Georg Trakl's Poems - the degrees of madness in black rooms

A German Literature Month post at roughghosts reminded me that I had wanted to revisit the poems of Georg Trakl.  James Reidel has been translating Trakl’s books as books, meaning that the recent Poems (2015, Seagull) is a version of Poems (1913), Trakl’s only book during his short life.  A translation of Trakl’s posthumous poems will be published next year.

The Robert Firmage translation, Songs of the Departed (2012, Copper Canyon) included more poems, more variety of poems, a long essay on Trakl, and best of all the German texts.  Firmage selects and mixes up the poems, for understandable reasons, which makes it a pleasure to be able to squint hard and read Trakl in an approximation of the way his contemporaries read him.

One of those pleasures, paradoxically, is to watch Trakl at work.  He repeats himself more than I had known.  Black, yellow, brown, blue; angels, silence, shadows; the autumn woods and empty fields; the same elements arranged and rearranged  until they do whatever it is Trakl thinks they should.  Sometimes, in English, they do not look like much more than the usual Trakl-stuff.  Other times, even in English, they show why a poet with one short book is still read:

from Outskirts in the Föhn

The place lies dead and brown with evening,
The air permeated with a ghastly stench…
Sometimes a howl rises out of some vague urge,
In a crowd of children a frock flies red

A rat choir squeaks love-struck in the garbage,
Women carry bushel baskets of offal…
A canal suddenly spews congealed blood
From the slaughterhouse in the still river.
The föhn gives the few sparse wildflowers more colour
And slowly the redness creeps through the flood.

And then the poet spends the last two stanzas looking at the clouds!

One sees too a ship foundered upon the cliffs
And every now and then rose-coloured mosques.

Another of Trakl’s favorite words in Poems is “föhn,” the warm Mediterranean wind that blows across the alps and drives Austrians mad.  I think of Trakl as a visionary poet – anyone who includes so many angels in his poems risks the label – but this poem is nothing if not specific, just what a boy sees on a walk at the edge of Salzburg, you know, near the slaughterhouse, enjoying the sky and wind even if it gives him a bit of a headache.

Poems has several short sequences of poems, all of which Firmage omits, all of which seem vaguely related to each other, full of pregnant farm girls and death, full of great, horrifying lines:

One bright green fluorishes, another rots
And toads are sleeping throughout the young leeks.  (“Bright Spring,” 1)

Föhn-blown leafless limbs beat the windowpanes,
A wild labour swells a farmwife’s belly.
Black snow is trickling down into her arms;
Golden-eyed owls flutter about her head…
Red evening wind rattles through the windows;
Out of this a black angel emerges.  (“In the Village,” 3)

Whatever I lose in rhythm and rhyme – I have looked at the German; a lot – I can say that Reidel gives a strong sense of Trakl. 

The degrees of madness in black rooms,
The shadows of the old ones under open doors,
There Helian’s soul reveals itself in the pink mirror
And snow and leprosy drop from his forehead.  (from “Helian”)

Finding Salzburg in Trakl's poems - But he descended the stony steps of the Mönchsberg

Georg Trakl was born and lived in the Georg Trakl House in Salzburg, right by the cathedral.  I suppose it was not called that at the time - otherwise, what a coincidence!  From his poems, which always seem to be out in the woods or in strangely deserted villages, I might guess that he was a country poet.  But no, he was a city kid – Salzburg, Vienna, Innsbruck.  Mostly Salzburg.

I never catch Trakl writing about Salzburg’s ubiquitous Mozart and Sound of Music kitsch, but once I start looking I can find other traces of the city.  “To One Dead Young” begins with the usual angel:

Oh, the black angel, who stepped softly from inside the tree,
When we were gentle playmates in the evening
At the edge of the bluish fountain…

A tree, a fountain, a dryad-like angel – this could be anywhere.  It is in Salzburg, though:

But he descended the stony steps of the Mönchsberg,
A blue smile on his countenance, and strangely cocooned
Into his stiller childhood, and died.

The Mönchsberg is the mountain that curves around the old city of Salzburg.  A castle is perched on one end of the mountain.  Young Trakl would have seen it every time he left his house through the front door.  At  the other end, a ways to the right (we are standing just outside the house) the ridge is now capped by a quite good Museum of Modern Art.  I suppose it was just woods in Trakl’s time.  Walls, maybe, or a watch tower.

Soul sang death, the green corruption of the flesh,
And it was the rustling of the forest,
The ardent lament of the prey.
Always the blue bells of evening rang from the dusky towers.

It is funny how what at first seemed so abstract falls into place once I put the poet up on the Mönchsberg, overlooking old Salzburg and the Salzach River.  One word does it.

I wonder if this is Salzburg, too, if these are the same bells, or perhaps, a “great city,” it is Vienna, or perhaps a fantasy.

To Those Grown Mute

Oh, the madness of the great city, where stunted trees
Stiffen at evening along the black wall;
The spirit of evil peers from a silver mask;
Light drives out the stony night with a magnetic scourge.
Oh, the sunken tolling of the evening bells.

Whore, who bears a dead infant in icy shudders,
God’s wrath whips raging the brow of the possessed,
Crimson plague, hunger, which shatters green eyes.
Oh, the hideous laughter of gold.

But a muter mankind bleeds silently in a dark cavern,
Joins from hard metals the redeeming head.

It’s like a parody of a Trakl poem, although it would be the rare parodist who would think up “magnetic scourge,” the “magnetischer Geißel” that is sonically linked to the earlier “Geist (spirit).”  The evil spirit is not simply electric light is it?

I wonder what point there is in pinning Trakl’s poems down to a specific place, even when he is the one who mentions the Mönchsberg.  The translator, Robert Firmage, informs me that Heidegger wrote about Trakl, attracted by mankind grown mute in the cavern, the “unspeakability of human experience” (217).  Heidegger is as interested in the absence in Trakl’s poems, in his “single and unspoken poem” (217, italics mine, words actually Firmage’s, not Heidegger’s).  I hope to return to Trakl soon with a little more poetic context, but I suspect I might as well give up hope if I do not limit myself to Trakl’s multiple written poems, to the sound of the bells above Salzburg, and leave the negative space to Heidegger.

Vacation looms.  No more writing until Monday.

forgotten things, extinguished angels - the poetry of Georg Trakl

Georg Trakl, a drug addict with mental health problems, died young of a drug overdose, possibly a suicide.  He was also a poet – one of those poets, like Rimbaud and Baudelaire, derangers of the senses.

This is how he sounds in English, or one way he sounds:

Rest and Silence

Shepherds buried the sun in the naked forest.
With a net of hair
A fisherman hauled the moon from the icy pond.

The pale man dwells
In a blue crystal, his cheek at rest against his stars,
Or he bows his head in crimson sleep.

But the black flight of birds always touches
The watcher, the holiness of blue flowers;
The nearby silence thinks forgotten things, extinguished angels.

Again the brow turns night in moonlit stone;
A radiant youth,
The sister appears in autumn and black putrefaction.

Trakl’s only book was published in 1913, the year before he died, but otherwise I do not know how to date his poems; this one could have been written years earlier.  I took this translation from Robert Firmage’s ideal Song of the Departed: Selected Poems (Copper Canyon, 2012), but there is a lot of Trakl in English.

Trakl’s favorite words (or those of Firmage's Trakl): silence, stillness, angel, and then colors, primary mostly but also silver and black and white.  “Crimson” is almost too fussy, but Firmage is working with a problematic word, “purpur,” that does not quite overlap with English color words.  Mostly it is “brown wine,” “white water,” “black destruction,” “the yellow walls of summer” (all from “Helian”).  Seasonal words, those should go on the list, too.

With a little simplification, the pale man is just the man in the moon (“a blue crystal”) so of course his cheeks brush the stars.  Why the shepherds bury the sun is a puzzle – they didn’t murder it, did they?  The forest is naked because of the season, I see at the end, so a bit of early strangeness becomes plain description.  But then should the blue flowers be there?  They allude to Novalis and German Romanticism, a century in the past at this point. The strangeness of the silence “thinking,” and what it thinks (“erloschene Engel”), remains.

Firmage matches the poem’s form and, as far as I can tell, images.  He makes no attempt at its rhythm or sound.  Trakl sometimes rhymes:

from The Accursed

The night is black.  The nightshirt of the child,
Who wanders, bloats out ghost-white in the wind.
And tenderly snakes the dead woman’s hand
Into his mouth.  Sonia smiles, fair and mild.

Perhaps some readers would enjoy the German.  In this case, Firmage sacrifices literal sense for rhyme and meter.

Die Nacht is schwarz.  Gespenstich bläht der Föhn
Des wandelnden Knaben weißes Schlafgewand
Und leise greift in seinen Mund die Hand
Der Toten.  Sonja lächelt sanft und schön.

This does not sound like fair and mild German to me, but perhaps someone else will hear it differently.

I could have fun just pulling out lines:

Lepers, who rot away perhaps at night,
Read convoluted omens of birdflight.  (“Dream of Evil”)

Unspeakable the flight of birds, a meeting
With the dying; dark year follows year.  (“Afra”)

Immersed in the gentle string music of his madness  (“Helian”)

Across the footbridge of bone, the hyacinthine voice of the boy,
Softly reciting the forgotten legends of the forest.  (“At Mönchsberg”)

Tomorrow I will see if I can make anything of Georg Trakl.  Meine Frau reminds me that I have been to his childhood home.  That should help.