The Radiance & Unity of Georg Trakl's Work for Certain Philosophers

NYR Daily's Christopher Benfey considers the musicality of Georg Trakl's poems, noting that "James Reidel’s recently completed three-volume translation of Trakl’s major work, timed to coincide with the centennial of the poet’s suicide, allows readers to speculate on what Heidegger and Wittgenstein (along with many other poetry-lovers) may have found so alluring." (The Reidel translations—Poems, Sebastian Dreaming, and A Skeleton Plays Violin, are published by Seagull Books and distributed by University of Chicago Press.)

The piece draws the philosophers alongside, but also serves as a good introduction to Trakl's work and life. For instance:

In a late Dream Song, John Berryman summarized Trakl’s lurid life as “Drugs Alcohol Little Sister.” He was born into an upper-middle-class Protestant family in Salzburg, Mozart’s birthplace (and also that of Thomas Bernhard, a fervent admirer of Trakl). His father sold hardware; his mother was addicted to drugs. The children were placed in the care of an Alsatian nanny, under whose tutelage Trakl and his younger sister, Grete, a piano prodigy, spoke French and developed an intense, possibly incestuous relationship. Trakl survived his bumpy schooling, read Rimbaud, started taking drugs at fourteen, and wrote plays and poetry under those twin influences. He trained, perhaps predictably, as a pharmacist; in 1912, the year his first book of poems was published, he was assigned, in fulfillment of his military obligations, to a garrison hospital in the provincial capital of Innsbruck. There he became a regular contributor to Ludwig von Ficker’s Der Brenner (The Burner), a journal related in title and tendency to Karl Krauss’s Die Fackel (The Flame). Meanwhile, Grete’s career as a concert pianist was foundering, as she descended into alcoholism and a miserable marriage.    

At the outbreak of World War I, Trakl was transferred to the Eastern Front. Assigned to oversee a makeshift ward in a barn near the battle of Gródek, in Poland, he found himself responsible, with limited medical supplies, for ninety grievously wounded soldiers. The horrific experience contributed to a mental breakdown, while also inspiring one of his greatest poems, “Grodek,” which deftly blends silence with violent imagery:

With evening the autumn woods sound
Of deadly arms, the golden plains
And blue lakes, over which the sun
Trundles hazier; the night envelopes
Dying warriors, the wild lament
Of their shattered jaws.
But silent in the willow-marsh gather
Red clouds, wherein an angry god dwells,
The spilt blood itself, lunar cold;
All roads empty into black corruption.

At the end of the poem, “the sister’s shadow” mysteriously appears, wandering, like one of Wagner’s Valkyrie, “through the still grove, hailing the ghosts of heroes.” The short “Lament,” another of Trakl’s powerful last poems, invokes “Sleep and death, the somber eagles,” before the “sister of a tempestuous despair” reappears.

Not surprisingly, Heidegger and Wittgenstein had radically divergent methods of reading such poems. Both philosophers saw their task as in some sense putting an end to philosophy, which both felt, though in differing ways, had gone astray. Heidegger believed that the whole tradition of Western philosophy, with its Platonic division of body and soul and its embrace of technology and mechanistic thinking, had left far behind some primal radiance and unity at the source, which he associated with pre-Socratic philosophy and with certain poets, like Trakl...

Read on at NYR Daily.