Stephen Watts reviews Will Stone's translation of Georg Trakl

Stephen Watts reviews To the Silenced, a bilingual selection of poems by Georg Trakl in the translations of Will Stone, issued by Arc Publications of Todmorden at £10.95. He begins by placing Trakl among the major poets of the early twentieth century, a writer who worked within a narrow range and who died on the Eastern Front in 1914, aged twenty-seven. Watts argues that the limited stock of repeated images, colours and word clusters is a source of strength, giving the poems a density that spreads well beyond the literal sense of the words. He sets Trakl beside Georg Heym as an Expressionist who still stands apart from the movement.

A good part of the review is a short history of Trakl in English. Watts recalls Michael Hamburger's chapbook of 1952, the pocket-sized Cape Editions volume of 1968 containing work from four translators (Hamburger, Middleton, Luke and Grenier), a Carcanet reissue in 1984, several North American volumes, and a Libris edition of Alexander Stillmark's work in 2001. Stone's book is placed as the latest stage of an interrupted tradition. Watts values its poet-translator approach, in which Stone offers Trakl as he understands him, and notes how Stone's introduction handles colour, and how an afterword on Salzburg, with the translator's own photographs, fills in the setting of the poet's life.

Watts is candid about his own loyalties: he still finds some of Hamburger's versions hard to better and thinks Christopher Middleton's Helian outstanding. Even so he judges Stone's new versions much needed and mostly successful at balancing ease with the strangeness that belongs to this poetry. He then follows Helian through its five sections and on to the late poems Klage I and II and Grodek, whose seventeen lines he compares to a musical offering. He declines to read the poet in psychoanalytic or clinical terms, preferring to see the work as shaped by the terrors of its time.

Work

To the Silenced: Selected Poems

Author

Georg Trakl

Publisher

Arc Publications (Todmorden, UK)

spring-coiled visionary energy gathered in the least number of words needed to contain it

Will Stone, as quoted by Stephen Watts, The Wolf, issue 12

Important poetry deserves to be translated again and again.

Stephen Watts, The Wolf, issue 12