RRP: £17.95
BINDING: Hardback
PUBLISHED: 2001
ISBN: 9781870352512
PAGES: 214
A Libris book
Dual text
Georg Trakl
Poems & Prose
Translated from the German by Alexander Stillmar
Dual text
An undeniable aura surrounds the name of Georg Trakl. He is a central figure among the German Expressionist poets exhibiting what he once called ‘the universal nervousness of our century’. The autumnal, melancholy moods of his poetry herald the calamity of the First World War. This selection of his poems and major prose pieces and prose poems is the most comprehensive edition available to the English-language reader.
Trakl wrote at a time of spiritual and social disintegration, when personal values and perceptions tended to be subsumed in a generalised sense of either anguish or exaltation. This is the background to his transcendent, often hymnic, always lyrical voice, and to his haunting imagery in which purgatory and paradise are never far apart.
‘This collection should finally win Trakl wider recognition. Alexander Stillmark’s selection of around 125 poems, including most of the major ones, is well designed, reflecting Trakl’s wish for individual poems to be printed within larger cycles, and the translations themselves are accurate, unfailingly thoughtful and often very moving.’ – Jeremy Adler, London Review of Books
GEORG TRAKL was born in Salzburg in 1887, and studied pharmacy there and in Vienna, where he experimented with drugs and began to write verse. His first volume of poetry was published in 1913. In August 1914 he enlisted as a medical orderly, and died that November in a military hospital after seeing action in the battle of Grodek in Galicia.