Due to a passing in the family a few years ago and my subsequent health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for years after the bereavement. Thank you for the opportunity.

I received a copy of this book from Net Galley in exchange for my honest review.

Georg Trakl is an Austrian poet, his work has been translated to English a number of times.
This translation had some particularly wonderful poems, however, I did feel as though some of the poems seemed a little more disjointed than what I know of Trakl's poetry.

Reading this collection of poetry reminded me of the whimsy in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Nights Dream with the atmosphere of a dark ominous thriller.

Overall, I enjoyed the atmospheric tone to this collection and the connection to nature that seemed to inspire Trakl.

I felt that the poems felt a bit samey after a while and this collection could have been a lot smaller. There were a few of the poems that felt like they were filler and did not seem as good as the others in the collection.

"Surrender to Night" is a fantastic collection of poetry. I was unfamiliar with the work before reading this, but I'll be looking for more.

Austrian poet Georg Trakl was trained as a pharmacist in Vienna where his friends helped him get his first poetry published. His service as a medical officer on the Eastern Front during WWI led to depression and attempted suicide. Trakl did succeed in ending his life with a cocaine overdose in November of 1914. Will Stone provides the translation. Stone holds a degree in Literary Translation from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, and has produced prose and poetry translations of the works of several writers.

Trakl is an impressionist poet and captures the world in symbolism, shades expressed in words, and disconnection. Much like an impressionist painter captures the world in light and colors while blurring the boundaries reality, Trakl accomplishes the same with words:

Black skies of metal
Crossing in the red storms at evening Hunger crazed crows drift
Over the parks mournful and pale.

He carries several themes through his work, most notably, Fall, Winter, and silence.  In many poems, there is a youthful feeling balancing with the lateness of the year.  Although he only served in the opening months of the First World War, there is a noticeable darkness in many of his works from this period.  The horrors of the war are clearly evident.  The earlier works are meant to be read and examined in much the same way one would experience a painting by Monet.  A remarkable poetic experience.  This is also a collection of poetry where one cannot overlook the translator. Stone's work is seamless and unnoticeable in the reading. He is able to preserve the poet's original intent. Masterfully done.

Had only previously heard of Trakl in passing, so I was grateful for the short biography at the beginning of the book which gave me a vague idea of what to expect from his work. There's no doubt that the poet was extremely talented, there were particular verses throughout which were just genuinely stunning in the imagery they invoked.

While it was obvious that his writing was of a deeply personal nature and the poems within the collection give a clear insight to the Trakl's deeply troubled state of mind, it did make for a frustrating read. I did find the poems, while beautifully written, very small in scope and repetitive in nature.

A collection to be dipped into every now and then rather than devoured.

With kind thanks to Netgalley and Pushkin Press for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Poetry is an old genre for people to express their sorrow, pain, feelings of joy. This ancient style can be traced back to thousands of years before the Christ. Image is one of the most important elements in ancient Chinese poetry. Poets used symbolic images to represent and channel their emotions. For example, bamboos that have been growing in a straight up fashion mirror the integrity poets have and praise for; plum flowers project a certain kind of beauty that is not afraid of winter, in particular, these kinds of beauty bloom while all the other flowers wither.

Most of these "images" are still in use in most of Chinese/East Asian literatures. One thing is with the sorrow and grieving for autumn. Three or four thousand years ago, poets in ancient China grieved for autumn. Song Yu has been considered as one of the first poets in the world who grieved for autumn in poetry.

The reason why I mentioned these two aspects -- image and grieving for autumn -- are that, in this book collection of poems from Georg Trakl, images and grieving for autumn have been heavily repeated.

On one hand, I appreciate the poet's ability to channel his depressive feelings into those images with various colours that associated with depression in the modern psychological domain. For instance, blue moon, blue pond, black brook, crimson infant, crimson death, black countenance of the door frame, etc. As a reader, I do feel the pain and sorrow the poet felt at that moment when he stared into the crimson brook next to his village.

On the other hand, it raises the question to whether the quality of the translation is ok when these images have emerged in nearly every single poem, in every single page. One major feeling is, after reading this collection, I cannot look at words such as "crimson", "countenance" "blue" "black" etc. There is no German source text to compare with. If there is a high frequency of repetition in the original text, I would question the value of the poems or have a different perspective. Otherwise, I wonder, is anyone bothered by the repetition of words in each poem each page? Since I do assume the translator is competent.

Last but not least, the repetition reduces the quality of reading and appreciating the poems in a large scale. It makes the titles also repetitive. There are some other collections from other depressive poets, but their topics and images in poems vary. This is a big disappointment for me in this book. Because the biography in the intro part really got me interested in Georg Trakl... But after all, I found he is a depressive poets with very limited of imagination and choice of words.

I'm on a hiding to nothing here, for no grade I can give this book is a suitable one. The work in translating and presenting all this is a sterling one, so should be given due credit, and any academics approaching this should not be put off by my layman comments. But it is quite awful. The shtick of the depressive junkie producing all this poetry was to have blunt, dark and depressing non sequitur after blunt, dark and depressing non sequitur. Page 116 here alone has at least two dozen negative words on, from 'smoke' to 'leprosy' to a 'grey and mouldered family vault' where a 'skeleton ascends'. And that's just four verses. Even when he's being almost optimistic it seems his verse is still set in the evening. Elsewhere he gives us such jolly non-images as "In his grave the white magician plays with his snakes." He really does manage to make EA Poe read like Edward Lear. And he most certainly has a thing about mignonettes, whatever they are. It's only in the works that were unpublished or unfinished in his lifetime that you find fully summery pieces, although others in that same section might as well be in code, and to the very end his sunflowers are "deeply inclined towards death". I suppose I must also admire Trakl for managing to thrust out such an oeuvre despite his moods and his hardcore drug-taking in such a short time, but to have a sustained and morbid output like this is surely not to be recommended. This is the very epitome of 'try before you buy'.

Powerful and full of symbolisms, Trakl's poetry delves into the themes of nostalgia, childhood memories, the horrors of war. An under-appreciated poet that definitely deserves the reader's interest.