Georg Trakl Books

There were a few poems that didn't seem to fully blossom but the vast majority are exciting, some shockingly good. Some of the absolute best poetry I've read in years.

Georg Trakl is the greatest German poet most english readers have never heard of. Most of his best poetry dates from the period just before and during his service in the Austrian Army during the First World War and this makes him a brief contemporary of Rilke. However, while Rilke's verses are each a world of incandescent beauty and spiritual profundity, Trakl's are intimations of death, decay and expressions of a world trapped in a cycle of hell. His poems are intensely expressionistic, dark and powerful. Simko's translation is excellent; though he makes a few word choices from the German that might be open to debate, he does an excellent job of preserving the poems' structure while transmitting their power in English. My only quibble is that I would have liked it if the selection of poems was broader.

Fans of German Expressionism owe a debt of gratitude to Simko for this book. Trying to find a book from this era can be extremely difficult. Other famous authors of the period (Gottfried Benn, Georg Heym) are almost impossible to find.

The book presents both the original German text, and a very good English translation. Trakl's poetry is bittersweet, the meter almost hynoptic. The reader confronts a collage of colors and emotions in a Trakl poem.

Trakl died young, a victim of WWI. No bullet killed him, but rather he killed himself while working at a military hospital. Although his poems reveal his grief, and his despair, the reader finds himself somehow empowered by them. Out of his suffering came some of the most beautiful poems in the German language.

Trakl strolls through the dream of a child decaying under blood-red leaves. Silver waters shimmer and recieve the sky's terrible unction. In the elderbush, a wolf devours an Angel, or an Angel expires like the sigh of a golden flame falling into a mythic well whose pit is the open mouth of the man gasping as his murderer confronts him. In the knife is reflected the compassionate face of your melancholy sister, or is it a vengeful God's purple laughter? Your face goes cold as the child speaks your name.

This is a very fine book of translations. To read Georg Trakl in German, of course, is far better. His German is extroadinarily beautiful. Trakl was a magnificent poet; I would say one of my absolutely favorite poets. His techniques are marvelous. He comes from, and surpasses, the lineage of such master technicians as Edgar Allen Poe, and Charles Baudelaire. He wrote poetry as if he were composing music, modulating colors and emotional content rather than tones and harmonies. One has the sense that he was divinely inspired. His work is miraculous.

Whether experiencing the turbulent Vietnam era through adolescent Ceci's hypersensitive and imaginative perspective, reliving the events of "Genesis" in Eve's point of view or exploring and questioning ancient religious beliefs and practice, "The Sweetheart Is In" is at some points clear and entertaining but also has the ability to be heartbreaking and profound. This collection of stories is varied and innovative.

In the first half of the collection, the reader follows the life of Ceci Rueben, a curious, bright, asthmatic girl raised in a "modern" Jewish household. She dreams of attending college and being courted by boys as world events unfold around her. S.L. Wisenberg effectively weaves the significant cultural and political events into the story and draws out Ceci's reaction to them.

The stories are not limited to Ceci's perspective as the reader jumps back and forth in time to view significant moments of Ceci's friends and family. For example, the first story, "Big Ruthie imagines Sex Without Pain", is a depressing account of Ceci's mother and her sexual issues. Issues that she is uncomfortable relaying to her own husband.

The second half of the collection makes a clear break from the experiences of Ceci and those among her and instead discusses with some of religion's oldest stories with a fresh perspective. In the first story of the Part II, "In the Beginning", the reader is told the story of "Genesis" from Eve's point of view, lending humor and new insight to the familiar story.

Throughout all of the stories, the prose is clear, easy to follow and often times lyrical and entertaining.

S.L. Wisenberg's collection of short stories, The Sweetheart Is In, is divided into two parts. Part one consists of a look into familial and human relationships while part two continues on with more emphasis placed on God and religion. The stories vary in length from two, to thirteen pages. Each one could stand alone but together they strengthen and reinforce one another.
In part one, Wisenberg gracefully moves from one short story to the next using first, second and third person points of view to provide an almost three dimensional view of one family's relationships, peppered with Jewish life, humor and wit. At times it is even poetic. The family is in essence a vehicle for Wisenberg to cover a broad range of topics including; the death of a parent; the search for and the loss of romantic love; suppresed female sexuality; the search for one's self on many levels; the balancing of dreams for the future with one's station in life and the opposing views of a lover. Of particular note are two short stories in the first part. One, titled Love, is a fresh look at unrequainted love while the other, titled The Last Day of the World, is a look into the desire to end consequences rather than life itself.
The second part of the collection, while still strong in it's parllels of modern relationships with Biblical scenes and figures, is shorter than and pales in comparison to the first part. Which is not to say it is without it's merits. The first short story, in the second part, is a brilliant view of the defiance of patriarchy and the illusion of happiness as paralleled in a metaphor of the Garden of Eden.
In one line (page 77) Wisenberg writes, "the role of the artist...is to find the universality of mankind." As a whole, The Sweetheart Is In, swims in skillfully crafted topics universal to all, thus confirming Wisenberg's role as an artist.
As a writer I am not only inspired but jealous that I didn't write this collection.

S.L. Wisenberg, in her collection of stories, which come together to show how a young girl's life is shaped by her religion/culture and by her parent's upbringing, gives fiction a new twist. Although Wisenberg's stories are fiction, the way in which she presents them is so raw and honest that the stories appear to be true. This is especially the case in the beginning of the book in which Wisenberg's character Ruthie, "imagines sex without pain." In The Sweetheart Is In, Wisenberg tells of an upper class Jewish family that lives in the suburb of Houston. While the stories introduce all of the members of the family and other characters related to them, they focus primarily on Ceci, the younger of the two daughters in the Jewish family. More specifically, the stories attempt to show Ceci's journey through life, as she learns more about the world and her religion, and uses these tools to become whom she is. The stories begin in her childhood when she has just begun to explore who she is, both mentally and physically and end years later when she is grown up and has come to understand more about who she is and how she has grown to be this person. In her childhood, she encounters incidents with boys, events that mark her womanhood, and talent shows, which allow her to make some decisions about what life is like. For the most part, she's unhappy and feels as though life is unfair. While she tries to make positive changes in her life, becoming a news reporter after she's been an ESL instructor, she finds herself entangled through a series of unhappy and unsatisfying relationships. At all times Ceci recalls her childhood and what it was like growing up with a mother that she adored and a father who had been to WWII and who she disliked. In many ways, her past reflects her future and she tries to avoid making the same mistakes her parents made. On the surface, Wisenberg's stories are just stories about Ceci and her encounters in life, but on a deeper level, her stories show how a woman searches for her place in the world, in relation to her religion or her Jewishness. There are moments in the book at which it becomes difficult to understand who is speaking, but it is fair to say that when religion is doubted or questioned it is Ceci who is doing the speaking. Although Ceci doesn't speak Hebrew, she attempts always to preserve the Jewish ways whether that is at her parent's funerals or by simply following Jewish traditions. Throughout her stages in life, Ceci attempts to connect with her religion, possibly in search of her identity. While the stories can be pessimistic at times they exemplify the hardships of growing up and creating an identity.

These stories are beautifully written, serious literature and wise but at the same time, witty. My favorite is "In the Beginning," because it's so sly and irreverent.

Georg Trakl, Poems and Prose (Libris, 2001)

Why is it that Georg Trakl has faded into obscurity? You'd think, given his background, he'd be considered quite the now author, despite his not having made it to the end of World War I; a brief bio that contains both incest and suicide seems as if it would certainly appeal to today's fanatical tell-all memoir crowd. Those folks who are so happy reading Running with Scissors and the spate of "boy, did I love alcohol growing up (but I'm smarter than that these days!)" books currently on the market should be getting quite the kick out of resurrecting the boy's corpse. And yet, despite the fact that this book's been out for four years, I was the first one to take it out of the library; you know how, every once in a while when you buy a hot-of-the-presses book, the pages aren't fully separated because the printing press was cutting pages too fast? Yeah. I was separating pages for most of the second half of the book.

A shame, this, because Trakl was a contemporary of the earliest surrealists, but while they've gone on to be astoundingly influential, Trakl's particular brand of seemingly-naive fantasy, constantly shadowed with death and his guilt over/obsession with his relationship with his sister, has influenced far too few. One could probably make a case for him having been in influence on the early imagists, but they never managed to infuse their work with as much emotion (let alone obsession) as can be found in Trakl. This is great stuff, well worth reading. Those who find this a bit on the large side for a single-author collection (it should be noted that it's a bilingual edition, except for the last eight pages of prose) could certainly start with, say, Autumn Sonata, but you'll eventually get round to reading this once you've figured out how good his work is. Start now, will you? ****