| 格奥尔格·特拉克尔 | |||||
Read works of Georg Trakl at 诗海 | |||||
特拉克尔Life and work
Trakl was born and lived the first 18 years of his life in Salzburg. His father, Tobias, was a dealer in hardware, while his mother, Maria, was a housewife with strong interests in art and music.
Trakl attended a Catholic elementary school, although his parents were Protestants. He matriculated in 1897 at the Salzburg Staatsgymnasium, where he studied Latin, Greek, and mathematics. Around 1904, Trakl began to write poetry.
After dropping out of high school in 1905, Trakl worked for a pharmacist for three years and decided to pursue pharmacy as a career. It was at this time that he experimented with playwriting, but his two short plays, All Souls' Day and Fata Morgana, failed onstage.
In 1908, Trakl moved to Vienna to study pharmacy, and fell in with a group of local artists and bohemians who helped him to publish some of his poems. Trakl's father died in 1910, shortly before Trakl received his pharmacy certificate; thereafter, Trakl enlisted in the army for a yearlong stint. His return to civilian life in Salzburg was a disaster, and he reenlisted, serving as a pharmacist at a hospital in Innsbruck. There he also met the local artistic community, which recognized his budding talent. Ludwig von Ficker, the editor of the journal Der Brenner, became his patron: he regularly printed Trakl's work and endeavored to find him a publisher to produce a collection of poems. The result of these efforts was Gedichte (Poems), published by Kurt Wolff in Leipzig in the summer of 1913. Ficker also brought Trakl to the attention of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who anonymously provided him with a sizable stipend so that he could concentrate on his writing.
On the outbreak of World War I, Trakl was sent as a medical official to attend to soldiers in Galicia (comprising portions of modern-day Ukraine and Poland). Trakl suffered frequent bouts of depression , exacerbated by the horror of caring for severely wounded soldiers. During one such incident in Grodek, Trakl had to steward the recovery of some ninety soldiers wounded in the fierce campaign against the Russians. He tried to shoot himself from the strain, but his comrades prevented him. Hospitalized in Krakow and placed under close observation, Trakl lapsed into deeper depression and wrote to Ficker for advice. Ficker convinced him to contact Wittgenstein. Upon receiving Trakl's note, Wittgenstein went to the hospital, but found that Trakl had committed suicide from an overdose of cocaine three days before.
Critical appraisal
Trakl's richly symbolic poetry stands at the forefront of the literary arm of the Austro-German expressionist movement.[citations needed]
Online texts
Ten poems (English) by George Trakl
Twenty Poems, trans. by James Wright and Robert Bly — PDF file of a 1961 translation, listed in Bibliography
The Complete Writings of Georg Trakl in English - translations by Wersch and Jim Doss
Bibliography
Selected titles:
Gedichte (Poems), 1913
Sebastian im Traum (Sebastian in the Dream), poetry 1915
Der Herbst des Einsamen (The Autumn of The Lonely), 1920
Gesang des Abgeschiedenen (Song of The Departed), 1933
In English:
DECLINE: 12 POEMS trans. Michael Hamburger, Guido Morris / Latin Press, 1952
Twenty Poems of George Trakl, trans. James Wright & Robert Bly, The Sixties Press, 1961
Selected Poems, Christopher Middleton, Jonathan Cape, 1968
Georg Trakl: A Profile, ed. Frank Graziano, Logbridge-Rhodes, 1983
The Golden Goblet: Selected Poems of Georg Trakl, 1887-1914, trans. Jamshid Shirani & A. Maziar, Ibex Publishers, 1994
Song of the West: Selected Poems, trans. Robert Firmage, North Point Press, 1988
Autumn Sonata: Selected Poems of Georg Trakl, trans. Daniel Simko, Asphodel Press, 1998
Poems and Prose, Bilingual edition, trans. Alexander Stillmark, Libris, 2001