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Song of the Departed: Selected Poems of Georg Trakl

Song of the Departed: Selected Poems of Georg Trakl

Song of the Departed: Selected Poems of Georg Trakl

By Georg Trakl
Translated by Robert Firmage

“Trakl’s work is disturbing and visionary, melancholy and surreal… Delving deeply into the unconscious, Trakl’s poems are voyages of poetic discovery.”—Chris Faatz, Powell’s Books

In Song of the Departed, George Trakl confronts the conflicts of pursuing truth in a difficult and declining world at the edge of war. Robert Firmage brilliantly translates Trakl’s work in this bilingual collection of writings about the unspeakable that lies beyond language, creating poetry that is intensely personal, haunting, dark, and eerily beautiful.  Although Trakl is best known for his drug use, madness, and self-inflicted death, as Firmage’s commentary and translations illustrate, Trakl was more than a poete maudit: he was instead one of the most significant poets of the German language, supported during his lifetime by Ludvig Wittgenstein and later an influence on Ranier Maria Rilke, Paul Celan, James Wright, and poets across generations and languages. And yet, translations of is work remain underrepresented in English. Out of print for two decades, this revised edition includes over a dozen newly translated poems along with fresh commentary from their translator.

Paperback
184 pages
Copper Canyon Classics, 2012
5.4 x 0.8 x 7.4 inches
ISBN 9781556593734 

Poetry

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