Books in the SB-The German List series

This work is a gripping and profoundly personal encounter with the great expressionist poet Georg Trakl. It is a taking stock of two troubled lives, a turbulent century, and the liberating power of poetry. Picking up where his last book, 'The Jew Car', left off, Fèuhmann probes his own susceptibility to ideology's seductions - Nazism, then socialism - and examines their antidote, the goad of Trakl's enigmatic verses.

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Sebastian Dreaming comprises the second book in James Reidel's Our Trakl series. Published posthumously in the original German in 1915, this is the second and last collection prepared by Trakl himself. Indeed, the Austrian poet may have tied his own fate to it. During his last days in a military hospital, Trakl had politely requested proofs of Sebastian Dreaming from his publisher and waited a week before overdosing on cocaine. He had been told once before that the war, which drove him into madness, had indefinitely postponed his masterpiece. Now the wait is over for Trakl's book to appear separately and in English. Until now translations of the poems from this collection have appeared in selections and complete volumes. Reidel has chosen to present the book individually, as Trakl wanted his book experienced. To achieve this, a certain verisimilitude in these English renderings has been achieved--even omitting the German facing texts is at work here--for which the translator has gone to great lengths, with an eye for seeing Trakl in his time and place, not only as an early modern poet but one whose strange and intriguing language and setting came from another century and still haunt us in ours.

Originally published under title: Ein Tag im Jahr im neuen Jahrhundert 2001-2011. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013.

The work of poet Georg Trakl, a leading Austrian-German expressionist, has been praised by many, including his contemporaries Rainer Maria Rilke and Else Lasker-Schüler, as well as his patron Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein famously wrote that while he did not truly understand Trakl's poems, they had the tone of a "truly ingenious person," which pleased him. A Skeleton Plays Violin comprises the final volume in a trilogy of works by Trakl published by Seagull Books. This selection gathers Trakl's early, middle, and late work, none of it published in book form during his lifetime. The work here ranges widely, from his haunting prose pieces to his darkly beautiful poems documenting the first bloody weeks of World War I on the Eastern Front. Book Three of Our Trakl--the series that began with Trakl's first book Poems and his posthumously published Sebastian Dreaming--also includes translations of unpublished poems and significant variants. Interpolated throughout this comprehensive and chronological selection is a biographical essay that provides more information about Trakl's gifted and troubled life, especially as it relates to his poetry, as well as the necessary context of his relationship with his favorite sibling, his sister Grete, whose role as a muse to her brother is still highly controversial. Trakl's life was mysterious and fascinating, a fact reflected in his work. A Skeleton Plays Violin should not be missed.