Surrender to Night: Collected Poems of Georg Trakl

Description

In Georg Trakl's brief, tragic life he produced a body of work of intense visual power. Dense, imagistic and full of unnerving symbolism, his poems occupy a critical space in German Expressionism. Until his death on the Eastern Front in 1914, Trakl honed a singular poetic voice to express the horror he saw in the world around him, culminating in the starkly powerful war poems for which he is best known. This edition includes all of Trakl's major poems alongside a judicious selection of the best of his uncollected work, all rendered in vividly clear English by translator and poet Will Stone. With a biography, a critical introduction and a chronology of Trakl's life, this collection promises to reinvigorate interest in this under-appreciated poet.

Georg Trakl (1887-1914) was born in Salzburg, Austria, where he lived for most of his life. He began writing poetry at age 13 and left school to become a pharmacist, going on to study for a degree in pharmacy at the University of Vienna. After graduating he enlisted in the army and was stationed first in Vienna and then in Innsbruck. With the outbreak of World War I, Trakl was sent to attend soldiers at the Eastern Front in Galicia. After the battle of Grodek, he died of a drug overdose in a military hospital in Krakw.

* "For me the Trakl poem is an object of divine existence." - Rainer Maria Rilke * "Mystery, lyric intensity, strangeness, animism: no poet embodied these qualities more than did the early twentieth-century Austrian poet Georg Trakl." - Los Angeles Review of Books