A comprehensive English-language edition of verse by the Austrian poet
An undeniable aura surrounds the name of Georg Trakl, a poet of intense inner vision and originality whose work stands alongside that of Yeats, Valery, and T. S. Eliot. Besides Rilke, his more famous admirers include Karl Kraus and Martin Heidegger. The distinctive tone of Trakl's work-especially admired by his patron Ludwig Wittgenstein-is autumnal and melancholy. Trakl was writing at a time of spiritual and social disintegration on the eve of the First World War, when personal values and perceptions tended to be subsumed in a more generalized anguish and exaltation. Neo-romantic, early modernist, his rich, vitally sensuous poetry can be seen to mark the transition from impressionism to expressionism, but at the same time transcends such categories. Trakl's poetry has previously only been available in English in short selections or in anthologies. This bilingual edition, the most comprehensive to date, gives readers the chance to get to know Trakl's work more fully than ever before.

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-Schuler, 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began with Trakl's first book Poems and his posthumously published Sebastian Dreaming also includes translations of unpublished poems and significant variants.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.

The second book in Seagull's ambitious series of Georg Trakl's works, Sebastian Dreaming was the second, and final, collection prepared for publication by Trakl himself. Published after his death, it was perhaps even tied to it: forced into a military hospital by the psychological trauma of his World War I experiences, the Austrian poet requested that his publisher send him proofs of the book. He waited a week, and then overdosed on cocaine. A century later, the book appears for the first time in English. While a number of its poems have been included in other collections, translator James Reidel argues that this particular book deserves to stand on its own and be read as one piece, as Trakl intended. Only by doing this can we begin to see Trakl in his proper time and place, as an early modern poet whose words nonetheless continue to exert a powerful hold on us while we make our way through a new, uncharted century.

An aura of mystery surrounds the life and poetry of the Austrian poet Georg Trakl. Although he was born over a century ago, his starkly original poems provide a window into the psyche of the early twentieth century with its anguish, melancholy, and occasional exaltation. From a life inflicted with drug addiction and mental torment, Trakl paints a vivid, musical portrait of his autumn soul. This bilingual edition includes all of Trakl's mature published work, as well as his youthful poems and prose, drama fragments and selected letters, and is the most comprehensive collection of his work in English to date.

Although the Austrian poet Georg Trakl was born over a century ago, the mesmerising imagery and haunting visions of his highly sensitive and morbidly intro-spective poems are as powerful today as they were when he wrote them. A source of inspiration for artists, musicians and writers throughout the Expressionist period and beyond, Trakl's poetry - bleak, yet revealing tenderness and hope, nightmarish yet eerily beautiful - can be savoured to the full in Will Stone's new translation of a representative selection of Trakl's finest work (complete with introductory essays and commentary), a volume which promises to rekindle interest in the work of this seminal poet.