Tracking Trakl

Emulation has been called the daughter of admiration. It is a generous disposition because it reveals a high esteem for the work or author it seeks to inhabit, and embody. "Emulation," observed Samuel Johnson, "includes in it a laudable curiosity, as one of the characteristics of a vigorous intellect and a keen appetite for knowledge, which should always be encouraged, especially in youth. A mind that is emulous has a vigilance which permits nothing to pass without notice, and a habit of reflection that suffers nothing to be lost."

The subject of Christian Hawkey's immersion is the German expressionist poet Georg Trakl. Trakl, whose life demonstrated a prodigious appetite for strong stimulants and fulfillment without restriction, and was in all respects a fascinating and mysterious being. He has been described by at least one author as a difficult subject for biography, the antithesis of a man of letters, existing solely in his poetry where a strange blend of sensuality, rapture, and despair simmer and bubble in an unlikely and uncanny compound of decayed sunflowers, fairy tales, and evil dreams. Trakl's very name is synonymous with the phrase "Poète Maudit." The drugs that he used to "keep himself in life," as he put it, included opium, morphine, Veronal, and cocaine. He would often speak of spiritual degeneracy and his poetry gapes with abyssal stupefaction, cold and evil, white birds and black rain, moments of resplendent stillness, cold metal walking on his forehead while drinking the silence of God.

For a poet who burns this brightly and yearns for a fulfillment that transcends life on our sad planet of war and mud and blood and the whine of shrapnel, the First World War was especially cruel. After becoming (appropriately) a chemist, but unable to keep a job, Trakl volunteered in the Austrian army and was made a medic, caring for ninety men with scant medical supplies on the eastern front in the Austrian campaign. He was witness not only to men in incurable pain, but those who, no longer able to endure their suffering, hung themselves from trees. Trakl cracked. He was diagnosed with dementia praecox and hospitalized. He died, at age twenty-seven, from a cocaine overdose while under psychiatric observation in a military hospital in Kraków, Poland.

Ventrakl, as stated on the back of the book, is best described as a collaboration. Hawkey employs a number of strategies to rev the engine of Trakl's poetry, including translation, photographs, poetry, and prose poetry. Its primary method of composition is compared to Jack Spicer's experimental procedures in the production of After Lorca (1957). Spicer, who seemed completely at home communicating with spirits in the afterlife, observed wisely, and enigmatically, and echoing Ludwig Wittgenstein not a little, that when all was said and done, "it," the writing, the letters to Federico García Lorca, the poetry, the collaboration, "was a game." "It was a game made out of summer and freedom and a need for a poetry that would be more than the expression of my hatreds and desires. It was a game like Yeat's spooks or Blake's sexless seraphim." "Yet it was there," Spicer continues. "The poems are there, the memory not of a vision but a kind of casual friendship with an undramatic ghost who occasionally looked through my eyes and whispered to me, not really more important then than my other friends, but now achieving a different level of reality by being missing."

I would not, however, characterize Trakl as an "undramatic ghost," and I seriously doubt Hawkey would either. Trakl is a very dramatic ghost, a phantom burning a hole through the other dimension and smoldering on the page in a surge of scintillating ink. His agitations and spiritual convulsions still seem very much alive. Palpable. Breathing. Corporeal. And this attests to the high level of invention and commitment that Hawkey has brought to this enterprise.

Hawkey, who did not speak or read any German at the outset of his project, seems to have found that more of an asset than a...