[In the following favorable review, Enright attempts to position Trakl within a particular school of poetry, at times comparing him to Holderlin.]

Georg Trakl, an Austrian, died in 1914, at the age of 27, of an overdose of drugs. This makes him, in the Germanic language of classification, an Expressionist. It only remains to find out what he expressed.

Trakl makes use of a quite constricted range of references and images (the word-counter would have an easy job here!), and many of his poems look like variations on each other. The range of meaning is much harder to assess, because Trakl's meaning is customarily difficult to establish. It is narrow, one would venture, but by no means superficial. The usual comparison is with Hölderlin, and the similarities are obvious enough and (I would say) not very significant. For one thing, Trakl is a miniaturist, whereas even Hölderlin's shortest poems convey a sense of spaciousness. Trakl is reminiscent of the older poet in the movement of his verse, in the dignity and solemnity of its tone, which modifies severely what otherwise would be a somewhat sensational subject-matter, and occasionally also in wording and in local statement. For instance, in the fine "Caspar Hauser Song":

Ernsthaft war sein Wohnen im Schatten des Baums
Und rein sein Antlitz

Serious was his habitation in the tree-shade And pure his face.

And 'Schön ist dér Mensch und erscheinend im Dunkel' ('Beautiful is man and evident in the darkness').

The chief difference with Hölderlin, and it far outweighs the similarities, is this: in the poetry of his sanity (which is his poetry), Hölderlin is pursuing a line of thought, he is what can legitimately be called a "philosophical poet." The thought is there, it is of prime importance, and it can be followed with no more difficulty than is to be expected in a serious-minded author who is also a poet. What holds Trakl's poems together, in as far as they do hold together, is not a continuity of thinking. Only occasionally are these poems truly self-sufficient wholes—and I will admit that those which are, such as "Caspar Hauser Song," "The Sun," "Summer," "Eastern Front," and perhaps "Grodek," seem to me the most unequivocally satisfying—but more often they are a succession of images, sometimes touching, sometimes chilling, interspersed with more or less enigmatic exclamations and arbitrary assertions ("The sun desires to shine black").

For Trakl the designation that springs to mind is "Imagist." And in his book, Reason and Energy (1957), Michael Hamburger remarks that the term "would at least have the virtue of indicating the most distinctive characteristic of Trakl's art". It must be added, though, that Trakl is radically unlike the Anglo-American poets whom we know by this title: their imagist poems are light, and the meaning (such as it is) is not hard to find; his poems, whose meaning is very hard to find, convey an impression of weightiness. The Imagists are rather self-consciously performing literary manoeuvres, whereas Trakl is doing what he is driven to do.

Trakl's work has numerous references to "decay" and "decline", corruption and putrescence both physical and spiritual, but the verse never mimes, it maintains at such moments a cold, almost clinical air, which however is warmed by other references to the point at which the total effect is oneeven of tenderness. Perhaps it was this which led Rilke to say of Trakl's work, in his sacerdotal manner, that "falling is the pretext for the most continuous ascension". Trakl was most certainly no bard of the refuse bin or the garbage cart.

His incessant use of colours is the most obvious thing about his poetry, and the most mysterious. Blue, purple, rosy, black, silver, golden, white and brown recur with a frequency which, contemplated in cold blood, is quite staggering. In a 13-line poem we encounter 'black rooms', "rosy mirror", "white forms", "purple night-wind", "black mouths" and "blue eyelids". Blue is the most favoured among these favourite colours. In "Childhood" we meet "blue cave", "blue waters" and "a blue moment", besides "holy blueness" (translated here as "azure"), and the last few lines of "Elis" give us "blue deer", "blue fruits" and "blue doves."

The difficulty, Mr. Hamburger remarks, is in deciding to what extent Trakl's images are to be treated as symbols. The colour adjectives, he concludes, are "partly pictorial, partly emotive and partly symbolic." More often than not, it appears to me, the significance of the adjective is determined by the noun to which it is attached and on which it then reflects back. Thus "black" generally seems to indicate or emphasise corruption, melancholy, age or dread, though not of course in the repeated "black horses," nor (it would seem) when the "black flight" of birds comes together with the "holiness" of "blue flowers." "Purple" is usually found in connection with richness of taste or texture, or perfume, though "purple pestilence" and the "purple curses of hunger" are clearly exceptions. The ubiquitous "blue" commonly seems to connote youthfulness, life, spirituality, freshness (blue waters, blue springs, the blue butterfly emerging from its chrysalis), but here and there it is linked with decay. If consistency is a requirement, then clearly Trakl's colours cannot properly be called symbolic. They are pictorial, rather, and then inevitably, according to their contexts, emotive in a greater or lesser degree.

Despite the references to corruption and decay (yet contained coolly and cleanly within the sealed poem like specimens in a jar of formalin) and despite such explicit declarations as "Overwhelming is the generation's decline," to talk about "a vision of spiritual crisis in Europe" is not much more useful than ascribing these poems to hallucinatory states produced by alcohol and drugs. The images are of such an extreme clarity and sharpness, the pointblank conjunction of a few primary colours and a few simple objects, as to create a paradoxical effect of pellucid mysteriousness, as in some Surrealist paintings. Like such paintings, which seem on the point of telling a story, Trakl's poems repulse the interpretation they also appear to invite. Perhaps Wittgenstein said as much as can safely be said of this poetry: "I don't understand it; but its tone delights me. It is the tone of true genius."

Thirteen of these translations were included in the valuable anthology, Modern German Poetry (1962), edited by Michael Hamburger and Christopher Middleton. The versions here show a number of small changes, among them a few distinct improvements, tending to suggest that the more literal rendering is often the better one. They certainly bring Mr Hamburger's earlier assertion that Trakl's poems are "not translatable" into grave doubt.

It is unwise to offer to assess the stature of a poet of whom your understanding is uncertain. But set beside Hölderlin, Trakl has the look of a minor rather than a major poet. He could well be overestimated today, when enigmaticness is considered a sign of superiority and the fully "made" poem is looked down on. But he is a true poet and a unique voice, and it is good to have this selection of him.