Poems and Prose: A Bilingual Edition [Paperback]

A comprehensive English-language edition of verse by the Austrian poet

An undeniable aura surrounds the name of Georg Trakl, a poet of intense inner vision and originality whose work stands alongside that of Yeats, Valéry, and T. S. Eliot. Besides Rilke, his more famous admirers include Karl Kraus and Martin Heidegger. The distinctive tone of Trakl's work-especially admired by his patron Ludwig Wittgenstein-is autumnal and melancholy. Trakl was writing at a time of spiritual and social disintegration on the eve of the First World War, when personal values and perceptions tended to be subsumed in a more generalized anguish and exaltation. Neo-romantic, early modernist, his rich, vitally sensuous poetry can be seen to mark the transition from impressionism to expressionism, but at the same time transcends such categories. Trakl's poetry has previously only been available in English in short selections or in anthologies. This bilingual edition, the most comprehensive to date, gives readers the chance to get to know Trakl's work more fully than ever before.

Trakl's poetry is for me a thing of sublime existence. -Rainer Maria Rilke

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.
-Times Literary Supplement

Georg Trakl (1887-1914) was born into a middle-class family in Salzburg, Austria. He trained as a pharmacist at the University of Vienna where he started to experiment with drugs and began writing. The patronage of a periodical publisher and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein enabled Trakl to concentrate on his poetry and he brought out his first volume in 1913. The following year he enlisted as a lieutenant in the army medical corps, however, he became very distrl£"