Surrender to Night

A new translation by acclaimed poet Will Stone of the visionary Austrian poet Georg Trakl

Georg Trakl is recognised as one of the most important European poets of the twentieth century. His visionary poetry has influenced not only later poets but also composers, artists and filmmakers. The full measure of Trakl's genius can be appreciated in this extensive Collected Poems, intuitively translated by poet Will Stone, which features the key collections including the posthumously published Sebastian in Dream, 1915. Supplementary to these are the poems originally published in the literary journal Der Brenner as well as a discerning selection of Trakl's uncollected work.

Trakl's trademark tonal qualities, his melancholy stamp, the often apocalyptic but eerily beautiful language gradually infect the reader. His poems are awash with images, symbolic colours and signs; mysterious dream-like figures appear and vanish, and an alternative world is born out of the unconscious. The most sensitive observer of Trakl's poetry was his contemporary, Rainer Maria Rilke, who concluded: 'For me, the Trakl poem is an object of sublime existence. . .'

Georg Trakl (1887-1914) was born in Salzburg, Austria, and spent his youth there. He began writing poetry at age 13 and later became apprentice to a pharmacist in Salzburg, then went on to take a degree in pharmacy at the University of Vienna. Following his father's death in 1910 Trakl enlisted in the army, eventually working in the military hospital in Innsbruck. With the outbreak of World War I, Trakl volunteered as a medical orderly and attended soldiers at the Eastern Front in Galicia. After the battle of Grodek, he suffered a mental collapse and was confined to a military hospital in Kraków where he died of a cocaine overdose.