Funeral In Translation: Georg Trakl Without Madness

B1271-BS7

What is the best way to approach the strange poems of Georg Trakl? Well, first of all, since I speak not a word of German, I must read him in translation, but looking at Alexander Stillmark’s translation, I compare the German, making out a good portion of the words with the help of the internet, and I see that the English is very close, almost unaltered. Perhaps Trakl’s style lent itself well to translation; in general, it lacks rhyme although it has some music, it relies heavily on lyricism, and he does not adhere to any regular meter that I can make out. So, now that we have his dark images in English, I need to figure out how to figure him out.

First, I have read that he likened his stanzas to a layering of a certain number of lines, each adding another dimension to the complex image. So I experiment with this idea and its possibilities, and what I discover is something quite amazing, shifting images much like layering in screen printing, but oh so dramatic in its effect. Seeing that this approach is possibly the best way to interpret his works, I think we’ll hold on to this practice for the remainder of our examination. Let us not interpret this secret of his writing to be an unrealized intention; this is a key to the composition of the poems, a sort of form; the poems, the puzzles were composed along a certain line, and therefore are to be understood by the corresponding application of this method in reading and understanding, in interpreting the poems. He has supplied a helpful key to posterity. Yet there must be more.

Trakl writes an incredibly bleak atmosphere into life, a funereal sentiment as theme with the variation that comes in image, many symbolic, some contradicting what would normally be their interpreted meaning. This is not a normal funeral though; it’s more of the celebration of a funeral; perhaps it’s a morbid exhibition at a wedding. Color plays an enormous role in many of Trakl’s poems, once again symbolically, often the symbolic meaning coming inverted; that is, sometimes the color as a symbolic element clashes with what surrounds it, or the surrounding elements change the symbolic meaning of the chromatism. Gold, green, blue, not always representing the same quality, but generally establishing a mood to be manipulated. His images work in much this same way, each either reaffirming or contradicting that which comes before, perhaps just changing the direction of the meaning of the collective image. I could imagine innumerable possibilities, and indeed I see them in the poetry. As an addition to this dissection of the parts of Trakl’s works, I must mention the glaring lack of a clever, striking, or dominant ending; likewise could be said of his beginnings. In the poems each line is almost equally important. That said, the ending still brings the work back together, completes it, just without the pageantry so common to good poems.

This leads me to something that is clear in Trakl’s style of writing. The poem, despite its disparate, almost desultory, variation line to line, begins and ends as a whole, something complete in itself. He is essentially dividing a sentiment into its constituent elements, images, colors, activities, even characters, and then expecting his reader to bring them all back together as an inner sense, something broader and more encompassing than a single emotion, but a sense of things, an approach. This principle of unity, that is common to most good poetry, is expressed in a way similar to music. We have theme and variation, but the theme is never explicitly stated. The theme, instead of being the beginning for the reader, is the end result of the work.

Although Trakl most often paints a world replete with evil, melancholy, and despondency, he is knowingly creating something beautiful. His works are not a mess of cacophony and piecemeal damnations; they clearly express what is more or less bleak through the beauty of skilled craft. He, like all great artists, is a magician confident in the reality of his illusions. By the way, the fact that his bizarre poems point to the reality of a guiding principle of unity beyond the specific, lends plausibility, if not credibility, to my own more recent theories of such unity and its source. Let me sum up my approach here this way: because Trakl is such an idiosyncratic poet, I am going to take this essay through the process of understanding the poems in the manner in which Trakl himself intended. (If only one of my compatriots would do the same with E.E. Cummings for my edification.)

Now, it is said that Hölderlin was a major influence on Trakl; I can see a connection in both poets’ tendency to build mythological or symbolic works from the elements of those poems, but I know Hölderlin used pre-established mythical characters to help build his own myths, while Trakl uses his imagery along with related symbolic material to create his moods and atmospheres. But because Hölderlin has this admitted influence on our subject, I’ll include as a proof one of Hölderlin’s shorter works, perhaps his best—in translation, of course. Note that this is a rare piece by this poet that does not include pre-established mythological characters.

What is the Life of Men . . .

What is the life of men an image of the godhead.

As all the earthly move under heaven they see

This heaven. But reading, so to speak,

As thought in a script, men imitate

Infinity and riches. Is simple heaven

Rich then? Surely like blossoms are

Silvery clouds. Yet from there it is that dew and

Moisture rain down. But when

The blueness is extinguished, the simpleness,

Then shines the pale hue that resembles marble, like ore,

An indication of riches.

Yes, I can already see many resemblances to the work of our subject. Images, colors, actions, but still, there is a long lapse of time between the two. Trakl is, in his unique magnificence, of a higher echelon than Hölderlin, the latter often guilty of using outworn tropes and poorly worded expressions. There are also questions about Hölderlin’s choices in terms of lining and the reasons for his unusual punctuation and so forth (not in an E.E. Cummings way, but something like it). Other similarities exist between them; both of their poetic careers were cut short, Trakl’s by death, Hölderlin’s because of insanity, late-onset schizophrenia, a severe case that all but destroyed his artistic sensibilities. In addition to his career’s tragic end, Hölderlin was a very important German writer, so there is little question of why Trakl was attracted to him. But this influential poet’s work does not after all read like that of our subject, so we should swiftly move on to what we’re really all about in this essay, the parsing of a master’s poems. Because I have used this poem in another essay, I’ll begin with it. It’s title is also emblematic of Trakl’s work in general, so I’ll reflect that it is a good choice.

Melancholy

Bluish shadows. O you dark eyes

Which gaze long upon me gliding by.

Sounds of a guitar gently accompanying autumn

In the garden, dissolved in brown fluids.

Death’s grave darkling hour is prepared

By nymphen hands; decaying lips

Suck at red breasts and into black fluids

The sun-youth’s damp locks glide.

Because this poem is most clearly divided in two parts equally, we’ll approach it that way.

Bluish shadows. O you dark eyes

Which gaze long upon me gliding by.

Sounds of a guitar gently accompanying autumn

In the garden, dissolved in brown fluids.

First, I admit my own attraction to his moving use of language in general, his appreciation for the simple combination of words that is lyricism. This is a great way to show that you are indeed a poet and not just a writer of verse. On the first line, though the color, blue, does not directly reflect on the eyes, the two somehow mix, but in the sense that they are essentially opposites. So we see dark eyes against a background of bluish shadows. And the eyes are addressed in a way that personifies them, in apostrophe, a common rhetorical tool of Trakl. The next line furthers the first, explaining the activity of the eyes, giving them an object, thus bringing them to life. The first collection of images half-fades into an autumnal image, meaning a generic image of the reader’s imaginings, and music is used, though not heavily. It seems already that our internal perceptual or imaginative abilities are being tested as in some ceremonial magic ritual. But we soon know that autumn, our image of it anyway, exists in a garden. At this point we have the complete complex image, a collective that together does not add up to melancholy as promised in the title. Yet, suddenly all of this, despite the fact that the final clause seems only to be acting on the second sentence—somehow we know that the entire image dissolves in brown fluids. And this fact no doubt gives a special meaning to the dissolving and the fluids. So we are on to another impression.

Death’s grave darkling hour is prepared

By nymphen hands; decaying lips

Suck at red breasts and into black fluids

The sun-youth’s damp locks glide.

Here begins the melancholia, “Death’s grave darkling hour.” It’s as if death by itself were not enough to express the total blackness or evil of the scene, and we even understand that there is an intent, which too must be dark or menacing: it “is prepared.” But no, the context of the expression is reversed, and we are told what it is prepared by—the magic of enjambment, strategic line endings. This horrible hour which is enhaced by death, darkling, and grave, was prepared by none other than the elegant hands of a nymph; notice the immediate reversal or inversion, something evil prepared by something almost heavenly. Then we are assaulted with something even more directly morbid, “decaying lips,” but what of them? They both suck at red breasts and suck into blackened fluids. Here we have a seeming leveling of both on what borders on innocent and what is disgusting. But notice as well, we do not know either why breasts would be red, nor what makes up a black fluid. There is a mystery here; but lets solve it quickly by suggesting that the breasts are bloody externally or sore from within, and the black fluids are an unnamable sludge. But what has happened to that just mentioned? Once again because of the subtle enjambment, we must change our image to make it match Trakl’s words. The lips are not sucking into black fluids, as we would expect because of the lack of a comma after “and.” No, “The sun youth’s damp locks” are gliding into the black fluids. So, here again we have a complex image very difficult to hold together mentally. But everything is complete; we have two complex images, one building on the prior. And note that both ‘fluids’ and ‘gliding’ are used in each of the two sections of the poem.

Although we are left with many questions, the poem is made complete and final with the final action. The fact that the poem in its entirety is not all melancholy reveals that such is not the true unifying force of its workings, indeed not even its theme. And in relatively short order, this complex process is how one can best understand the magic workings of Trakl. I’m sure you will have no problem seeing that Trakl’s work is an unusual animal; but we also see that it makes sense when read in a certain order and with a certain method in mind. And we also see that the poem adds up to, if I can even say as much, a mysterious sense of itself that defies the words within.

For the sake of clarity, and because I am having more fun than I should exercising my fetish, the worship of great art, I’ll try another poem, this one maybe darker and more mysterious, and housing more ambiguity, than that before. Here is the first poem in the book I am working with.

The Ravens

Across the black nook the ravens hasten

At noonday with harsh cry.

Their shadows sweep past the hind

And sometimes one sees them in sullen repose.

O how they disturb the brown silence

Wherein a tilled field is enrapt

Like women by heavy foreboding entranced,

And sometimes one can hear them bickering

Over some carrion scented out somewhere;

Of a sudden they direct their flight northwards

And dwindle away like a funeral procession

In airs which shudder with rapture.

How to begin this one? Notice the mix of a post-Poesque Satanic naturalism and a civilized human regularity. Notice the normalcy of the end, which fades into the revelation of intended mood. Okay, one stanza at a time, which Trakl seems to have intended, after all.

Across the black nook the ravens hasten

At noonday with harsh cry.

Their shadows sweep past the hind

And sometimes one sees them in sullen repose.

Before the first stanza takes all of our attention, let us remark that the title has no intention of originality or attraction; this in contradistinction to the poems of many, of course including my own. Trakl in his somberness is not an exhibitionist. But before we literally lose sight of the first stanza, we should note that it is indicated that the ravens are hastening over a secluded spot, already establishing a distance from the general workings of civilization; we are at some dark corner of the world watching these mischievous creatures. Next, we have a time, which is surprisingly not the night, but we also have the wild sound of the birds. Notice in the third line, the symmetry of image as the shadows sweep as the ravens hasten. But where do they sweep? “Past the hind.” The hind, a word that offers several possibilities; the ravens’ shadows could be sweeping past our hind, their own hind, or the hind could be a deer, a farmer, or even a country bumpkin. We shall never know the answer; I can say that not only was this ambiguity intended by the translator, but by Trakl himself, for the German word for hind, Hirschkuh, also means both hind in the typical sense and various types of deer—although not the farmer or the bumpkin. So, he accomplished more ambiguity in English than his German. And the simple last line of the stanza gives us “sullen repose.” About this, it brings all activity to a close, making way for the next stanza, it indicates the stilling of the ravens, and it gives us humans a slant on the activity of the animals, “sullen.” Show me a sullen bird, and I’ll show you a madman.

O how they disturb the brown silence

Wherein a tilled field is enrapt

Like women by heavy foreboding entranced,

And sometimes one can hear them bickering

This stanza begins with apostrophe addressed to the reader, indicated by the exclamation, ‘O.’ After the standstill, we can begin to compose another image. We have a silence that is anything but, and that has a color, synesthesia at work, and in the next line we are to see where the color comes from, the “tilled field,” for often synesthesia is just as much a confusion of qualities or epithets as an intention of confusing the senses; one thing’s quality is confused with the qualities of another’s. “A tilled field is enrapt”: this is originality, singularity, an excellent phrase. It is pretty much guaranteed nobody else has ever and hopefully will ever use this combination of words. Again here we must ask ourselves how a field could be enrapt, tilled or not? One might assume once again that this sort of personification is much like the prior synesthesia, a case of intentional confusion, for we could envisage the ravens enrapt. Is it not exceptional as well that the enrapt tilled field is in the brown silence. What a fantastic conception. But moving on, we have the field enrapt compared by simile to women entranced by fear of what’s to come; here the foreboding goes harshly against the entrancement, again this expression of contradiction as if to achieve an outside result. They are entranced by fear of what’s to come; this is a beautiful rendering of his women; they are fascinated by fear. In the final line, we experience the ambiguity of this almost effortless enjambment, for who do we hear bickering? It is more likely that one would hear women bickering, but because of what’s to come, we know the ravens are bickering. Poetic excellence sans pareil.

Over some carrion scented out somewhere;

Of a sudden they direct their flight northwards

And dwindle away like a funeral procession

In airs which shudder with rapture.

Because the image was not really enhanced much in the prior stanza’s ending, we are pretty much ready to start again. To start, the ravens are bickering over carrion, lunch no doubt, considering the time of day, and they are smelling it “somewhere.”

Yes, we do not see the dead animal, we only smell it. although he did not explicitly give us such instructions. And then immediacy returns, for suddenly the ravens head northwards. And in the penultimate line we see them flying out of view “like a funeral procession.” Again, an emphasis on the morbid, almost ending on a dead note, but then comes the finale, which as I indicated earlier does not come as some dramatic surprise. Instead we are told that the ravens leave “in airs which shudder with rapture.” We’ll let slide the multiple meaning of airs, although they do hang in the air. But rapture turns the sadness of a funeral procession on its head. Indeed we end with a splendid pleasure, a pleasure that even makes one shudder. This transparent and unadorned ending is almost like something out of a great film, a classic out of . . . name a European country known for its cinema.

So why and how is this poem great? To answer that let me refer to something I said of Robert Frost, a very unlikely candidate for comparison, on the surface. What we have here is a moment, but a moment immortalized, made into something worthy of nostalgia. You see, the layers of the poem are after all one, one short timeframe captured. The puzzle is workable both ways, starting from the pieces and starting with the completed work. This idea of the puzzle can also be extended into the realm of the illusionist, the magician, who is only worth the name magician when he shows his mastery—we’re not talking dares here, we’re talking performance. But, yes, I have no doubt that this poem is great. I took you and myself through the whole ‘Trakl process,’ and now I and you know that Trakl may be one of the best German poets, or at least known German poets; I’m sure somebody’s hiding, sending his masterpieces to these hack publishers.

This may have been the most fun I’ve had writing an essay. Let’s do it again some time. How is it that even I am surprised? Did I forget to mention the simple fact of his mastery of language, the combination of words, is a great start and finish to any worthwhile poem?

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