When I consider thy heavens, the work
of thy fingers, the moon and the stars,
which thou hast ordained; What is man,
that thou art mindful of him? and the son
of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast
made him a little lower than the angels, and
hast crowned him with glory and honour.
Psalms 8:3-5
While searching for a poem to use with my painting "Fallen Angel," I discovered the Austrian poet and playwright George Trakl (1887-1914). Trakl was a tortured soul who suffered from depression and drug abuse even from a young age. His poetry is known for its "dark vision... that [is] dense, jagged, forceful and heavy with symbolism of life and decay."
Trakl is known for his first play, All Souls Days; his first successful poems "Decline", "The Beautiful City" and "The Stormy Evening"; his collection, Sebastian in Dream, shortly after his death, and three other posthumous collections--Aus Goldenem Kelch (the early poems), Die Dichtungen (the later poems), and Errinnerung An Georg Trakl (letters and reminiscences).
Trakl enlisted in the military in 1910 but became a reservist when he had a confrontation with his superior. However, when the first world war engulfed his country, he was re-enlisted. His experiences in the war zone quickly brought about his demise.
According to his biography on the poetry website "Little Blue Light," after his regiment encountered several defeats by the Russians, Trakl was singled-out to care for 90 wounded men in a barn near Grodek, Poland by himself. Because some of the injuries were so grave, and the soldier’s pain so great, Trakl could not adequately care for them. He witnessed one of the soldiers shoot himself in the head. After which, Trakl left the confines of the barn, only to see some of the locals hanging from the nearby trees. He suffered a mental breakdown and was soon taken to Cracow. While being hospitalized, he received a fatal dose of cocaine.
In 1915, Kurt Wolff (publisher of Kafka) published a collection of Trakl's poems titled Sebastian in Dream. This garnered a loyal following in Germany.
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein would later say of Trakl’s poetry: "I do not understand them; but their tone pleases me. It is the tone of true genius."
More recently, James Wright and Robert Bly translated a collection of Trakl’s poetry and published them in the collection Dreamsongs.
In the introduction to the collection, Robert Bly wrote about a fascinating aspect of Trakl’s style– it’s silence:
The poems of Georg Trakl have a magnificent silence in them. It is very rare that he himself talks—for the most part he allows the images to speak for him. Most of the images, anyway, are images of silent things.
In a good poem made by Trakl images follow one another in a way that is somehow stately. The images have a mysterious connection with each other. The rhythm is slow and heavy, like the mood of someone in a dream. Wings of dragonflies, toads, the gravestones of cemeteries, leaves, and war helmets give off strange colors, brilliant and sombre colors—they live in too deep a joy to be gay. At the same time they live surrounded by a darkness without roads. Everywhere there is the suggestion of this dark silence...
The other translator, James Wright, in his introduction, spoke about an experience of sitting in on a university class in which the professor opened the class reading Trakl’s poem "Verfall." Wright explains:
It was as though the sea had entered the class at the last moment. For this poem was not like any poem I had ever recognized: the poet, at a sign from the evening bells, followed the wings of birds that became a train of pious pilgrims who were continually vanishing into the clear autumn of distances; beyond the distances there were black horses leaping in red maple trees, in a world where seeing and hearing are not two actions, but one.
I returned to that darkening room every afternoon for months, through autumn and winter, while Professor Susini summoned every poem out of Trakl’s three volumes. I always went back to that strange room of twilight, where Susini peered for long silences into the darkness until he discovered the poem he sought; and then he spoke it with the voice of a resurrected blackbird.
His entire manner was one of enormous patience, and he read Trakl’s poems very slowly. I believe that patience is the clue to the understanding of Trakl’s poems. One does not so much read them as explore them. They are not objects which he constructed, but quiet places at the edge of a dark forest where one has to sit still for a long time and listen very carefully. Then, after all one’s patience is exhausted, and it seems as though nothing inside the poem will ever make sense in the ways to which one has become accustomed by previous reading, all sorts of images and sounds come out of the trees, or the ponds, or the meadows, or the lonely roads—those places of awful stillness that seem at the centre of nearly every poem Trakl ever wrote.
I've selected Georg Trakl's poem "Birth" from the collection Dreamcatcher to represent my painting "Fallen Angel." I hope you enjoy it.
Birth
These mountains: blackness, silence, and snow.
The red hunter climbs down from the forest;
Oh the mossy gaze of the wild thing.
The peace of the mother: under black firs
The sleeping hands open by themselves
When the cold moon seems ready to fall.
The birth of man. Each night
Blue water washes over the rockbase of the cliff;
The fallen angel stares at his reflection with sighs,
Something pale wakes up in a suffocating room.
The eyes
Of the stony old woman shine, two moons.
The cry of the woman in labor. The night troubles
The boy’s sleep with black wings,
With snow, which falls with ease out of the purple
clouds.
1:33:05 PM  | |
|
|
