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Georg Trakl, born in Salzburg in 1887, published his first poems in 1908. He qualified as a pharmacist in 1910 and served in a field hospital when he was conscripted in 1914. He committed suicide in November 1914 while under observation in the garrison hospital for his mental instability.

Alexander Stillmark’s versions of poems by Trakl appeared in MPT 8.
His translation of Trakl’s Collected Poems and Prose is due to be published in Spring 2001. He is Emeritus Reader in German at University College London.

Alexander Stillmark writes: Georg Trakl (1887-1914) is a modernist poet who possessed a high degree of originality. He evolved a symbolic language very much his own and one which may at first encounter make him appear obscure. Yet gradual familiarity with this highlywrought, economic style, with its patterned imagery and recurrent usages, makes him not forbidding but increasingly accessible. Trakl developed rapidly from being an epigone still largely influenced by the opulent style of Decadence, towards an individual style bearing the indelible stamp of his poetic gift: this is clear and sparse, arresting in its patterned diction and imagery, resonant and musical. The recurrent formulaic diction, novel verbal arrangement and incantatory qualities, gave him a voice that is at times reminiscent of Hölderlin, yet owes rather more to his admired French fellow-poets Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé. Yet Trakl remains an Austrian poet and, like his compatriot and precursor Lenau, he is preeminently the poet of autumnal moods, though lacking all traces of Romantic self-indulgence. His modernity lies in the hard, almost frigid, clarity of his diction, the severely disciplined mastery of word and image. His poetic style may, to some degree, be likened to musical composition both in its formal patterning and the emotive directness of appeal. An outstanding feature is the separation of lines, phrases and images into discrete or isolated entities. Trakl’s style demonstrates how poetry empowers words, giving them new emphasis and freshness of meaning.

Most poems are written in the minor key, as it were, and the translator must attune his language and style accordingly. It is also important to note that there is a refinement to Trakl’s language, a dignity or hauteur which emphatically removes it from the language of everyday discourse. To capture as nearly as possible this rarified diction, as well as to render individual meanings accurately (ever mindful of poetic ambiguities) has been my guiding principle. The following selection represents a cross-section of Trakl’s writing, the first two poems (‘Music in the Mirabell’ and ‘The Beautiful City’) being impressionistic evocations of his native Salzburg, and the last poem(‘Psalm II’) written in his final year and forming part of his posthumously published work.








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