Much of his
biography
has taken on the character of legend, and the enigmatic poet changes according to who's looking: at the extremes, some see his verse as deeply religious, others as the rantings of a benighted, monstrous psychopath.
Trakl - Bringing Blood to Trakl’s Ghost
Bringing Blood to Trakl's Ghost
BY MARK GUSTAFSON
"We were like Lewis and Clark, tracing out the delicate strange dark places inside Trakl, all alone without anything from the past to guide us. " So James Wright wrote to Robert Bly when, after a two- year process, Twenty Poems of Georg Trakl, the first book of Bly's Sixties Press, was in the final stages before publication. Wright added: "I think that our translation has profited a great deal by our doing it slowly. . . . His poems are there, and our translations are like encamp- ments from which we make excursions in among the trees and sudden clearings, and make notes while we interview those odd beautiful little animals in there. So the delay was a ripening. "
The book appeared in late 1961, with a small scene from Hiero- nymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights on the jacket. Poet and editor John Logan, who would soon try his own hand at translating Trakl, offered Bly his interpretation of the picture: "It is such a beauti- ful detail. The boy has learned how to hold the owl without hanging on to him and the owl has learned how to love the boy and transmit to him his power without frightening him. . . . It has a curious rapport with the Trakl poems. " That transmission of power--how it worked for Bly and Wright especially, by way of their fresh translations and on into their Trakl-saturated poems, and the legacy of the kinship they felt with him and with each other--is a pivotal event in twentieth-cen- tury American poetry. They had not stuffed the owl, but revivified it; the art was thaumaturgy, not taxidermy. Thereby they made Trakl an essential figure for English-language poets to reckon with. Since then, in a steady stream of English translations and poetic nods, Trakl has continued to enjoy an active afterlife.
*
Bringing Blood to Trakl's Ghost 637
In Ventrakl (2010), Christian Hawkey fuses his own work to Trakl's, calling it a collaboration, so that questions of agency hardly apply. He uses photographs, and deploys various modes of composition to com- municate with or to channel his predecessor. It amounts to what one critic (in another context) has called "apocryphal" translation, to the creation of a new version of Trakl, as Hawkey, cleverly negotiating their cultural differences, imagines and thereby reanimates a ghost. To write this off--as rogue taxidermy, mere ventriloquism, another intertextual contrivance, or transgression against some hallowed po- etic principle--would be a mistake. Hawkey is utterly sincere, and he has the precedent of Jack Spicer's prodigious After Lorca (1957). In the vast gray area between conceptual and more conventional poetry, he plays with translation and pastiche while he seeks common ground. All poetry, in the end, is built on artifice; likewise, all translations are apocryphal to some degree. Ventrakl is a tribute by another poet in thrall to the evergreen force of Trakl's vision.
In 1958 Bly started his little magazine The Fifties (later The Sixties and The Seventies). Through it and its sibling small press, hunkered down on a farm in western Minnesota, he launched a sharp attack on the reigning North American literary aesthetic, in part by going beyond the bounds English-language poetry. A couple of generations earlier, Ezra Pound's insistence on translation had been a vital compo- nent of the Modernist program. Since then, American poetry had been de-radicalized and was largely stuck in the mire of New Criticism, rhyme, iambic pentameter, and a willful isolationism. The poetic es- tablishment valued rational, linear processes. In contrast, Bly touted an openness to and trust in the hidden currents of imagination and intuition springing from the unconscious mind.
Thus, all for the sake of "the new poetry" and "the new imagina- tion," Bly restored translation to a place of central concern. He found representatives of a still prevalent international modernism, poets from other lands, to serve as exemplars and transmitters through whom American poets might receive subconscious, pre-rational material that had been lost or was as yet untapped in the U. S. Furthermore, he vig- orously championed most of the poets he translated (five of whom, Pablo Neruda, Harry Martinson, Eugenio Montale, Vicente Aleixan- dre, and Tomas Transtro? mer--a lifelong friend and prote? ge? --went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature).
638 The Antioch Review
The books of the Sixties and Seventies Press, usually limited to twenty poems, served as introductions. They were kindling for the fire of what would become known as Deep Image poetry (the default term, despite Bly's dislike of it). The eponymous so-called school, of which he was the chief proponent and catalyst, was at best a "loose cluster" of poets who shared and cultivated certain sympathies and inclinations to a greater or lesser degree. (In the first wave, they included Wright, Galway Kinnell, Louis Simpson, Donald Hall, W. S. Merwin, as well as David Ignatow, Philip Levine, William Stafford, James Dickey, and even Denise Levertov. The "deep image" of Jerome Rothenberg and Robert Kelly, though related, was mostly a different and fleeting matter. ) This poetic sensibility was grounded most obviously in the Spanish-language surrealism of Neruda, Ce? sar Vallejo, Federico Gar- ci? a Lorca, Miguel Herna? ndez, and Aleixandre, but some of its deep- est and earliest roots were in Trakl. As Bly and Wright came into the foreground in the early 1960s (Silence in the Snowy Fields and The Branch Will Not Break were two of the most widely reviewed poetry books of that time), and as college and university writing programs metastasized in the 1970s, Deep Image was widely disseminated and, institutionalized, came to dominate American poetry.
Traduttore traditore, goes the Italian proverb, the translator is a traitor. As Robert Frost said, "poetry is what gets lost in translation. " Due to what Paul Celan called "the fatal uniqueness of language," perfect mi- mesis is impossible. (Never mind that it may also be undesirable. ) In this negative view, translation has been likened to thievery, hijacking, cannibalism, parricide, and other acts of violence.
A compromise position sees translation as "the art of the best pos- sible failure. " Jose? Ortega y Gasset called it "a utopian task" and thus unrealizable, but, as he says, so is everything humans strive to do; it is no less necessary for that. When done right, according to George Steiner, one step in the process is compensation; that is, making up for the inevitable losses--in acoustic effects, especially--with gains in the new idiom. Literal accuracy and "objectivity," ever-elusive ideals, must be sacrificed.
Pound asserted that a part of poetry is "indestructible" and cannot be lost in translation. The job is to locate the vital spark of the origi- nal, to match somehow its quality and tone, and to avoid, as much as possible, distortion and decontextualization. The translator needs to
Bringing Blood to Trakl's Ghost 639
identify imaginatively with the writer, or at least with the text itself. Beyond this, while translation aims to be acceptable to its target audi- ence, it must also, as A. K Ramanujan says, be true to the translator. In this positive view, to translate is to construct a bridge, to negotiate meaning, to make witness, to reconcile, to melt and refreeze an ice cube, or to resurrect--a` la Pound, to gather the scattered limbs of Osiris so that their "reunited energies assert themselves. " In the best circumstances, poetry can also be found in translation.
At issue here, however, is not only translation for translation's sake. Dryden declared that the translation of poetry into poetry was, at the most important level, an act of sympathy. It is this sympathetic--as well as therapeutic--exercise that Bly pushed other poets to begin. As Kenneth Rexroth said, it is "the best way to keep your tools sharp. " By projecting oneself into the work of another human being, one "learns more than the craft of words. He learns the stuff of poetry. It is not just his prosody he keeps alert, it is his heart. " This sympathy then is a kind of friendship with benefits, or beyond that, love, even a mystical union. In the erotics of translation, in that charged encounter, creative power is released. The overall effect, then, is liberating, introducing new possibilities that assist in the development of style, expression, and originality.
Pound alertly saw translation as a model for the poetic act-- "blood brought to ghosts," as Hugh Kenner put it. This pertains when one poet--consciously or not--writes under the influence of another poet she has translated. In this intimate confrontation with another lan- guage, the poet-translator undergoes a transformation. After absorp- tion and metabolization, the original components of the blood flowing in the veins of the new poem are inseparable.
Tormented, drug-addicted, possibly involved incestuously with his sister, the Austrian Trakl died in 1914, an apparent suicide at age twen- ty-seven. Much of his biography has taken on the character of legend, and the enigmatic poet changes according to who's looking: at the extremes, some see his verse as deeply religious, others as the rantings of a benighted, monstrous psychopath. In between, it is easy to link him to Modernism, though he has also been labeled Expressionist, Ex- istentialist, Symbolist, or Marxist. Trakl was experimental, visionary,
640 The Antioch Review
with an unusual consciousness and a talent for capturing the human di- lemma, such that he earned the admiration of his contemporaries Witt- genstein, Heidegger, and Rilke. He is best seen as unorthodox; he read and was influenced by, among others, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Ho? lderlin, Mo? rike, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, and Nietzsche. Though dark and death-driven, attentive to cultural decline and spiritual cor- ruption, the poems are not unremittingly bleak, but offer occasional glimpses of hope.
Most importantly, Trakl is a master of the resonant image, which wrested center stage from its more typical occupant, the poet's egocen- tric self. He augments this emphasis with startling juxtapositions, wild and mysterious dissonances that jolt the reader out of a prosaic mode of thinking and call up long-forgotten relationships. We may find our- selves in a ghostly place between two worlds, simultaneously familiar and strange. Trakl also uses especially frequent color epithets. These can be descriptive, symbolic, emotional, or synaesthetic--swapping the sensations of sight and sound; their function in any one instance is not always clear.
Although one hundred or so poems might seem a rather meager output, not so in Trakl's case. Despite his youth, he was well acquainted with grief, which gives tremendous psychic weight and power to each poem. Even without giving special consideration to German-language poetry and translations and poetry in languages other than English, a number of poets and critics now consider his body of work essen- tial. Gregory Orr, for example, in his cycle The City of Poetry (2012), includes Trakl as a permanent citizen, along with Sappho, Li Po, Rumi, Villon, Blake, Coleridge, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Rimbaud, Ner- uda, and Roethke.
In the summer of 1958, Bly sent Wright, whom he had not met, a copy of The Fifties #1. A successful young poet, teaching at the University of Minnesota, but in desperate emotional and creative straits, Wright devoured it and replied at once. He said the magazine had saved him. Among other things, it mentioned Trakl, whose work both men had independently and unexpectedly discovered abroad as Fulbright Fel- lows--Wright in Vienna in 1952-53, Bly in Oslo in 1956-57. Wright told Bly that he had "blundered" into the wrong classroom, to which he kept returning "to hear [a French scholar named] Susini whisper in his beautiful, gentle, liquid voice the poems of an Austrian (this poet
was Trakl, by the way) of whom I had never heard, but who had the grasp and shape of what you in your article called the new imagina- tion. "
Back in the U. S. , Wright was frustrated: "So I used to get hid- eously drunk at parties of academic intellectuals, and after the point of no return I would stand and bellow Trakl . . . because nobody knew what the hell I was saying, and because I only slightly felt, rather than understood, what in the name of God was crying in the miracles of those images that were sane to the depths of their being and which yet followed no rules that anyone else had ever dreamed of, and in the tide-suck of that music that sounded like the sea burying its birds or a jellyfish crying out in pain. " As Bly later put it, more prosaically: "It seems everyone became embarrassed. . . . And he felt them saying, 'Jim, get back in the cage. Come on, what are you doing? Get back in our old English cage. Stay there! '"
While Wright had been infected with the Trakl bug, he admit- ted that he "didn't know what to do with it," at least not when sober. Bly, however, did: as a self-appointed apostle of the new imagination and teacher of his generation, he--in partnership with Wright, whom he immediately invited to the farm--would pass the message along, spread the contagion. They set to work at their first meeting.
At the outset, Wright put himself at Bly's feet, hungry for criticism and direction (which is not to suggest that their working relationship was not reciprocal). Bly responded to an early batch: "'Sleep' is a fine poem. It takes a long time to translate a poem. That is shown by the fact that what you have written as
White birds from the outskirts of the night Flutter out over the shuddering cities
Of steel
is a thousand times the better of the typed lines, and absolutely per- fect for the last three lines. Those 3 lines are done, but the rest of the lines are not, yet. They will come. " Bly's observations have a dis- tinct freshness; unseasoned, he was still formulating his ideas. There is also brilliance: "I think you struggle too much with the poem, as if in translating you suddenly got an arrogant streak, and struggle with the poet to see who shall be the master of the poem. But as a transla- tor, we are only servants, and must follow every movement of the poem, and make no short cuts, unless by doing so we can follow his
Bringing Blood to Trakl's Ghost 641
642 The Antioch Review
movement so much better, and then only if the original path has hope- lessly failed. That is like creating a body without studying the skele- ton. . . . " His suggestions include, first: "trust the poet: if it is a great poet, that is worth translating, each image, if accurately rendered, will carry the poem, and we don't want you to imagine something else-- your ability to imagine is only called in at moments of emergency. For the rest, you are just a window pane. " Another suggestion: "always understate. . . . That is hard to learn, because in the English tradition we continually overstate--with a quite humble emotion, we overstate it in grandiloquent language and meter till it seems quite huge--Trakl does the opposite. He comes to the poem with an extremely violent emotion, much stronger than ours, a passion, dark and gigantic--and then writes a short poem, understating everything. In this way each word soaks up this dark force, and there is a huge reserve of unex- pressed feeling, so the poem is very powerful. "
After their next session, Wright said: "the three hours we spent over 'Grodek' may not as yet have produced a good translation, but they nevertheless left me with a sense of radiant peace, with a view of a luminous and clear landscape, that gave me assurance of your force and reality. . . . " And later: "It's endlessly worth the struggle . . . Time, time, time, patience, patience, patience. " At first Wright was in favor of seeking expert advice. But eventually he admitted, "I can't get rid of the stubborn idea that it is better for us to grope our own way through these poems. " However, with the twenty poems in place, Bly, for whom groping was not enough, again urged Wright to check with colleagues "to see if we can pick up any inaccuracies in syntax. " As they wrapped things up, Wright said: "I too am delighted--that isn't the word for it--over the Trakl translations . . . they really do sound--and look, and feel--like Trakl's own poems. "
Two poems will serve as examples. First is "Sleep":
Not your dark poisons again, White sleep!
This fantastically strange garden Of trees in deepening twilight Fills up with serpents, nightmoths, Spiders, bats.
Approaching stranger! Your abandoned shadow In the red of evening
Is a dark pirate ship
Of the salty oceans of confusion.
White birds from the outskirts of the night Flutter out over the shuddering cities
Of steel.
Wright said: "the mere phrase 'shuddering cities of steel,' com- bined with the picture of birds flying over it, evokes an image of bombing; and yet there is the other terror of untouched purity, the purity of a thing which looks on man's darkest terrors, which in effect knows all about his innermost secret fears even better than he does, and which nevertheless is utterly cold to them. Both images (bombing and untouched purity, indifference) are combined into a single mean- ing--profoundly rich, and an instance of what you called the 'new imagination' which has genuine grandeur. "
Second is "Grodek," Trakl's last poem, written in the aftermath of a horrendous battle:
At evening the woods of autumn are full of the sound Of the weapons of death, golden fields
And blue lakes, over which the darkening sun
Rolls down; night gathers in
Dying recruits, the animal cries
Of their burst mouths.
Yet a red cloud, in which a furious god,
The spilled blood itself, has its home, silently
Gathers, a moonlike coolness in the willow bottoms;
All the roads spread out into the black mold.
Under the gold branches of the night and stars
The sister's shadow falters through the diminishing grove,
To greet the ghosts of the heroes, bleeding heads;
And from the reeds the sound of the dark flutes of autumn rises. Oh prouder grief! you bronze altars,
The hot flame of the spirit is fed today by a more monstrous pain, The unborn grandchildren.
This seems to be just what his previous emphasis on death, doom, and decay had been prophesying. Again, Wright wrote to Bly: "It is start- ing to become clear that Trakl in many poems . . . places pastoral and harsh urban (or war) imagery side by side, underplays both, and lets a kind of explosion flare up and join them together--like the arc that sears the air between two sticks of carbon. "
The book elicited admiration from contemporaries like Merwin,
Bringing Blood to Trakl's Ghost 643
644 The Antioch Review
Kinnell, Logan, and Jonathan Williams, older poets like Stanley Burn- shaw and Richard Eberhart, and younger ones including Jim Harrison and Hank Malone, who wrote: "That 'magnificent silence' of Trakl's is more than disarming, much more. To a young, rather noisy, poet like myself it has an effect not unlike the best of haiku, or peyote. " Euge`ne Susini, the professor in Vienna, responded affirmatively: "La traduction . . . me parai^t rendre tre`s heureusement le sens et le magie de cette e? trange poe? sie" ("The translation . . . seems to me to express very aptly the sense and the magic of this strange poetry. ")
As for criticism, H. Arthur Klein wrote in The Nation: "The pres- ent translations are readable and devoted, even when marred by minor misunderstandings and a few infelicities of phrasing. Trakl's . . . pow- er and amazing precision of imagery do come through memorably. " Other reviewers lauded the "subtlety and precision," how the transla- tions preserved the mood of the originals, and the value of the transla- tors' commentaries. On the contrary, a German professor wrote that the book "demonstrates how amateurishly some poet translators go about their task. Those who know a language only through the diction- ary should keep their hands off such an arduous undertaking. " John Simon's brief negative notice ran in the Hudson Review; Bly cheekily reproduced it uncut as a paid advertisement in that magazine's next issue:
It is most commendable of James Wright and Robert Bly to offer us Twenty Poems of Georg Trakl, but would it not have behooved at least one of the translators to learn some German? Folks who translate "am Weiler vorbei" (past the hamlet) as "a while later," "ru? hrt die Knabenschla?
Much of his biography has taken on the character of legend, and the enigmatic poet changes according to who's looking: at the extremes, some see his verse as deeply religious, others as the rantings of a benighted, monstrous psychopath. In between, it is easy to link him to Modernism, though he has also been labeled Expressionist, Ex- istentialist, Symbolist, or Marxist. Trakl was experimental, visionary,
640 The Antioch Review
with an unusual consciousness and a talent for capturing the human di- lemma, such that he earned the admiration of his contemporaries Witt- genstein, Heidegger, and Rilke. He is best seen as unorthodox; he read and was influenced by, among others, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Ho? lderlin, Mo? rike, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, and Nietzsche. Though dark and death-driven, attentive to cultural decline and spiritual cor- ruption, the poems are not unremittingly bleak, but offer occasional glimpses of hope.
Most importantly, Trakl is a master of the resonant image, which wrested center stage from its more typical occupant, the poet's egocen- tric self. He augments this emphasis with startling juxtapositions, wild and mysterious dissonances that jolt the reader out of a prosaic mode of thinking and call up long-forgotten relationships. We may find our- selves in a ghostly place between two worlds, simultaneously familiar and strange. Trakl also uses especially frequent color epithets. These can be descriptive, symbolic, emotional, or synaesthetic--swapping the sensations of sight and sound; their function in any one instance is not always clear.
Although one hundred or so poems might seem a rather meager output, not so in Trakl's case. Despite his youth, he was well acquainted with grief, which gives tremendous psychic weight and power to each poem. Even without giving special consideration to German-language poetry and translations and poetry in languages other than English, a number of poets and critics now consider his body of work essen- tial. Gregory Orr, for example, in his cycle The City of Poetry (2012), includes Trakl as a permanent citizen, along with Sappho, Li Po, Rumi, Villon, Blake, Coleridge, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Rimbaud, Ner- uda, and Roethke.
In the summer of 1958, Bly sent Wright, whom he had not met, a copy of The Fifties #1. A successful young poet, teaching at the University of Minnesota, but in desperate emotional and creative straits, Wright devoured it and replied at once. He said the magazine had saved him. Among other things, it mentioned Trakl, whose work both men had independently and unexpectedly discovered abroad as Fulbright Fel- lows--Wright in Vienna in 1952-53, Bly in Oslo in 1956-57. Wright told Bly that he had "blundered" into the wrong classroom, to which he kept returning "to hear [a French scholar named] Susini whisper in his beautiful, gentle, liquid voice the poems of an Austrian (this poet
was Trakl, by the way) of whom I had never heard, but who had the grasp and shape of what you in your article called the new imagina- tion. "
Back in the U. S. , Wright was frustrated: "So I used to get hid- eously drunk at parties of academic intellectuals, and after the point of no return I would stand and bellow Trakl . . . because nobody knew what the hell I was saying, and because I only slightly felt, rather than understood, what in the name of God was crying in the miracles of those images that were sane to the depths of their being and which yet followed no rules that anyone else had ever dreamed of, and in the tide-suck of that music that sounded like the sea burying its birds or a jellyfish crying out in pain. " As Bly later put it, more prosaically: "It seems everyone became embarrassed. . . . And he felt them saying, 'Jim, get back in the cage. Come on, what are you doing? Get back in our old English cage. Stay there! '"
While Wright had been infected with the Trakl bug, he admit- ted that he "didn't know what to do with it," at least not when sober. Bly, however, did: as a self-appointed apostle of the new imagination and teacher of his generation, he--in partnership with Wright, whom he immediately invited to the farm--would pass the message along, spread the contagion. They set to work at their first meeting.
At the outset, Wright put himself at Bly's feet, hungry for criticism and direction (which is not to suggest that their working relationship was not reciprocal). Bly responded to an early batch: "'Sleep' is a fine poem. It takes a long time to translate a poem. That is shown by the fact that what you have written as
White birds from the outskirts of the night Flutter out over the shuddering cities
Of steel
is a thousand times the better of the typed lines, and absolutely per- fect for the last three lines. Those 3 lines are done, but the rest of the lines are not, yet. They will come. " Bly's observations have a dis- tinct freshness; unseasoned, he was still formulating his ideas. There is also brilliance: "I think you struggle too much with the poem, as if in translating you suddenly got an arrogant streak, and struggle with the poet to see who shall be the master of the poem. But as a transla- tor, we are only servants, and must follow every movement of the poem, and make no short cuts, unless by doing so we can follow his
Bringing Blood to Trakl's Ghost 641
642 The Antioch Review
movement so much better, and then only if the original path has hope- lessly failed. That is like creating a body without studying the skele- ton. . . . " His suggestions include, first: "trust the poet: if it is a great poet, that is worth translating, each image, if accurately rendered, will carry the poem, and we don't want you to imagine something else-- your ability to imagine is only called in at moments of emergency. For the rest, you are just a window pane. " Another suggestion: "always understate. . . . That is hard to learn, because in the English tradition we continually overstate--with a quite humble emotion, we overstate it in grandiloquent language and meter till it seems quite huge--Trakl does the opposite. He comes to the poem with an extremely violent emotion, much stronger than ours, a passion, dark and gigantic--and then writes a short poem, understating everything. In this way each word soaks up this dark force, and there is a huge reserve of unex- pressed feeling, so the poem is very powerful. "
After their next session, Wright said: "the three hours we spent over 'Grodek' may not as yet have produced a good translation, but they nevertheless left me with a sense of radiant peace, with a view of a luminous and clear landscape, that gave me assurance of your force and reality. . . . " And later: "It's endlessly worth the struggle . . . Time, time, time, patience, patience, patience. " At first Wright was in favor of seeking expert advice. But eventually he admitted, "I can't get rid of the stubborn idea that it is better for us to grope our own way through these poems. " However, with the twenty poems in place, Bly, for whom groping was not enough, again urged Wright to check with colleagues "to see if we can pick up any inaccuracies in syntax. " As they wrapped things up, Wright said: "I too am delighted--that isn't the word for it--over the Trakl translations . . . they really do sound--and look, and feel--like Trakl's own poems. "
Two poems will serve as examples. First is "Sleep":
Not your dark poisons again, White sleep!
This fantastically strange garden Of trees in deepening twilight Fills up with serpents, nightmoths, Spiders, bats.
Approaching stranger! Your abandoned shadow In the red of evening
Is a dark pirate ship
Of the salty oceans of confusion.
White birds from the outskirts of the night Flutter out over the shuddering cities
Of steel.
Wright said: "the mere phrase 'shuddering cities of steel,' com- bined with the picture of birds flying over it, evokes an image of bombing; and yet there is the other terror of untouched purity, the purity of a thing which looks on man's darkest terrors, which in effect knows all about his innermost secret fears even better than he does, and which nevertheless is utterly cold to them. Both images (bombing and untouched purity, indifference) are combined into a single mean- ing--profoundly rich, and an instance of what you called the 'new imagination' which has genuine grandeur. "
Second is "Grodek," Trakl's last poem, written in the aftermath of a horrendous battle:
At evening the woods of autumn are full of the sound Of the weapons of death, golden fields
And blue lakes, over which the darkening sun
Rolls down; night gathers in
Dying recruits, the animal cries
Of their burst mouths.
Yet a red cloud, in which a furious god,
The spilled blood itself, has its home, silently
Gathers, a moonlike coolness in the willow bottoms;
All the roads spread out into the black mold.
Under the gold branches of the night and stars
The sister's shadow falters through the diminishing grove,
To greet the ghosts of the heroes, bleeding heads;
And from the reeds the sound of the dark flutes of autumn rises. Oh prouder grief! you bronze altars,
The hot flame of the spirit is fed today by a more monstrous pain, The unborn grandchildren.
This seems to be just what his previous emphasis on death, doom, and decay had been prophesying. Again, Wright wrote to Bly: "It is start- ing to become clear that Trakl in many poems . . . places pastoral and harsh urban (or war) imagery side by side, underplays both, and lets a kind of explosion flare up and join them together--like the arc that sears the air between two sticks of carbon. "
The book elicited admiration from contemporaries like Merwin,
Bringing Blood to Trakl's Ghost 643
644 The Antioch Review
Kinnell, Logan, and Jonathan Williams, older poets like Stanley Burn- shaw and Richard Eberhart, and younger ones including Jim Harrison and Hank Malone, who wrote: "That 'magnificent silence' of Trakl's is more than disarming, much more. To a young, rather noisy, poet like myself it has an effect not unlike the best of haiku, or peyote. " Euge`ne Susini, the professor in Vienna, responded affirmatively: "La traduction . . . me parai^t rendre tre`s heureusement le sens et le magie de cette e? trange poe? sie" ("The translation . . . seems to me to express very aptly the sense and the magic of this strange poetry. ")
As for criticism, H. Arthur Klein wrote in The Nation: "The pres- ent translations are readable and devoted, even when marred by minor misunderstandings and a few infelicities of phrasing. Trakl's . . . pow- er and amazing precision of imagery do come through memorably. " Other reviewers lauded the "subtlety and precision," how the transla- tions preserved the mood of the originals, and the value of the transla- tors' commentaries. On the contrary, a German professor wrote that the book "demonstrates how amateurishly some poet translators go about their task. Those who know a language only through the diction- ary should keep their hands off such an arduous undertaking. " John Simon's brief negative notice ran in the Hudson Review; Bly cheekily reproduced it uncut as a paid advertisement in that magazine's next issue:
It is most commendable of James Wright and Robert Bly to offer us Twenty Poems of Georg Trakl, but would it not have behooved at least one of the translators to learn some German? Folks who translate "am Weiler vorbei" (past the hamlet) as "a while later," "ru? hrt die Knabenschla? fe" (touches the boy's temple) as "troubles the boy's sleep," "(it) dropped down stony precipices" as "stony waterfalls sank away," "the white grandchild prepares a dark future" as "a dark future prepared for the pale grandchild" are beyond the pale, even if in every other way the translations are most competent, which they are not.
One might expect embarrassment at outright howlers, but Bly told Hall: "It looks rather strange, but I'm sick of everyone quoting favor- able reviews. Louis [Simpson] thought it was a wonderful gag. " Print- ing the original versions on facing pages, he invited comparison and acknowledged that the new poems did not render the old invisible. He and Wright were not impersonating scholars; they were industrious poets on a mission. Simon had missed the point.
Both Wright and Bly had an affinity for a mood in Trakl. For all three
of them, poetry was akin to spiritual practice--being still, patient, and reverent toward a world in which every single thing has a voice. In their own poems, the two friends made aesthetic choices and adopted Traklian images that they found pleasing and that were--no won- der--often coincident with their Midwestern landscapes, experiences, and outlooks. They made something new if in the same vein. The at- tempt to isolate and identify the marks of influence when a virtual transfusion has taken place is hazardous, more so when several other poets (especially Spanish-language poets, and the Chinese poets of the T'ang Dynasty, not to mention those of the English and American traditions) are implicated. Such borrowings are what Bly has recently metaphorized as "stealing sugar from the castle. "
To put it another way, Wright once addressed Trakl, who had his ear, as "Father of my sound. " (The poetic image is certainly first a matter of mind, always holding to at least one of the five senses. But to Pound's "imaginative eye" one might add the imaginative ear--hear- ing dark sounds, as Lorca puts it, with lingering resonance. To Wright a Trakl poem was "a world where seeing and hearing are not two ac- tions, but one. ") Along similar lines, Ted Solotaroff, taking a cue from Iron John, saw Trakl as a "male mother" for Bly, bringing about his second birth, an initiation that allowed him "to grasp the subjective, intuitive, 'wild' side of modernism as opposed to the objective, ratio- nalist, 'domesticated' one. " Wright and Bly accepted their patrimony and assumed their roles as offspring and brothers, part of the Traklian clan.
The predominant influence on Wright's third book, The Branch Will Not Break (1963)--his breakthrough and masterpiece--was Bly, as their letters make unequivocally plain. Bly starts hacking away at many of Wright's poems, then more carefully paring until the hard, shining center is revealed. But as Wright shifted from the decorum, rhetoric, traditionalism, and rationalism of his first two books, The Green Wall and Saint Judas, and toward the subordinated ego, the strong, vivid image, and a more natural metrical scheme, the rup- ture can also be traced to Trakl. Wright told Bly: "your comments on translation . . . are, without exception, clear and valuable, not only for translation but for the new style itself. . . . " Pointing again to the pur- pose of Bly's emphasis, he added: "I think I'm learning something. I haven't really succeeded with any poems of mine yet, but I have this
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curious sensation of standing at the edge of a whole forest, completely unexplored. " Wright later said: "I would suppose that Trakl has had as much influence on me as anybody else has had. " And he made a point of addressing one of Bly's major bugaboos: "I am still pretty heavy- footed in my private escape from thump-thump-thump iambics, and God knows that Trakl at the height of his power has the most sensi- tively light rhythm in the world. "
Of the many similarities to Trakl in The Branch, the clearest are in vocabulary and images. Wright was accustomed to walk the gravel roads around the Blys' farm, with words and phrases surely swirling in his thoughts. In "A Blessing," Wright has: "Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass. / And the eyes of those two Indian ponies / Darken with kindness. " His translation of Trakl's "My Heart at Evening" be- gins: "Toward evening you hear the cry of the bats. / Two black horses bound in the pasture. " "Oh the mossy gaze of the wild thing," from Trakl's "Birth," seems to prefigure "a wild, gentle thing, the small dark eyes / Loving me in secret," in Wright's "Milkweed. " Even in the "bronze butterfly" and the "golden stones" of horse manure, from "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Min- nesota," which are more imagistic than the "black trunk" and "green shadow," it is difficult not to hear Trakl. There are many other re- semblances, including "silver maple," "scarlet face," "green voice," "black snow," and moons, wings, and dreams. Wright and Trakl both abide comfortably in a bucolic setting, but they also write of civiliza- tion, and human-made products and problems. "[T]he shuddering cit- ies / Of steel" in Trakl's "Sleep" is a closing phrase reminiscent of "A red shadow of steel mills," the last line in Wright's "Twilights. "
Shall We Gather at the River (1968) seems a departure from the relative contentment of Wright's previous book, with a more fully developed Traklian mood in its themes of drunkenness, despair, and suicide. Gloom apparently had become more nourishing for him. For some critics, the diminishment of clarity and light, on top of that of the usual conventions, was too much. But Trakl had intervened and, as Bly says with regard to his friend's psychological torments, "Wright was himself living in the dark. "
This image-laden poetry of the subconscious mind also has an inherent connection with Bly's development. Translating Trakl was not merely synchronous with the process of finding his own poetic voice, it was
a major force leading directly to his first book, Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962). Most of those poems were written between 1958 and 1961, precisely when the Trakl project was underway. Since countless poets came under Bly's sway, and since that first book has remained an Ur-text of Deep Image poetry, this connection is crucial.
In his introduction to Twenty Poems, Bly notes Trakl's "magnif- icent silence," how he rarely speaks, allowing the images to speak instead, although most of them are "images of silent things. " Trakl moves around in a "darkness without roads. " Bly says: "As his po- ems grow, more and more creatures live in his poems--first it was only wild ducks and rats, but then oak trees, deer, decaying wall- paper, ponds, herds of sheep, trumpets, and finally steel helmets, armies, wounded men, battlefield nurses, and the blood that had run from the wounds that day. "
In "Driving Toward the Lac Qui Parle River," Bly writes: "I am driving; it is dusk; Minnesota. / The stubble field catches the last growth of sun. " Trakl's "De Profundis" begins: "It is a stubble field, where a black rain is falling. " The "pirate ship" in Bly's "Night," a startling image, cannot help but recall the same in Trakl's "Sleep. " Bly's use of these and so many other words--"frail skiff," "golden trumpets," "gold animals," "golden wings," "black sun," "insane," not to mention the moon, moonlight, rustling, darkness, wild, silver, vari- ous trees--situates these poems unmistakably in Traklian territory. And there is silence, repeatedly invoked and overarching.
As mentioned earlier, the convergence of images of nature, human fabrication, and mechanized warfare is typical of Trakl. In a related aspect--his "poetry of witness" to the horrors of World War I--we may also perceive an impact on Bly, especially on his second book. The critic Martin Dodsworth, although his view was negative, had no doubt of Bly and Trakl's consanguinity: "Trakl is a fine poet, but he cannot be taken over on the large scale attempted in Silence in the Snowy Fields or The Light Around the Body. " But most of the poems in The Light (1967)--with the obvious exception of those directly ad- dressing the Vietnam War--were written before those in Silence, and thus before the Trakl translation. Yet it was the Vietnam poems that stood out, and Trakl's mark is surely there.
Bly proclaimed that such subject matter was appropriate, as he called for a new style in The Fifties #1: "There is an imagination which realizes the sudden new change in the life of humanity, of which the Nazi camps, the terror of modern wars, the sanctification of
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the viciousness of advertising, the turning of everyone into workers, the profundity of associations, is all a part, and the relationships unex- plained. . . . " He proclaims: "We need poets now who can carry on a sustained raid into modern life. . . . " As he preached, so he practiced.
"A note to tell you a half-sad and half-triumphant fact: Twenty Po- ems of Georg Trakl, J. Wright and R. Bly, Trans. , has just gone out of print in its first impression! The Sixties Press will shortly undertake some minor adjustments (Viel dank zum verdamnten John Simon) and put out a second printing! " So Carol Bly, Robert's wife, wrote Wright in 1965. Subsequently, they gathered corrections, new phrasings, re- translations, indications of who had (mostly) translated what, and new acknowledgments. Bly set a target date of 1967, and considered add- ing ten poems translated by Dallas Wiebe. But 1967 came and went. In 1970 Bly wrote to himself: "After reading Michael Hamburger's essay [on Trakl] . .
BY MARK GUSTAFSON
"We were like Lewis and Clark, tracing out the delicate strange dark places inside Trakl, all alone without anything from the past to guide us. " So James Wright wrote to Robert Bly when, after a two- year process, Twenty Poems of Georg Trakl, the first book of Bly's Sixties Press, was in the final stages before publication. Wright added: "I think that our translation has profited a great deal by our doing it slowly. . . . His poems are there, and our translations are like encamp- ments from which we make excursions in among the trees and sudden clearings, and make notes while we interview those odd beautiful little animals in there. So the delay was a ripening. "
The book appeared in late 1961, with a small scene from Hiero- nymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights on the jacket. Poet and editor John Logan, who would soon try his own hand at translating Trakl, offered Bly his interpretation of the picture: "It is such a beauti- ful detail. The boy has learned how to hold the owl without hanging on to him and the owl has learned how to love the boy and transmit to him his power without frightening him. . . . It has a curious rapport with the Trakl poems. " That transmission of power--how it worked for Bly and Wright especially, by way of their fresh translations and on into their Trakl-saturated poems, and the legacy of the kinship they felt with him and with each other--is a pivotal event in twentieth-cen- tury American poetry. They had not stuffed the owl, but revivified it; the art was thaumaturgy, not taxidermy. Thereby they made Trakl an essential figure for English-language poets to reckon with. Since then, in a steady stream of English translations and poetic nods, Trakl has continued to enjoy an active afterlife.
*
Bringing Blood to Trakl's Ghost 637
In Ventrakl (2010), Christian Hawkey fuses his own work to Trakl's, calling it a collaboration, so that questions of agency hardly apply. He uses photographs, and deploys various modes of composition to com- municate with or to channel his predecessor. It amounts to what one critic (in another context) has called "apocryphal" translation, to the creation of a new version of Trakl, as Hawkey, cleverly negotiating their cultural differences, imagines and thereby reanimates a ghost. To write this off--as rogue taxidermy, mere ventriloquism, another intertextual contrivance, or transgression against some hallowed po- etic principle--would be a mistake. Hawkey is utterly sincere, and he has the precedent of Jack Spicer's prodigious After Lorca (1957). In the vast gray area between conceptual and more conventional poetry, he plays with translation and pastiche while he seeks common ground. All poetry, in the end, is built on artifice; likewise, all translations are apocryphal to some degree. Ventrakl is a tribute by another poet in thrall to the evergreen force of Trakl's vision.
In 1958 Bly started his little magazine The Fifties (later The Sixties and The Seventies). Through it and its sibling small press, hunkered down on a farm in western Minnesota, he launched a sharp attack on the reigning North American literary aesthetic, in part by going beyond the bounds English-language poetry. A couple of generations earlier, Ezra Pound's insistence on translation had been a vital compo- nent of the Modernist program. Since then, American poetry had been de-radicalized and was largely stuck in the mire of New Criticism, rhyme, iambic pentameter, and a willful isolationism. The poetic es- tablishment valued rational, linear processes. In contrast, Bly touted an openness to and trust in the hidden currents of imagination and intuition springing from the unconscious mind.
Thus, all for the sake of "the new poetry" and "the new imagina- tion," Bly restored translation to a place of central concern. He found representatives of a still prevalent international modernism, poets from other lands, to serve as exemplars and transmitters through whom American poets might receive subconscious, pre-rational material that had been lost or was as yet untapped in the U. S. Furthermore, he vig- orously championed most of the poets he translated (five of whom, Pablo Neruda, Harry Martinson, Eugenio Montale, Vicente Aleixan- dre, and Tomas Transtro? mer--a lifelong friend and prote? ge? --went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature).
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The books of the Sixties and Seventies Press, usually limited to twenty poems, served as introductions. They were kindling for the fire of what would become known as Deep Image poetry (the default term, despite Bly's dislike of it). The eponymous so-called school, of which he was the chief proponent and catalyst, was at best a "loose cluster" of poets who shared and cultivated certain sympathies and inclinations to a greater or lesser degree. (In the first wave, they included Wright, Galway Kinnell, Louis Simpson, Donald Hall, W. S. Merwin, as well as David Ignatow, Philip Levine, William Stafford, James Dickey, and even Denise Levertov. The "deep image" of Jerome Rothenberg and Robert Kelly, though related, was mostly a different and fleeting matter. ) This poetic sensibility was grounded most obviously in the Spanish-language surrealism of Neruda, Ce? sar Vallejo, Federico Gar- ci? a Lorca, Miguel Herna? ndez, and Aleixandre, but some of its deep- est and earliest roots were in Trakl. As Bly and Wright came into the foreground in the early 1960s (Silence in the Snowy Fields and The Branch Will Not Break were two of the most widely reviewed poetry books of that time), and as college and university writing programs metastasized in the 1970s, Deep Image was widely disseminated and, institutionalized, came to dominate American poetry.
Traduttore traditore, goes the Italian proverb, the translator is a traitor. As Robert Frost said, "poetry is what gets lost in translation. " Due to what Paul Celan called "the fatal uniqueness of language," perfect mi- mesis is impossible. (Never mind that it may also be undesirable. ) In this negative view, translation has been likened to thievery, hijacking, cannibalism, parricide, and other acts of violence.
A compromise position sees translation as "the art of the best pos- sible failure. " Jose? Ortega y Gasset called it "a utopian task" and thus unrealizable, but, as he says, so is everything humans strive to do; it is no less necessary for that. When done right, according to George Steiner, one step in the process is compensation; that is, making up for the inevitable losses--in acoustic effects, especially--with gains in the new idiom. Literal accuracy and "objectivity," ever-elusive ideals, must be sacrificed.
Pound asserted that a part of poetry is "indestructible" and cannot be lost in translation. The job is to locate the vital spark of the origi- nal, to match somehow its quality and tone, and to avoid, as much as possible, distortion and decontextualization. The translator needs to
Bringing Blood to Trakl's Ghost 639
identify imaginatively with the writer, or at least with the text itself. Beyond this, while translation aims to be acceptable to its target audi- ence, it must also, as A. K Ramanujan says, be true to the translator. In this positive view, to translate is to construct a bridge, to negotiate meaning, to make witness, to reconcile, to melt and refreeze an ice cube, or to resurrect--a` la Pound, to gather the scattered limbs of Osiris so that their "reunited energies assert themselves. " In the best circumstances, poetry can also be found in translation.
At issue here, however, is not only translation for translation's sake. Dryden declared that the translation of poetry into poetry was, at the most important level, an act of sympathy. It is this sympathetic--as well as therapeutic--exercise that Bly pushed other poets to begin. As Kenneth Rexroth said, it is "the best way to keep your tools sharp. " By projecting oneself into the work of another human being, one "learns more than the craft of words. He learns the stuff of poetry. It is not just his prosody he keeps alert, it is his heart. " This sympathy then is a kind of friendship with benefits, or beyond that, love, even a mystical union. In the erotics of translation, in that charged encounter, creative power is released. The overall effect, then, is liberating, introducing new possibilities that assist in the development of style, expression, and originality.
Pound alertly saw translation as a model for the poetic act-- "blood brought to ghosts," as Hugh Kenner put it. This pertains when one poet--consciously or not--writes under the influence of another poet she has translated. In this intimate confrontation with another lan- guage, the poet-translator undergoes a transformation. After absorp- tion and metabolization, the original components of the blood flowing in the veins of the new poem are inseparable.
Tormented, drug-addicted, possibly involved incestuously with his sister, the Austrian Trakl died in 1914, an apparent suicide at age twen- ty-seven. Much of his biography has taken on the character of legend, and the enigmatic poet changes according to who's looking: at the extremes, some see his verse as deeply religious, others as the rantings of a benighted, monstrous psychopath. In between, it is easy to link him to Modernism, though he has also been labeled Expressionist, Ex- istentialist, Symbolist, or Marxist. Trakl was experimental, visionary,
640 The Antioch Review
with an unusual consciousness and a talent for capturing the human di- lemma, such that he earned the admiration of his contemporaries Witt- genstein, Heidegger, and Rilke. He is best seen as unorthodox; he read and was influenced by, among others, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Ho? lderlin, Mo? rike, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, and Nietzsche. Though dark and death-driven, attentive to cultural decline and spiritual cor- ruption, the poems are not unremittingly bleak, but offer occasional glimpses of hope.
Most importantly, Trakl is a master of the resonant image, which wrested center stage from its more typical occupant, the poet's egocen- tric self. He augments this emphasis with startling juxtapositions, wild and mysterious dissonances that jolt the reader out of a prosaic mode of thinking and call up long-forgotten relationships. We may find our- selves in a ghostly place between two worlds, simultaneously familiar and strange. Trakl also uses especially frequent color epithets. These can be descriptive, symbolic, emotional, or synaesthetic--swapping the sensations of sight and sound; their function in any one instance is not always clear.
Although one hundred or so poems might seem a rather meager output, not so in Trakl's case. Despite his youth, he was well acquainted with grief, which gives tremendous psychic weight and power to each poem. Even without giving special consideration to German-language poetry and translations and poetry in languages other than English, a number of poets and critics now consider his body of work essen- tial. Gregory Orr, for example, in his cycle The City of Poetry (2012), includes Trakl as a permanent citizen, along with Sappho, Li Po, Rumi, Villon, Blake, Coleridge, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Rimbaud, Ner- uda, and Roethke.
In the summer of 1958, Bly sent Wright, whom he had not met, a copy of The Fifties #1. A successful young poet, teaching at the University of Minnesota, but in desperate emotional and creative straits, Wright devoured it and replied at once. He said the magazine had saved him. Among other things, it mentioned Trakl, whose work both men had independently and unexpectedly discovered abroad as Fulbright Fel- lows--Wright in Vienna in 1952-53, Bly in Oslo in 1956-57. Wright told Bly that he had "blundered" into the wrong classroom, to which he kept returning "to hear [a French scholar named] Susini whisper in his beautiful, gentle, liquid voice the poems of an Austrian (this poet
was Trakl, by the way) of whom I had never heard, but who had the grasp and shape of what you in your article called the new imagina- tion. "
Back in the U. S. , Wright was frustrated: "So I used to get hid- eously drunk at parties of academic intellectuals, and after the point of no return I would stand and bellow Trakl . . . because nobody knew what the hell I was saying, and because I only slightly felt, rather than understood, what in the name of God was crying in the miracles of those images that were sane to the depths of their being and which yet followed no rules that anyone else had ever dreamed of, and in the tide-suck of that music that sounded like the sea burying its birds or a jellyfish crying out in pain. " As Bly later put it, more prosaically: "It seems everyone became embarrassed. . . . And he felt them saying, 'Jim, get back in the cage. Come on, what are you doing? Get back in our old English cage. Stay there! '"
While Wright had been infected with the Trakl bug, he admit- ted that he "didn't know what to do with it," at least not when sober. Bly, however, did: as a self-appointed apostle of the new imagination and teacher of his generation, he--in partnership with Wright, whom he immediately invited to the farm--would pass the message along, spread the contagion. They set to work at their first meeting.
At the outset, Wright put himself at Bly's feet, hungry for criticism and direction (which is not to suggest that their working relationship was not reciprocal). Bly responded to an early batch: "'Sleep' is a fine poem. It takes a long time to translate a poem. That is shown by the fact that what you have written as
White birds from the outskirts of the night Flutter out over the shuddering cities
Of steel
is a thousand times the better of the typed lines, and absolutely per- fect for the last three lines. Those 3 lines are done, but the rest of the lines are not, yet. They will come. " Bly's observations have a dis- tinct freshness; unseasoned, he was still formulating his ideas. There is also brilliance: "I think you struggle too much with the poem, as if in translating you suddenly got an arrogant streak, and struggle with the poet to see who shall be the master of the poem. But as a transla- tor, we are only servants, and must follow every movement of the poem, and make no short cuts, unless by doing so we can follow his
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movement so much better, and then only if the original path has hope- lessly failed. That is like creating a body without studying the skele- ton. . . . " His suggestions include, first: "trust the poet: if it is a great poet, that is worth translating, each image, if accurately rendered, will carry the poem, and we don't want you to imagine something else-- your ability to imagine is only called in at moments of emergency. For the rest, you are just a window pane. " Another suggestion: "always understate. . . . That is hard to learn, because in the English tradition we continually overstate--with a quite humble emotion, we overstate it in grandiloquent language and meter till it seems quite huge--Trakl does the opposite. He comes to the poem with an extremely violent emotion, much stronger than ours, a passion, dark and gigantic--and then writes a short poem, understating everything. In this way each word soaks up this dark force, and there is a huge reserve of unex- pressed feeling, so the poem is very powerful. "
After their next session, Wright said: "the three hours we spent over 'Grodek' may not as yet have produced a good translation, but they nevertheless left me with a sense of radiant peace, with a view of a luminous and clear landscape, that gave me assurance of your force and reality. . . . " And later: "It's endlessly worth the struggle . . . Time, time, time, patience, patience, patience. " At first Wright was in favor of seeking expert advice. But eventually he admitted, "I can't get rid of the stubborn idea that it is better for us to grope our own way through these poems. " However, with the twenty poems in place, Bly, for whom groping was not enough, again urged Wright to check with colleagues "to see if we can pick up any inaccuracies in syntax. " As they wrapped things up, Wright said: "I too am delighted--that isn't the word for it--over the Trakl translations . . . they really do sound--and look, and feel--like Trakl's own poems. "
Two poems will serve as examples. First is "Sleep":
Not your dark poisons again, White sleep!
This fantastically strange garden Of trees in deepening twilight Fills up with serpents, nightmoths, Spiders, bats.
Approaching stranger! Your abandoned shadow In the red of evening
Is a dark pirate ship
Of the salty oceans of confusion.
White birds from the outskirts of the night Flutter out over the shuddering cities
Of steel.
Wright said: "the mere phrase 'shuddering cities of steel,' com- bined with the picture of birds flying over it, evokes an image of bombing; and yet there is the other terror of untouched purity, the purity of a thing which looks on man's darkest terrors, which in effect knows all about his innermost secret fears even better than he does, and which nevertheless is utterly cold to them. Both images (bombing and untouched purity, indifference) are combined into a single mean- ing--profoundly rich, and an instance of what you called the 'new imagination' which has genuine grandeur. "
Second is "Grodek," Trakl's last poem, written in the aftermath of a horrendous battle:
At evening the woods of autumn are full of the sound Of the weapons of death, golden fields
And blue lakes, over which the darkening sun
Rolls down; night gathers in
Dying recruits, the animal cries
Of their burst mouths.
Yet a red cloud, in which a furious god,
The spilled blood itself, has its home, silently
Gathers, a moonlike coolness in the willow bottoms;
All the roads spread out into the black mold.
Under the gold branches of the night and stars
The sister's shadow falters through the diminishing grove,
To greet the ghosts of the heroes, bleeding heads;
And from the reeds the sound of the dark flutes of autumn rises. Oh prouder grief! you bronze altars,
The hot flame of the spirit is fed today by a more monstrous pain, The unborn grandchildren.
This seems to be just what his previous emphasis on death, doom, and decay had been prophesying. Again, Wright wrote to Bly: "It is start- ing to become clear that Trakl in many poems . . . places pastoral and harsh urban (or war) imagery side by side, underplays both, and lets a kind of explosion flare up and join them together--like the arc that sears the air between two sticks of carbon. "
The book elicited admiration from contemporaries like Merwin,
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Kinnell, Logan, and Jonathan Williams, older poets like Stanley Burn- shaw and Richard Eberhart, and younger ones including Jim Harrison and Hank Malone, who wrote: "That 'magnificent silence' of Trakl's is more than disarming, much more. To a young, rather noisy, poet like myself it has an effect not unlike the best of haiku, or peyote. " Euge`ne Susini, the professor in Vienna, responded affirmatively: "La traduction . . . me parai^t rendre tre`s heureusement le sens et le magie de cette e? trange poe? sie" ("The translation . . . seems to me to express very aptly the sense and the magic of this strange poetry. ")
As for criticism, H. Arthur Klein wrote in The Nation: "The pres- ent translations are readable and devoted, even when marred by minor misunderstandings and a few infelicities of phrasing. Trakl's . . . pow- er and amazing precision of imagery do come through memorably. " Other reviewers lauded the "subtlety and precision," how the transla- tions preserved the mood of the originals, and the value of the transla- tors' commentaries. On the contrary, a German professor wrote that the book "demonstrates how amateurishly some poet translators go about their task. Those who know a language only through the diction- ary should keep their hands off such an arduous undertaking. " John Simon's brief negative notice ran in the Hudson Review; Bly cheekily reproduced it uncut as a paid advertisement in that magazine's next issue:
It is most commendable of James Wright and Robert Bly to offer us Twenty Poems of Georg Trakl, but would it not have behooved at least one of the translators to learn some German? Folks who translate "am Weiler vorbei" (past the hamlet) as "a while later," "ru? hrt die Knabenschla?
Much of his biography has taken on the character of legend, and the enigmatic poet changes according to who's looking: at the extremes, some see his verse as deeply religious, others as the rantings of a benighted, monstrous psychopath. In between, it is easy to link him to Modernism, though he has also been labeled Expressionist, Ex- istentialist, Symbolist, or Marxist. Trakl was experimental, visionary,
640 The Antioch Review
with an unusual consciousness and a talent for capturing the human di- lemma, such that he earned the admiration of his contemporaries Witt- genstein, Heidegger, and Rilke. He is best seen as unorthodox; he read and was influenced by, among others, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Ho? lderlin, Mo? rike, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, and Nietzsche. Though dark and death-driven, attentive to cultural decline and spiritual cor- ruption, the poems are not unremittingly bleak, but offer occasional glimpses of hope.
Most importantly, Trakl is a master of the resonant image, which wrested center stage from its more typical occupant, the poet's egocen- tric self. He augments this emphasis with startling juxtapositions, wild and mysterious dissonances that jolt the reader out of a prosaic mode of thinking and call up long-forgotten relationships. We may find our- selves in a ghostly place between two worlds, simultaneously familiar and strange. Trakl also uses especially frequent color epithets. These can be descriptive, symbolic, emotional, or synaesthetic--swapping the sensations of sight and sound; their function in any one instance is not always clear.
Although one hundred or so poems might seem a rather meager output, not so in Trakl's case. Despite his youth, he was well acquainted with grief, which gives tremendous psychic weight and power to each poem. Even without giving special consideration to German-language poetry and translations and poetry in languages other than English, a number of poets and critics now consider his body of work essen- tial. Gregory Orr, for example, in his cycle The City of Poetry (2012), includes Trakl as a permanent citizen, along with Sappho, Li Po, Rumi, Villon, Blake, Coleridge, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Rimbaud, Ner- uda, and Roethke.
In the summer of 1958, Bly sent Wright, whom he had not met, a copy of The Fifties #1. A successful young poet, teaching at the University of Minnesota, but in desperate emotional and creative straits, Wright devoured it and replied at once. He said the magazine had saved him. Among other things, it mentioned Trakl, whose work both men had independently and unexpectedly discovered abroad as Fulbright Fel- lows--Wright in Vienna in 1952-53, Bly in Oslo in 1956-57. Wright told Bly that he had "blundered" into the wrong classroom, to which he kept returning "to hear [a French scholar named] Susini whisper in his beautiful, gentle, liquid voice the poems of an Austrian (this poet
was Trakl, by the way) of whom I had never heard, but who had the grasp and shape of what you in your article called the new imagina- tion. "
Back in the U. S. , Wright was frustrated: "So I used to get hid- eously drunk at parties of academic intellectuals, and after the point of no return I would stand and bellow Trakl . . . because nobody knew what the hell I was saying, and because I only slightly felt, rather than understood, what in the name of God was crying in the miracles of those images that were sane to the depths of their being and which yet followed no rules that anyone else had ever dreamed of, and in the tide-suck of that music that sounded like the sea burying its birds or a jellyfish crying out in pain. " As Bly later put it, more prosaically: "It seems everyone became embarrassed. . . . And he felt them saying, 'Jim, get back in the cage. Come on, what are you doing? Get back in our old English cage. Stay there! '"
While Wright had been infected with the Trakl bug, he admit- ted that he "didn't know what to do with it," at least not when sober. Bly, however, did: as a self-appointed apostle of the new imagination and teacher of his generation, he--in partnership with Wright, whom he immediately invited to the farm--would pass the message along, spread the contagion. They set to work at their first meeting.
At the outset, Wright put himself at Bly's feet, hungry for criticism and direction (which is not to suggest that their working relationship was not reciprocal). Bly responded to an early batch: "'Sleep' is a fine poem. It takes a long time to translate a poem. That is shown by the fact that what you have written as
White birds from the outskirts of the night Flutter out over the shuddering cities
Of steel
is a thousand times the better of the typed lines, and absolutely per- fect for the last three lines. Those 3 lines are done, but the rest of the lines are not, yet. They will come. " Bly's observations have a dis- tinct freshness; unseasoned, he was still formulating his ideas. There is also brilliance: "I think you struggle too much with the poem, as if in translating you suddenly got an arrogant streak, and struggle with the poet to see who shall be the master of the poem. But as a transla- tor, we are only servants, and must follow every movement of the poem, and make no short cuts, unless by doing so we can follow his
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movement so much better, and then only if the original path has hope- lessly failed. That is like creating a body without studying the skele- ton. . . . " His suggestions include, first: "trust the poet: if it is a great poet, that is worth translating, each image, if accurately rendered, will carry the poem, and we don't want you to imagine something else-- your ability to imagine is only called in at moments of emergency. For the rest, you are just a window pane. " Another suggestion: "always understate. . . . That is hard to learn, because in the English tradition we continually overstate--with a quite humble emotion, we overstate it in grandiloquent language and meter till it seems quite huge--Trakl does the opposite. He comes to the poem with an extremely violent emotion, much stronger than ours, a passion, dark and gigantic--and then writes a short poem, understating everything. In this way each word soaks up this dark force, and there is a huge reserve of unex- pressed feeling, so the poem is very powerful. "
After their next session, Wright said: "the three hours we spent over 'Grodek' may not as yet have produced a good translation, but they nevertheless left me with a sense of radiant peace, with a view of a luminous and clear landscape, that gave me assurance of your force and reality. . . . " And later: "It's endlessly worth the struggle . . . Time, time, time, patience, patience, patience. " At first Wright was in favor of seeking expert advice. But eventually he admitted, "I can't get rid of the stubborn idea that it is better for us to grope our own way through these poems. " However, with the twenty poems in place, Bly, for whom groping was not enough, again urged Wright to check with colleagues "to see if we can pick up any inaccuracies in syntax. " As they wrapped things up, Wright said: "I too am delighted--that isn't the word for it--over the Trakl translations . . . they really do sound--and look, and feel--like Trakl's own poems. "
Two poems will serve as examples. First is "Sleep":
Not your dark poisons again, White sleep!
This fantastically strange garden Of trees in deepening twilight Fills up with serpents, nightmoths, Spiders, bats.
Approaching stranger! Your abandoned shadow In the red of evening
Is a dark pirate ship
Of the salty oceans of confusion.
White birds from the outskirts of the night Flutter out over the shuddering cities
Of steel.
Wright said: "the mere phrase 'shuddering cities of steel,' com- bined with the picture of birds flying over it, evokes an image of bombing; and yet there is the other terror of untouched purity, the purity of a thing which looks on man's darkest terrors, which in effect knows all about his innermost secret fears even better than he does, and which nevertheless is utterly cold to them. Both images (bombing and untouched purity, indifference) are combined into a single mean- ing--profoundly rich, and an instance of what you called the 'new imagination' which has genuine grandeur. "
Second is "Grodek," Trakl's last poem, written in the aftermath of a horrendous battle:
At evening the woods of autumn are full of the sound Of the weapons of death, golden fields
And blue lakes, over which the darkening sun
Rolls down; night gathers in
Dying recruits, the animal cries
Of their burst mouths.
Yet a red cloud, in which a furious god,
The spilled blood itself, has its home, silently
Gathers, a moonlike coolness in the willow bottoms;
All the roads spread out into the black mold.
Under the gold branches of the night and stars
The sister's shadow falters through the diminishing grove,
To greet the ghosts of the heroes, bleeding heads;
And from the reeds the sound of the dark flutes of autumn rises. Oh prouder grief! you bronze altars,
The hot flame of the spirit is fed today by a more monstrous pain, The unborn grandchildren.
This seems to be just what his previous emphasis on death, doom, and decay had been prophesying. Again, Wright wrote to Bly: "It is start- ing to become clear that Trakl in many poems . . . places pastoral and harsh urban (or war) imagery side by side, underplays both, and lets a kind of explosion flare up and join them together--like the arc that sears the air between two sticks of carbon. "
The book elicited admiration from contemporaries like Merwin,
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Kinnell, Logan, and Jonathan Williams, older poets like Stanley Burn- shaw and Richard Eberhart, and younger ones including Jim Harrison and Hank Malone, who wrote: "That 'magnificent silence' of Trakl's is more than disarming, much more. To a young, rather noisy, poet like myself it has an effect not unlike the best of haiku, or peyote. " Euge`ne Susini, the professor in Vienna, responded affirmatively: "La traduction . . . me parai^t rendre tre`s heureusement le sens et le magie de cette e? trange poe? sie" ("The translation . . . seems to me to express very aptly the sense and the magic of this strange poetry. ")
As for criticism, H. Arthur Klein wrote in The Nation: "The pres- ent translations are readable and devoted, even when marred by minor misunderstandings and a few infelicities of phrasing. Trakl's . . . pow- er and amazing precision of imagery do come through memorably. " Other reviewers lauded the "subtlety and precision," how the transla- tions preserved the mood of the originals, and the value of the transla- tors' commentaries. On the contrary, a German professor wrote that the book "demonstrates how amateurishly some poet translators go about their task. Those who know a language only through the diction- ary should keep their hands off such an arduous undertaking. " John Simon's brief negative notice ran in the Hudson Review; Bly cheekily reproduced it uncut as a paid advertisement in that magazine's next issue:
It is most commendable of James Wright and Robert Bly to offer us Twenty Poems of Georg Trakl, but would it not have behooved at least one of the translators to learn some German? Folks who translate "am Weiler vorbei" (past the hamlet) as "a while later," "ru? hrt die Knabenschla? fe" (touches the boy's temple) as "troubles the boy's sleep," "(it) dropped down stony precipices" as "stony waterfalls sank away," "the white grandchild prepares a dark future" as "a dark future prepared for the pale grandchild" are beyond the pale, even if in every other way the translations are most competent, which they are not.
One might expect embarrassment at outright howlers, but Bly told Hall: "It looks rather strange, but I'm sick of everyone quoting favor- able reviews. Louis [Simpson] thought it was a wonderful gag. " Print- ing the original versions on facing pages, he invited comparison and acknowledged that the new poems did not render the old invisible. He and Wright were not impersonating scholars; they were industrious poets on a mission. Simon had missed the point.
Both Wright and Bly had an affinity for a mood in Trakl. For all three
of them, poetry was akin to spiritual practice--being still, patient, and reverent toward a world in which every single thing has a voice. In their own poems, the two friends made aesthetic choices and adopted Traklian images that they found pleasing and that were--no won- der--often coincident with their Midwestern landscapes, experiences, and outlooks. They made something new if in the same vein. The at- tempt to isolate and identify the marks of influence when a virtual transfusion has taken place is hazardous, more so when several other poets (especially Spanish-language poets, and the Chinese poets of the T'ang Dynasty, not to mention those of the English and American traditions) are implicated. Such borrowings are what Bly has recently metaphorized as "stealing sugar from the castle. "
To put it another way, Wright once addressed Trakl, who had his ear, as "Father of my sound. " (The poetic image is certainly first a matter of mind, always holding to at least one of the five senses. But to Pound's "imaginative eye" one might add the imaginative ear--hear- ing dark sounds, as Lorca puts it, with lingering resonance. To Wright a Trakl poem was "a world where seeing and hearing are not two ac- tions, but one. ") Along similar lines, Ted Solotaroff, taking a cue from Iron John, saw Trakl as a "male mother" for Bly, bringing about his second birth, an initiation that allowed him "to grasp the subjective, intuitive, 'wild' side of modernism as opposed to the objective, ratio- nalist, 'domesticated' one. " Wright and Bly accepted their patrimony and assumed their roles as offspring and brothers, part of the Traklian clan.
The predominant influence on Wright's third book, The Branch Will Not Break (1963)--his breakthrough and masterpiece--was Bly, as their letters make unequivocally plain. Bly starts hacking away at many of Wright's poems, then more carefully paring until the hard, shining center is revealed. But as Wright shifted from the decorum, rhetoric, traditionalism, and rationalism of his first two books, The Green Wall and Saint Judas, and toward the subordinated ego, the strong, vivid image, and a more natural metrical scheme, the rup- ture can also be traced to Trakl. Wright told Bly: "your comments on translation . . . are, without exception, clear and valuable, not only for translation but for the new style itself. . . . " Pointing again to the pur- pose of Bly's emphasis, he added: "I think I'm learning something. I haven't really succeeded with any poems of mine yet, but I have this
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curious sensation of standing at the edge of a whole forest, completely unexplored. " Wright later said: "I would suppose that Trakl has had as much influence on me as anybody else has had. " And he made a point of addressing one of Bly's major bugaboos: "I am still pretty heavy- footed in my private escape from thump-thump-thump iambics, and God knows that Trakl at the height of his power has the most sensi- tively light rhythm in the world. "
Of the many similarities to Trakl in The Branch, the clearest are in vocabulary and images. Wright was accustomed to walk the gravel roads around the Blys' farm, with words and phrases surely swirling in his thoughts. In "A Blessing," Wright has: "Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass. / And the eyes of those two Indian ponies / Darken with kindness. " His translation of Trakl's "My Heart at Evening" be- gins: "Toward evening you hear the cry of the bats. / Two black horses bound in the pasture. " "Oh the mossy gaze of the wild thing," from Trakl's "Birth," seems to prefigure "a wild, gentle thing, the small dark eyes / Loving me in secret," in Wright's "Milkweed. " Even in the "bronze butterfly" and the "golden stones" of horse manure, from "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Min- nesota," which are more imagistic than the "black trunk" and "green shadow," it is difficult not to hear Trakl. There are many other re- semblances, including "silver maple," "scarlet face," "green voice," "black snow," and moons, wings, and dreams. Wright and Trakl both abide comfortably in a bucolic setting, but they also write of civiliza- tion, and human-made products and problems. "[T]he shuddering cit- ies / Of steel" in Trakl's "Sleep" is a closing phrase reminiscent of "A red shadow of steel mills," the last line in Wright's "Twilights. "
Shall We Gather at the River (1968) seems a departure from the relative contentment of Wright's previous book, with a more fully developed Traklian mood in its themes of drunkenness, despair, and suicide. Gloom apparently had become more nourishing for him. For some critics, the diminishment of clarity and light, on top of that of the usual conventions, was too much. But Trakl had intervened and, as Bly says with regard to his friend's psychological torments, "Wright was himself living in the dark. "
This image-laden poetry of the subconscious mind also has an inherent connection with Bly's development. Translating Trakl was not merely synchronous with the process of finding his own poetic voice, it was
a major force leading directly to his first book, Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962). Most of those poems were written between 1958 and 1961, precisely when the Trakl project was underway. Since countless poets came under Bly's sway, and since that first book has remained an Ur-text of Deep Image poetry, this connection is crucial.
In his introduction to Twenty Poems, Bly notes Trakl's "magnif- icent silence," how he rarely speaks, allowing the images to speak instead, although most of them are "images of silent things. " Trakl moves around in a "darkness without roads. " Bly says: "As his po- ems grow, more and more creatures live in his poems--first it was only wild ducks and rats, but then oak trees, deer, decaying wall- paper, ponds, herds of sheep, trumpets, and finally steel helmets, armies, wounded men, battlefield nurses, and the blood that had run from the wounds that day. "
In "Driving Toward the Lac Qui Parle River," Bly writes: "I am driving; it is dusk; Minnesota. / The stubble field catches the last growth of sun. " Trakl's "De Profundis" begins: "It is a stubble field, where a black rain is falling. " The "pirate ship" in Bly's "Night," a startling image, cannot help but recall the same in Trakl's "Sleep. " Bly's use of these and so many other words--"frail skiff," "golden trumpets," "gold animals," "golden wings," "black sun," "insane," not to mention the moon, moonlight, rustling, darkness, wild, silver, vari- ous trees--situates these poems unmistakably in Traklian territory. And there is silence, repeatedly invoked and overarching.
As mentioned earlier, the convergence of images of nature, human fabrication, and mechanized warfare is typical of Trakl. In a related aspect--his "poetry of witness" to the horrors of World War I--we may also perceive an impact on Bly, especially on his second book. The critic Martin Dodsworth, although his view was negative, had no doubt of Bly and Trakl's consanguinity: "Trakl is a fine poet, but he cannot be taken over on the large scale attempted in Silence in the Snowy Fields or The Light Around the Body. " But most of the poems in The Light (1967)--with the obvious exception of those directly ad- dressing the Vietnam War--were written before those in Silence, and thus before the Trakl translation. Yet it was the Vietnam poems that stood out, and Trakl's mark is surely there.
Bly proclaimed that such subject matter was appropriate, as he called for a new style in The Fifties #1: "There is an imagination which realizes the sudden new change in the life of humanity, of which the Nazi camps, the terror of modern wars, the sanctification of
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the viciousness of advertising, the turning of everyone into workers, the profundity of associations, is all a part, and the relationships unex- plained. . . . " He proclaims: "We need poets now who can carry on a sustained raid into modern life. . . . " As he preached, so he practiced.
"A note to tell you a half-sad and half-triumphant fact: Twenty Po- ems of Georg Trakl, J. Wright and R. Bly, Trans. , has just gone out of print in its first impression! The Sixties Press will shortly undertake some minor adjustments (Viel dank zum verdamnten John Simon) and put out a second printing! " So Carol Bly, Robert's wife, wrote Wright in 1965. Subsequently, they gathered corrections, new phrasings, re- translations, indications of who had (mostly) translated what, and new acknowledgments. Bly set a target date of 1967, and considered add- ing ten poems translated by Dallas Wiebe. But 1967 came and went. In 1970 Bly wrote to himself: "After reading Michael Hamburger's essay [on Trakl] . .
