No More Learning

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] . . . I'm dissatisfied with this book. . . . It's apparent . . . that his thought is greater than one would have understood only reading a few poetic poems. The order could be changed as well. " (Bly had met Hamburger, a poet and scholar who had also translated Trakl, in England in 1964; they worked together on the German content of The Sixties #8 [1966]. ) He added: "Also, many of the translations are wordy and sentimental. "
Whatever momentum there had been was lost. They were busy, Wright was in New York, and they saw less and less of each other. Occasionally, one of them would raise the subject. The last time, in 1979, Bly wrote: "Let's correct our mistakes on the Trakl book and issue it again! What do you say? " Such talk ended abruptly when Bly got the news of Wright's terminal cancer. His next letter closed: "Our friendship and brotherhood has meant so much to me; I felt so lonely in the literary world until I met you, and you came out to the farm, and we had the chance to brood over horse-poems and Trakl-poems together. "
Through their translations and related poems, it may seem that Bly and Wright created a "mythic stereotype" of Trakl by Americanizing him, shaping him to their own individual and shared purposes--in short, making him into a quintessential if not the prototypical Deep Image poet. Some critics of Bly's translations as a whole have decried
their lack of linguistic specificity and of concern for concrete details, as well as the imposition of his own voice, mannerisms, and tempera- ment--a kind of literary colonialism. A poem well translated by an- other poet has a tendency to grow a little, to become a new poem. To- mas Transtro? mer once told Bly that he was translating his poems into "Blyish," but added that it pleased him, and that sometimes it brought a noticeable improvement.
Of particular interest is the charge that Bly's own poems, and those of many of his associates, often had a "translated" quality. (This was also a rap against Pound. ) The supposed defect was evident in simplic- ity of language, vocabulary, and syntax, which may be called literal- ness or understatement, but also in sobriety and solemnity--in sum, a kind of Deep Image vernacular. Admittedly, heavy concentration on image entailed a lessening of concern with diction, tone, rhythm, and texture. (End rhyme and meter were long gone. ) But timing, enjamb- ment, and leaps had taken more prominent roles, as had cadence.
Obviously, this kind of poetry emphasizes inner life, solitude, and transcendence, often represented by means of common earthly substances. Trakl furnished or bolstered the use of various words and images in what some came to see as a stock lexicon of convention- al Deep Image poetry: wings, stones, silence, jewels, breath, snow, blood, water, light, darkness, bones, roots, glass, sleep, and absence, among others. These are more than formulaic (and hardly exclusive to Deep Image), but are of crucial importance, giving cohesion, whole- ness, and a basic solidity to the poems. Bly and Wright did not im- port them wholesale for use in their own physical and psychic land- scapes--many or most of these things were already there. This is what their lives were like. And although Bly was then spending as much as half of each year in New York City, he intentionally cultivated the rural sensibility of his Minnesota home. This drove a few of his critics, like LeRoi Jones [Amiri Baraka] and Gilbert Sorrentino, up the wall. Soon the scornful dismissal of Deep Image as the "stones & bones" school was in vogue among a small but vocal minority.
Trakl's presence on the poetic scene shows no sign of abating. First, books of his poems translated into English--by Christopher Middle- ton, Lucia Getsi, David Black, Francis Golffing, Robert Firmage, Rob- in Skelton, Daniel Simko, Will Stone, Alexander Stillmark, Margitt Lehbert, Stephen Tapscott, and Jim Doss and Werner Schmitt--keep
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appearing. If the passion of their partisans is any indication, translators are a competitive lot. Stanley Corngold, however, in the introduction to his recent translation of Goethe, avers that translators stand on one another's shoulders, that they and their readers are a collective, "one community in our devotion to the most truthful possible understand- ing of the works of [a] master writer. . . . " Each translation is a kind of personal rewriting of the text, but it doesn't exist in a vacuum; nor, if the translator is also a poet, does the ensuing "original" poetry. It is all part of a shared inheritance, an embarrassment of riches in the city of poetry's economy. Of course, along with the abundance of choices come not only varying levels of quality but also appeals to different tastes.
Second, while Trakl's potency was probably greatest in the hey- day of Deep Image, his methods have continued to be adopted and adapted. To consider explicitly what some poets have made of Trakl, it is apposite to begin with Wright's "Echo for the Promise of Georg Trakl's Life" (1971):
Quiet voice,
In the midst of those blazing Howitzers in blossom.
Their fire
Is a vacancy.
What do those stuttering machines Have to do
With the solitude?
Guns make no sound.
Only the quiet voice
Speaks from the body of the deer To the body of the woman.
My own body swims in a silent pool, And I make silence.
They both hear me. Hear me,
Father of my sound, My poor son.
Here is a nearly direct statement of Wright's aesthetic platform and his indebtedness. It all seems familiar: the vocabulary, the plain diction, the subtly controlled lines, images joined to images, even jarringly, with emphasis on both sound and silence, on outer and inner worlds.
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Wright's son, Franz, was born in 1953, during that fateful year in Vienna. Of all of his father's books, for him Shall We Gather at the River seems to loom the largest. Nevertheless, the Trakl transmission was also unmediated, as he studied the poems in German. "Trakl," from his first book, Tapping the White Cane of Solitude (1976), begins:
It is November 1914. I am not very old yet. Now I almost feel you
place the needle in your arm, dreaming of the lightvessel in Mary's right wrist,
the wheatfields, the blond cemeteries,
the wind that shepherds the dead leaves.
Now I am you walking among trees.
I have walked a long way from my army. I am dead.
I have already slept through the twentieth century, I've slept through my clothes, through my body, and nothing remains. . . .
The poet finds deeply personal reasons to identify with Trakl. "Your Last Poem" opens his next book, The Earth Without You (1980). He is thinking of the suicide, though in a sense Trakl is not gone. One poet speaks to the other: "When was it / you first began to pack? / The earth was already, secretly, the earth / without you. Because you left. . . . " He continues: "60 years later, it is still / dusk. . . . " The stark consideration of death, of here and not here, of the "beforelife" and the afterlife, has been a constant in the younger Wright's work as he has matured into a superior artist.
Several poets with clear links to Deep Image poetry via the Bly- Wright nexus have engaged with or invoked Trakl, including Rob- ert Hass, Charles Wright, and Gregory Orr. Many others whose place in the lineage is less direct or clear (even unowned), have also done so, such as Norman Dubie, Marcie Goldsby, Jorie Graham, Sandra McPherson, and Ron Overton. Some poets lift up sordid biographical factoids, despite much uncertainty; others make free use of Traklian special effects. It can seem as if there were an understood list: drugs-- check; incest--check; madness--check; synaesthesia--check. How- ever earnest the poem's objective, the result often feels superficial. Still, not a few poems capture Trakl's mood and tone and at the same time generate something new and vivid.
Carolyn Forche? 's "The Recording Angel" (from The Angel of His- tory [1994]) touches on almost unspeakable horrors of war. Although she employs a large palette of influences, references, and citations,
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echoes of Trakl may be heard in her use of color (e. g. , "blue road," "white ground," "white toy M-16," "black prayer"). She also incorpo- rates a couple of Trakl's lines. One, from Simko's translation of "De Profundis," she manipulates slightly, calling it (after Harold Bloom) a misprision: "at night I found myself in a pasture of refuse. " The other is from Trakl's nightmarish "Grodek": "Where an angry God, spilled blood itself, lives. " Her handling of Trakl is on political as well as aesthetic terms.
John Yau (a student of Robert Kelly, preceptor of the other, short- lived, branch of Deep Image poetry) has a sequence of twenty-two "Postcards from Trakl" (1994). This is "Postcard 21":
When will the night trust me and bring me inside its silver bakery
When will the night
drop me from its blue antlers and cavity of stiff fur
O when will the night
pour its nectar of illusions through the stars in my forehead
The form is Yau's own, with novel and arresting images that are simultaneously derived from Trakl.
Lucie Brock-Broido's poem "Am Moor" (1997), takes off homo- phonically from Trakl's "Am Moor" ("On the Moor," in English). It
begins:
Am the heavy hour
Am lean against.
Hand at urge,
At the verge of one. Am the ice comb of the tonsured
Hair, am the second
Hand, halted, the velvet opera glove. Am slant. Am fen. . . .
Striking images, again, and Brock-Broido achieves an unmistak- ably Traklian feel and ambience. Her fascination endures, with "Eight Takes of Trakl as Himself" in Stay, Illusion (2013).
A brief, irresistible digression: among Trakl's many colors, blue stands out. In one instance it apparently signifies the spiritual and, a few lines
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later, the color of the sky.
The tension between the image and the sym- bol, the phenomenon and the idea, the real and the unreal, can lead to a powerful and evocative obscurity. Is this "color displacement" a symptom of madness, or of genius? Hawkey's "Bluetrakl," a cento made up mostly of Trakl's words, ends:
Your legs rattle like blue ice A blue face quietly leaves you Drunk on blue scent
Blue flowers
Blue doves
The blue pond
And, as always, blue deer.
James Wright's "Sitting in a Small Screenhouse on a Summer Morn- ing" describes being at Bly's farm. "I could have become / A horse, a blue horse, dancing / Down a road, alone. " If, as William Gass puts it in On Being Blue, color is consciousness, is feeling, and if blue is the color of interior life, of transcendence, "leading us away in pursuit of the infinite," if "nothing stands in the way of blue's being smelled or felt, eaten as well as heard," then Trakl's way with color was more than the neurological condition of synaesthesia; it was the mark of a masterful intelligence. Indeed, James Hillman says that blue, "belong- ing to a deeper level of existence," is "the color of the imagination tout court. " It is neither surprising nor in any way unfitting that many poets have picked up on it.
In Wright's description, he and Bly were exploring what had been, for them, a dark continent. The expedition turned out to be a discovery not only of a new landscape of the imagination, but also of home and of self. This was not a matter of appropriation and control, but rather the convergence of common humanity and shared outlooks. Finally, they mapped the territory for further exploration, which has helped to keep Trakl a living presence in the English language.
But instead of Lewis and Clark, perhaps these two poets are better likened to the Toad and the Badger. Ted Hughes had written both men from England in 1961, praising their ongoing Trakl work and their unusual attention to translation. Carol Bly wrote Wright at the time: "I remember a book--a great story--I read over and over again when a child, it was The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame. Any- way, for hundreds of pages you follow the friendly, animal, somehow
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beautiful adventures of four great friends, the Rat, the Mole, the Toad, and the Badger. Then, at the end, when years had passed, and the mighty friends still met and smoked by the Rat's hole on the river, the mothers of new generations of otters, etc. would point out these fine old friends and say, Look, Junior, there goes the mighty Rat! and there is his stalwart friend, the Mole! And there is the great substantial Toad! And mind, Junior, if you cry, I'll give you to yon terrible Badger! " She then finishes: "Anyway, reading Ted Hughes' letter I suddenly thought how years and years from now, when, as in the children's book, all the good men are recognized for their truth and love, ill-kempt moth- ers with squawling babies on their red arms will suddenly cry, Hush, youngster! there go the mighty James Wright and Robert Bly, the first to translate Trakl! "
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