Bilingual edition, translated, with an introduction and notes, by Alexander Stillmark

An undeniable aura surrounds the name of Georg Trakl, a poet of intense inner vision and originality whose work stands alongside that of Yeats, Valery and T.S. Eliot. Besides Rilke, his more famous admirers include Karl Kraus and Martin Heidegger. Among his poetic models were Holderlin, Baudelaire and Rimbaud; Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky were important influences. His poems inspired music settings by Berg, Webern and Hindemith. He was an admirer and friend of Oskar Kokoschka, and his poetry often seems akin to fauvist or early expressionist painting in its unique and vivid use of colour. The distinctive tone of Trakl’s work – especially admired by his patron Ludwig Wittgenstein – is autumnal and melancholy. 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 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 sense of anguish and 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.

Trakl’s poetry has hitherto been available in English only in short selections or in anthologies. This bilingual edition, the most comprehensive so far, gives English-language readers the chance to get to know Trakl’s work more fully than ever before.

Published by Libris in 2001