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  SURRENDER TO NIGHT

  Collected Poems of Georg Trakl

  Selected and translated by Will Stone

  PUSHKIN PRESS

  LONDON

  This book is dedicated to the memory of Anthony Vivis (1943–2013)

  Translator of German literature, co-translator and friend

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  List of Poems

  Acknowledgements

  Georg Trakl (1887–1914): A Brief Biography

  Approaching Silence: The Poetry of Georg Trakl

  Translator’s Note

  Poems, 1913

  Sebastian in Dream, 1915

  Poems Published in Der Brenner, 1914–15

  Uncollected Poems and Prose

  Chronology

  About the Publisher

  Copyright

  LIST OF POEMS

  Poems, 1913

  The Ravens

  The Young Maid

  Romance to Night

  In Red Foliage Filled with Guitars…

  Music in the Mirabell

  Melancholy of Evening

  Winter Dusk

  Rondel

  Benediction to Women

  The Beautiful City

  In an Abandoned Room

  Thunderstorm Evening

  Evening Muse

  Dream of Evil

  Spiritual Song

  In Autumn

  Towards Evening My Heart

  The Peasants

  All Souls

  Melancholy

  Soul of Life

  Transfigured Autumn

  Forest Nook

  In Winter

  In an Old Album

  Metamorphosis

  Little Concert

  Mankind

  The Walk

  De Profundis

  Trumpets

  Dusk

  Smiling Spring

  Suburb in the Föhn

  The Rats

  Dejection

  Whispered in the Afternoon

  Psalm

  Rosary Songs

  Decay

  In the Homeland

  An Autumn Evening

  Human Wretchedness

  In the Village

  Song of Evening

  Three Glances into an Opal

  Night Song

  Helian

  Sebastian in Dream, 1915

  SEBASTIAN IN DREAM

  Childhood

  Song of Hours

  On the Way

  Landscape

  To the Boy Elis

  Elis

  Hohenburg

  Sebastian in Dream

  On the Moor

  In Spring

  Evening in Lans

  On the Mönchsberg

  Kaspar Hauser Song

  By Night

  Transformation of Evil

  AUTUMN OF THE LONELY

  In the Park

  A Winter Evening

  The Cursed

  Sonja

  Along

  Autumn Soul

  Afra

  Autumn of the Lonely

  SEVEN-SONG OF DEATH

  Rest and Silence

  Anif

  Birth

  Decline

  To One Who Died Young

  Spiritual Dusk

  Western Song

  Transfiguration

  Föhn

  The Wayfarer

  Karl Kraus

  To the Silenced

  Passion

  Seven-song of Death

  Winter Night

  SONG OF THE DEPARTED

  In Venice

  Limbo

  The Sun

  Song of a Captive Blackbird

  Summer

  Close of Summer

  Year

  The West

  Springtime of the Soul

  In Darkness

  Song of the Departed

  DREAM AND DERANGEMENT

  Poems Published in Der Brenner, 1914–15

  In Hellbrunn

  The Heart

  Sleep

  The Thunderstorm

  Evening

  Night

  Melancholy (II)

  The Homecoming

  Lament

  Surrender to Night

  In the East

  Lament (II)

  Grodek

  Revelation and Downfall

  Uncollected Poems and Prose

  The Three Ponds in Hellbrunn

  St Peter’s Churchyard

  A Spring Evening

  In an Old Garden

  Evening Roundelay

  Night Soul

  Desolation

  De Profundis (II)

  At the Cemetery

  Sunny Afternoon

  Aeon

  Dream of an Afternoon

  Luminous Hour

  Childhood Memory

  An Evening

  Season

  In Wine Country

  The Dark Valley

  Summer Dawn

  In Moonlight

  Fairy Tale

  Lament (III)

  Springtime of the Soul (II)

  Western Twilight

  Daydreaming at Evening

  Winter Walk in A-minor

  Ever Darker

  December

  (Untitled)

  Delirium

  At the Edge of Old Waters

  Along Walls

  (Untitled)

  (Untitled)

  (Untitled)

  (Untitled)

  (Untitled)

  In the Evening

  Judgement

  (Untitled)

  (Untitled)

  To Novalis

  Nocturnal Lament

  To Johanna

  Melancholy (III)

  To Lucifer

  Daydreaming

  Psalm (II)

  Age

  The Sunflowers

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would first and foremost like to express my gratitude to Dr Hans Weichselbaum, director of the Trakl Gedenkstätte in Salzburg, for sharing his unsurpassed knowledge concerning Trakl’s life in Salzburg. I am also grateful for the assistance offered by Professor Eberhard Sauermann of the Brenner Archive in Innsbruck during my initial research into Trakl’s poetry, which, like that of Dr Weichselbaum, informs this later volume. My thanks, too, go to Wolfgang Görtschacher, the editor of Poetry Salzburg Review, for inviting me many years ago to present my Trakl translations at the university of Salzburg, and to the programme The Verb on BBC Radio 3, which also invited me to read some of these poems. I am grateful to the following publications for enabling a number of these translations to take their first tentative steps into the world: Agenda, Black Herald, Gorse, Modern Poetry in Translation, 3:AM Magazine, The International Review and Poetry Salzburg. Lastly, I should like to mention the debt I owe to the poet Michael Hamburger, whose translations and pioneering critical work on Trakl and other German- and French-language poets forms a cornerstone of European poetry in the Anglophone world, a noble example of the dedicated life.

  GEORG TRAKL (1887–1914): A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY

  Georg Trakl’s life was short, in the fabled tradition of the poète maudit, which he undoubtedly was and thought himself to be. Yet he was so much more. The unclassifiable, morbidly introspective poetry which mesmerizes new generations of readers was the sole fruit of his troubled existence and confirms his status as one of the key German-language poets of the twentieth century. Trakl’s poetic legacy was forged over five dynamic years for European culture, 1909–14, before the poet vanished in cruel circumstances in the opening months of the First World War. Trakl’s life was principally spent in Austrian towns and cities, first in the sanctua
ry of the romantic Baroque surroundings of Salzburg, then later in the, for him, more alienating metropolis of Vienna and in the home city of his publisher, Innsbruck. Apart from a trip to Venice in the summer of 1914, Trakl spent most of his short life in these three locations. Following the poet’s ordeals on the Eastern Front in Galicia, a final tragic denouement took place in the Polish city of Kraków.

  Georg Trakl was born on 3rd February 1887, the fifth of seven children, in the Schaffner House (now the “Trakl-Haus” museum) on Waagplatz 1a in Salzburg. His Hungarian father and Slavic mother had immigrated in 1879 from Wiener Neustadt and in 1893 his father, Tobias, opened a hardware store on nearby Mozartplatz, to which the family moved, taking spacious apartments on the first floor. Some of Trakl’s early poems concern subjects he saw from the windows of these bright-lit rooms, namely the Mozart statue in the square and the surrounding mountains of the Gaisberg, the Kapuzinerberg and the Mönchsberg. The building is now a café, offering a view largely unchanged since Trakl’s time, and its outer wall bears a discreet commemorative plaque. Here the Trakl children, virtually abandoned by their mother, were taught by a Catholic governess from Alsace who introduced them to French, the required language of the European cultural elite. Trakl’s early life was one of the outward security of a middle-class milieu, with piano lessons, visits to the theatre, happy hours spent in the rustic summer house of a nearby idyllic garden—a traditional bourgeois upbringing which the Trakl parents, despite their immigrant roots, were keen to espouse for those belonging to the Bildungsbürgertum.*

  Period photographs show the ubiquitously sailor-suited and lace-adorned infants obediently lined up in age and height for formal portraits. But the mother, Maria Catharina, was self-absorbed and distant, more concerned with her bibelots and antiques than with her children, and she was also a little too keen on opium, a vice that would later contribute to her son’s ruin. It was the governess, then, who shaped the children’s adolescence and it was she who introduced young Georg to French-language poetry: the requisite Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, but also, importantly, the strange, dreamlike poetry of the Belgian poet and dramatist Maurice Maeterlinck. In childhood Trakl became particularly close to one sister, Margarethe or Grete. The nature of this infamous, arguably incestuous, relationship, whose parameters have never been fully confirmed and perhaps should not be, proved a defining existential moment for the acutely sensitive boy, and later left him wracked by guilt at the desire he felt for his sibling and what had taken place between them in childhood. Though apart much of the time in adulthood, their spirits remained closely interwoven throughout their lives, both destined for struggle and unhappiness, victims of depressive illness and suicidal impulses.

  Trakl was a conventional student and there was little to mark him out. He began to read Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, required reading along with the Symbolist poets, and his own early poems he read aloud to his classmates. He impulsively left school early to train as a pharmacist, his assumption being that he could more easily gain access to the narcotics with which he was already locked in a fatal embrace, completing three years of on-the-job training at the Apotheke “Zum weissen Engel” (the White Angel) at Linzergasse 5 in Salzburg between 1905 and 1908. In these years Trakl was part of a literary group called “Apollo”, which was later renamed “Minerva”. A telling photograph from 1906 shows the earnest young dilettantes posed awkwardly around an ornate antique table positioned on a lawn before a house romantically overgrown with ivy. Encouraged by Gustav Streicher, a local playwright, Trakl wrote two dramatic texts, “Totentag” and “Fata Morgana”, which were shown at the prestigious city theatre. But they proved a critical failure and Trakl ceremonially destroyed his notebooks and reverted to poetry.

  Trakl’s position in the pharmacy facilitated his access to veronal, opium and later cocaine. He grew increasingly dependent on a range of drugs to cope with what the poet Rainer Maria Rilke would later term “the unbearable weight of his own existence”. Trakl’s lifestyle became more anti-bourgeois and erratic, and by now he was an avid reader of the magazine Die Fackel (The Torch), edited by Karl Kraus, which regularly lambasted Austrian politics and institutions. Trakl eschewed crowds, preferring solitude, long walks and lonely vigils in country taverns. His early poems are saturated with memory images of this wandering country life in the landscape around his home city, visions of the drunken man returning from the tavern through the dusking wood. Trakl found solace roaming the wooded hills of the mountains, or lingering in the romantic environs of the castle of Anif, or the palace and gardens at Hellbrunn. In 1908 Trakl abruptly left the provincial life and his minor post at Apotheke “Zum weissen Engel”, moving to Vienna to study pharmacy.

  Faced with the alienating effects of the metropolis, Trakl’s innate sense of anxiety and despair at mankind’s spiritual decline was heightened by what he experienced and observed in the capital. In Europe this was an era of burgeoning materialism and technological change, progress appeared prescribed, unstoppable, but nationalism was emboldened, there were ugly stirrings around social Darwinism, dark tributaries leading into the eventual rapids of revolution and totalitarianism, the final paroxysm Trakl painfully anticipates. The poet’s alienation from the decadent city multitude now crucially fused with the earlier formative atmosphere of rural solitariness, of being the outsider apart from the normal country folk, of being in some sense damned, a “lonely one”, in the company of madmen, beggars and prostitutes, the fallen with whom he felt a bond. Trakl’s distinctive poetic language seems to evolve, to gather momentum out of this difficult Vienna period.

  Trakl’s close school friend Erhard Buschbeck also moved to Vienna at this time, and through Buschbeck’s social circle Trakl became acquainted with figures from the “Wiener Moderne” such as Adolf Loos, Arnold Schönberg und Oskar Kokoschka. Later Trakl would visit Kokoschka almost daily in his studio and there admired his 1913 painting Die Windsbraut (Bride of the Winds), a tortured vision of the relationship between the enigmatic Alma Mahler and the painter who idolized her. Trakl celebrated this powerful painting by referring to it in his poem “Die Nacht” (“Night”). A number of Trakl’s poems also appeared in the combative Expressionist art paper Der Ruf (The Cry) which championed, amongst others, Egon Schiele, whose brutally honest, risqué erotic drawings of prostitutes and models must surely have struck Trakl.

  In the summer of 1910, Trakl finally achieved his title of “Magistrum artis pharmaceuticae” and was qualified to practise as a pharmacist. Tobias Trakl died, and with him in the space of a few years the family business. It was essential now for the disorderly poet to establish himself financially, but his periods of work were erratic, short-lived and fraught with anxiety, and money issues dogged him. He even sold his cherished Dostoyevsky volumes and those of Nietzsche, Rilke, Wilde and Shaw in order to make ends meet. Grete’s decision to marry at this juncture did not help Trakl’s mental state, and as a result he became ever more alienated from the family in Salzburg.

  In 1912 Trakl secured a position in an Innsbruck pharmacy. Buschbeck introduced him to Ludwig von Ficker, the founder and editor of Der Brenner, named after the legendary pass into Italy close by. Ficker saw the genius in Trakl’s poetry from the outset and became a fervent supporter, unfailingly publishing his poems in issue after issue. In all, Trakl placed sixty-four poems in the magazine. Der Brenner then became the showcase for his work, the bedrock of his publications and the channel to his increasing renown. The loyal Ficker grew to be a close friend and exhibited a paternal influence, whilst also providing financial support and lodgings to the wayward poet. Finding the work at the pharmacy in Innsbruck intolerable due to his increasing inability to face the public, Trakl resorted more and more to dependency on drugs and alcohol to function. Attempts to find other jobs in Vienna all came to nothing. Typically, Trakl would take up a new position and then abruptly leave, unable to bear the responsibilities thrust upon him.

  With the assistance of Karl Kraus, Trakl’s first coll
ection, Gedichte (Poems), appeared in 1913 from Kurt Wolff Verlag in Leipzig. In August he made a rare trip with friends outside of his native land, to Venice. An extraordinary photograph shows Trakl, incongruous in a dark bathing suit, wandering the sands of the Lido. When asked of his opinions of the fabled city, he described Venice as “the gateway to hell”. Returning to Innsbruck, he worked on his second collection, Sebastian im Traum (Sebastian in Dream), which would only appear in 1915, after his death. In March 1914 Trakl rushed to Grete’s bedside after she suffered a miscarriage and tried unsuccessfully to persuade her to leave Berlin for Salzburg. He left in despair, lamenting later of having witnessed “terrible things”. He never saw his sister again. A beleaguered Trakl searched around desperately for options—he spoke of working in Borneo or Albania as a pharmacist—but these proved only delusions. Then came a turning point. In the spring of 1914 he received a generous donation from a certain Ludwig Wittgenstein (Rilke was another recipient), which meant that his financial position would again be secure. However, the fortunate poet was in such a state of high anxiety that he was apparently unable to summon the courage and strength of mind to stay in the bank long enough to draw on the sum, fleeing in terror from the tellers. By then war was upon Europe; Trakl was soon mobilized and would never take advantage of Wittgenstein’s timely gift.

  Having volunteered as a medical orderly in August 1914, Trakl joined a unit destined for the Eastern Front in Galicia. There he joined elements of the Austrian Army who took part in the Battle of Grodek, a bloody defeat for the Austrians. Without proper medical resources, Trakl was obliged to tend to over ninety seriously wounded men in a barn. Many of the soldiers begged him to end their misery with a pistol. The raw suffering before him meant Trakl’s fears for humankind were confirmed with gruesome realism, and thus a mind already perilously fragile broke decisively. One evening at the officers’ meal, Trakl suddenly pushed his plate away, stood up and declared his intention to end his life. A revolver was wrestled from his hand. Following this public collapse, he was admitted to the garrison hospital in Kraków for close observation. On hearing the disturbing news, the loyal Ficker rushed to his aid and strenuously argued for Trakl’s release. Fatefully, he was rebuffed by the physician in charge and forced to depart with his charge still incarcerated. Trakl succumbed to an intractable despair and expressed himself in a letter as being already “beyond the world”. He wrote a brief final will and testament, to which he added two final poems, “Klage” (“Lament (II)”) and “Grodek”. During the night of 3rd November 1914, Trakl took an overdose of cocaine smuggled into his cell by a sympathetic guard and died of heart failure. Three days later he was interred in the Radowicki Cemetery in Kraków, but in 1925 Ficker arranged for Trakl’s remains to be relocated to his local cemetery at Mühlau, near Innsbruck.