Georg Trakl

[xylokopos]

I have now read all of Trakl's poems - quite a few of them multiple times - and I feel strangely defeated...they remain vague to me, and mostly impenetrable. Perhaps because they borrow images and motifs from a European world that is gone, the same way the foehn wind crashes against the buildings of our overheated cities and sees its powers usurped. Perhaps it is my failure to visualize the autumn I haven't felt or seen in years. Perhaps I am just not receptive to his particular nightmarish subtleties.

Trakl packs at least 3 distinct images in most of his 4-line verses - one of them usually serving us a brutal denouement - and he does startle me with certain unexpected and nasty turns. But for the rest, the images of the moon, the constant recurrence of the sister, the clearing and the hunter and the deer and the water, leave me at a loss.

I am drawn - though I still don't claim to understand - the poems lamenting something, the defeat and the wrongness their tone invokes, and the ones where there is a terrible yearning for his own destruction.

But aside from his last few poems that were obviously inspired by and refer to his experience in the Galician front in WWI, it is hard to see what - if anything - can be hiding behind the combinations of words.

Though, I suppose, knowing certain salient facts about his life, helps.

Maybe I got more out of these poems than I thought.