Surrender to Night: Collected Poems of Georg Trakl by Will StoneThe Gentle Apocalypse: Truth and Meaning in the Poetry of Georg Trakl by Richard Millington

Abstract

Reviews 213 Surrender to Night: Collected Poems of Georg Trakl. Selected and translated by Will Stone. London: Pushkin Press, 2019. 304 pp. ISBN 9781782275176 The Gentle Apocalypse: Truth and Meaning in the Poetry of Georg Trakl. By Richard Millington. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2020. 259 pp. ISBN 978–1571135889. I happened to be reading Dante’s Inferno when the mail broke through the Corona lockdown with a parcel containing Richard Millington’s study on Georg Trakl, The Gentle Apocalypse. The verse that struck at that very moment seemed particularly fitting as a motto for the poetry of this tormented Austrian modernist: ‘Per me si va nella città dolente’ (Inferno iii, 1) — through me one enters the city of pain. The physical arrival of Millington’s subtle and thoughtful exploration of Trakl’s world — suitably covered in Chagallian blue with the image of his painting ‘Le soir à la fenêtre’ matching, as it were, the ‘blauen Lider’ of the quiet God in Trakl’s poem ‘Helian’ — was at the same time complemented by a digital edition of Will Stone’s excellent translations of Trakl’s poetry that found its way to me, too. The latter virtual volume included translations contained in an earlier edition — under the title Surrender to Night — that are similarly convincing. Nevertheless, they cannot quite replace for me Alexander Stillmark’s rendering of Trakl’s Poems and Prose (London, 2001), always within reach, with its striking etching drawing by Milein Cosman, which makes Trakl’s face look like that of Rimbaud’s twin brother. With his subtitle, Millington could not have reached higher: ‘Truth and Meaning in the Poetry of Georg Trakl’. The danger of over-stretching oneself with promises of this sort is acute but Millington averts the worst by offering a convincing structure for his detailed analyses of poems, representing what he calls the four phases in Trakl’s development as a poet. Running the risk of didactic tedium in his approach, but by and large avoiding it, he clarifies the biographical contexts of each phase in Trakl’s creative development before offering his carefully crafted interpretations. He then summarizes the ‘characteristics’ of each such phase in terms of Trakl’s artistic achievements and progress — but towards what exactly remains almost inevitably opaque. In his interpretations and biographical surveys Millington makes extensive andhelpfuluseoftherichsecondaryliteratureonTrakl,thiserrantExpressionist among German-language poets in literary Modernism and, according to Thomas Bernhard’s characteristically moody if not vitriolic judgement, the only Austrian poet of modernist stature, ‘weil er, wie wenige verachten konnte und verachtet wurde — am penetrantesten von den Bürgern und Eseltreibern seiner Vaterstadt Salzburg, die sich auch heute noch nicht geändert haben’. Best known, however, is the following sentence on the ‘truth’ about Bernhard’s relationship with the poetic phenomenon called Georg Trakl: ‘Der Einfluß Trakls auf meine eigene Arbeit war vernichtend. Hätte ich Trakl niemals kennengelernt, wäre ich heute weiter’ (Werke (Berlin, 2015), xx.1, 569). The truth about this truth is that the hypnotic quality of Trakl’s language Reviews 214 obliges one to take longer periods of distance so as not to succumb to the suggestiveness of his metaphors, verbal sound effects and sheer intoxicating rhetoric. If one wants to reconnect with Trakl after such a break, Millington’s meticulously researched study provides helpful tools to accomplish just that — not that one needs to agree with all of his interpretations. Considering his carefully crafted analyses of Trakl’s poetry and the poetics they reveal, this author would be the last to claim ultimate authoritativeness in matters of ‘understanding’ Trakl. Best to leave such claims to minor scholars. But given the impressive comprehensiveness of Millington’s surveys of primary and secondary material, it is surprising to find that he has evidently not taken notice of the major volume on Autorschaft und Poetik in Texten und Kontexten Georg Trakls (Salzburg, 2016) which, one has to say, pre-empted a great deal of his findings but not his distinctive take on many of Trakl’s poems. It is perfectly legitimate to argue that distinct phases can be identified in Trakl’s oeuvre, which was cruelly curtailed by his untimely death at the age of twenty-seven on...