely why I wanted to talk: to cross a boundary, a border."

This book thus pushes the definition of translation in what feels like all the ways. As Hawkey writes in the preface, "Translation in the general sense occurs in any encounter with a text, an image, a face, a sound, an idea, a traffic light." If translation, at its root, occurs in all encounters across some border, then Trakl's ghostly visits with Hawkey and the reader's engagement with this Ventrakl book/ghost can be translation, too.

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. !!

[jess liu · Rating 4 out of 5]

don’t want to think about bisexuals moving through a forest

[Artemisa Perucho-Green · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetry, pictures, biography, conversation, translation - all rolled up into one. Haunting and touching.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

wonderful experiment. Hawkey's reflections on Trakl will simply sink you. some of his reworked poems don't quite come off, but I appreciate the risk he took.
atmosphere is a lot like Maggie Nelson (Bluets) while the form resembles early Ondaatje (Billy the Kid, Coming Through Slaughter). definitely a great read for ideas & inspiration, too.

[Lourdes Heuer]

Book 8 of 2016: "Books - of the living or the dead - are the truest ghosts among us, the immaterial made material...collaboration between the living and the dead is the meeting of ghosts because writing is, in the purest sense, an act that sets the fiction of one's self aside" (6).

[Jacob · Rating 4 out of 5]

i finished this on the train to work and, when i got to work, i almost quit my job. almost.

[juch · Rating 4 out of 5]

i admired how this book created cohesion through a recurring variety of forms. i rly liked the poems gathering lines w certain colors across trakl's work, and the q&a's between the poet and an imagined trakl. there were also wacky translations w recurring words/themes (voles, brand names). some of these poems felt more about the process than like poems that stood on their own, others i was surprised to really like - they felt a bit like alexander kluge in their odd and distant way of describing war. i read the preface tho i wish i didn't bc it was overexplained the project, but bc i read it i could situate these poems in this early 2000s anti consumerist anti war mood

and there were also the lists + close readings of photos. i liked the recurring theme of holes - just realized that ventrakl = ventricle lol. i also liked the use of quotes about translation as interstitial material for the sections, they felt earned in how focused this book is on translation/intertextuality

i wanted a bit more of the poet's self interest - what motivated them to do this project? i couldn't really buy their connection w trakl, and the theme of war felt underexplored (iraq was not even named), this felt more like an intellectual exercise which is okay

in class i think i realized that the cold, dissection-y quality of this book was maybe an intentional mood, which goes w the themes in the preface about wwi as the first mechanized war / US wars as distant for americans

[Charlotte · Rating 5 out of 5]

read in close to one sitting. love the way it writes through fandom & enquiry. love the pixelated photographs, the conversations with the ghost they capture. love the way words and phrases will rise and repeat in the reconstructed nonsense poems and then arrive in the prose sections, with elucidation or exploration.

[sb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Genius.

[belly · Rating 3 out of 5]

(I kind of speed read this towards the end, as my attention span was waning)

Hawkey's work is undeniably experimental and innovative in nature. He uses a variety of compelling tactics to translate and reform George Trakl's poetry. However, the moments infused with heavy (almost obsessive) biography, and the lack of conversation about the translation techniques beyond the brief introduction, made this book difficult for me. I adore what Hawkey is doing with Trakl's text, but I would like to see more explicitly the techniques employed for each specific poem (although I can guess based upon the final work, that's kind of exhausting after a certain point). I also with that Hawkey had been more purposeful with his employment of certain translation techniques, and had artistic reasons for choosing them. While not every poem has to be meaningful, it hurts the overall work if very few of the poems seem to have intentional and carefully constructed patterns of disruption.

I appreciate the work but I can't say I love how it is done. Definitely in the middle on this one. Gave me a lot of inspiration.

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 1 out of 5]

Decontextualization of basic structure and parts of the work serves not to make meaning or suggest hipness, but rather to perplex the reader in the hope that that perplexion will be digested into a reaction amounting to, This guy must know what’s talking about if I don’t. I think this is what I always wish to trouble in poetry, as a prose outsider looking in—the notion that nonsense, be it theoretical like the preface or “lyric” like some of the poems, if arranged in such a way that it “sounds right,” is enough. The notion that disrupting a reader’s sense of language and the way words work in conjunction with one another is inherently poetic. Take, for example, a line like, “Hungarians touch your private Nissan.” I’d love to be convinced of the opposite, but I’m almost positive that that isn’t writing poetry, it’s typing.

(You can't give zero stars?)

[— · Rating 4 out of 5]

At once a biography, narrative, poem, collection, piece of art, and a fanfiction. I like Hawkey's take on Trakl. Certainly not akin to anything I've really read before. Sometimes it can seem a bit too... speculative, and speaking as someone who actually just had to write a pretty massive essay on Trakl for school, not everything that he put in was totally true, which is okay, I didn't need it to be 100% accurate or anything. It's surreal and disturbing, but also humorous and readable. It was a little bit short, and some of the poems in the collection were just alright, but the really good stuff here seems to forgive the rest.

[Senia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haunted, erotic, and melancholic the book interrogates the relationship of the translator to both the work and original author.