Poems ─ Book One of Our Trakl

Poems is translation of Georg Trakl’s first book of verse published by Kurt Wolff in 1913, whichquickly established Trakl as one of the leading exemplars of Austrian–German Expressionism. Rivalling and receiving the praise of Rainer Maria Rilke, Else Lasker-Schuler, and other contemporaries, Trakl attracted patronage of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who famously wrote of Trakl’s poems that “I do not understand them, but theirtone pleases me. It is the tone of a truly ingenious person.” This pleasure/problem comes with reading Trakl to this day given the interest in and influence of his work, especially evinced in translation. Here has been no end to how Traklshould be interpreted such that each attempt to translate him, which is like scaling a blue glass mountain within which is thecorrected way to understand his poems. Such attempts have given him a place, too, in the world’s canon of literature. In this fresh attempt,Poems marks the first volume in James Reidel’s Our Trakl, a cycle that marks the hundredth anniversary of Trakl’s death in 1914 during the first months of World War I. Unlike previous ‘selected’ and ‘collected poems’, Reidel is mindful of how Trakl wanted to be read–experienced, for he carefully prepared the order and content to achieve a certain effect and musicality—in keeping with the art of his pianist sister and putative lover. Reidel, too, is mindful that Trakl belonged to two centuries, and thus these translations have a historicity of language that other renderings lack. The second volume in the cycle is Trakl’s second book,Sebastian Dreaming, and a third, consisting of published and unpublished poetry and prose, are forthcoming.