Egon Schiele
“You golden sunflowers,
Feelingly bowed to die,
You dark mouth inside me,
You are strong, shape
Composed of autumn cloud,
And golden evening stillness;
In the shadows thrown
By the broken pine trees
A mountain stream turns dark in the green light;
A little town
That piously dies away into brown pictures.
Now the black horses rear
In the foggy pasture.
I think of soldiers!
Down the hill, where the dying sun lumbers,
The laughing blood plunges,
Speechless
Under the oak trees! Oh the hopeless depression
Of an army; a blazing steel helmet
Fell with a clatter from purpled foreheads.
The autumn night comes down so coolly.
With her white habit glittering like the stars
Over the broken human bodies
The convent nurse is silent.
Reproduced from Twenty Poems of Georg Trakl, translated and chosen by James Wright and Robert Bly http://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/Trakl.pdf
Die ungebornen Enkel.
is translated as:
The grandchildren — unborn. (148)
Here, the words match up quite neatly, but it’s Hawkey's differences — from/of/with the Austrian poet — that drive this book. And it's those same differences that put Ventrakl in conversation with all of Trakl's former English translators, who make an interesting bunch. That lineup includes (among others): Michael Hamburger, the great Celan translator immortalized in Sebald's Rings of Saturn; James Wright and Robert Bly, the dynamic duo of the Midwestern deep image; Robert Grenier, the father/uncle of the Language School poets beloved for his minimalist epic A Day at the Beach — all of whom appear in the 1983 volume Georg Trakl: A Profile, edited by Frank Graziano.[1A Profile begins with a question by Rainer Maria Rilke, writing on Georg Trakl: "What could he have been?" (Trakl, 7) — which is apt. What kind of figure could attract and marry the avant-garde tendencies of Grenier with the rural/lyric placidity of James Wright? Hawkey attempts to answer this question by marrying those two aesthetics himself. Poems like “Grodek” are paired with more bizarre translations, such as “Rosencrantz: A Western” or “You Bend My Megahertz,” whose titles alone address the range of permissible interpretation.
The nonstandard translation has its own traditions as Hawkey, in his introduction, points to the work of Jack Spicer, Louis Zukofsky, Anne Carson, and David Cameron, whose Flowers of Badstands out as a particularly dedicated "bad translation" (Cameron's own phrase).[2] Cameron, for example, takes Baudelaire's poems and puts them through chance operations to create works that are the spawn of the great French poet, if translucently so. Hawkey puts Trakl through similar filters, though his methods don't reveal themselves immediately. The resulting language is more Hawkey’s than anyone else's.
In Ventrakl, he echoes Rilke's question:
The question of what?
Of who is speaking.
Who is writing then?
Who is.
Who is. (37)
Who is writing is the translator.
Venice, 1913
1. It is difficult to think in the presence of an orphan.
2. It is difficult to think in the presence of the word "orphan."
3. It is like trying to think in the middle of an earthquake, trying to think about something other than what is happening, especially when what is happening is the repeated disturbance of the very ground of thought.
4. Some orphans become orphans, while others, despite being born, are born orphans, and still others are both born orphans and become orphans.
5. These orphaned orphans are the orphans with stillness-mittens (the ground is shaking). (96)
I am looking at his face. I am looking at his eyes. I am looking at someone I do not know, never could have known, since he died long before I was born. I look at his eyes, which seem small to me, too small, like the eyes of an animal, and then I wonder how or why eye-size ever came to represent levels of humanness, or compassion (the unusually large eyes of elephants and horses and whales are said 'to have soul,' whereas small eyes, 'beady eyes,' are often considered non-human or even non-mammalian – reptilian, cold). I'm trying to look at his eyes, and I am trying to write about looking at his eyes. I am doing two things, it seems, at once. Or three things. Since this is an image of a writer, I am seeing him – seeing in him – what I've read of and about him. I am seeing his image as a word, I am seeing words in his image (his words, the words of others). And then, fourthly, I am measuring what I know of these words against his face. In this sense I am reading him endlessly, and each time I am reading what I see, one of many, possible sights.
Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Hoch, 1st International Dada Convention (Berlin, 1920)
On the 1st of February 1971, Austrian artist and writer, Raoul Hausmann, died in Limoges, France. He was one of the founders of Berlin Dada. Together with Richard Huelsenbeck, George Grosz, John Heartfield, Fritz Jung, Hannah Höch, Walter Mehring and Johannes Baader, he established the famous Club Dada, where all kinds of evening events, poetry performances, and lectures took place. The first staged event, on the 12th of April 1918, with Huelsenbeck’s reading of the Dada manifesto – “Dadaism in Life and in Art,” followed by the Cubist dance performed by George Grosz, ended with Hausmann’s lecture – “The New Materials in Painting”, which investigated man’s “sexopsychic capacity” in art and explored the art of real objects. The lecture, as well as all the other performances of the night, caused a great stir among the public; this is how Hausmann described the atmosphere during the event: “My text, “The New Materials in Painting,” created such a commotion that the management, who was worried about its paintings displayed on the walls, switched of the lights in the middle of my speech, condemning me to darkness and silence.” (Raoul Hausmann, Am Anfang War Dada, 1972).
Wherever we turn in the storm of roses,
the night is lit up by thorns, and the thunder
of leaves, once so quiet within the bushes,
rumbling at our heels.
Source: In the Storm of Roses (translator unknown) by Ingeborg Bachmann.
PARIS
Santa Fe Trail I go separately The sweet knees of oxen have pressed a path for me ghosts with ingots have burned their bare hands it is th...
