[In the following excerpt, Foster compares Simko's translation with that of Firmage, noting the task is to "find the poem before it is set in language. "]

Rilke thought Trakl's books important in liberating "the poetic image." Scholars and critics have expended great effort showing that what he really liberated were his sex ual repressions and his religious obsessions. Was Trakl involved with his sister? Was he a suicide? Was he, in spite of all those ugly rumors, really a Christian?

Does it matter?

Trakl's life was horrible if all the speculations about his psychological torments are indeed true, yet they add nothing to the poems, which simply will not be reduced to explanation.

Jack Spicer learned from Rilke. Did he also learn from Trakl?

These lines conclude Spicer's "Language," but they have an affinity with Trakl. Here is the conclusion of "Nachtlied" in Daniel Simko's translation:

And you, still mirrors of truth—
Reflections of fallen angels appear
On the ivory temples of the lonely.

Both poetries have an autonomous quality that denies interpretation. They speak with utter conviction, saying all that needs to be said. Both operate in images that are simultaneously sharp and hermetic. Both possess an Orphic inevitability that can neither compromise nor laugh. If one wants something of Trakl in English, read Spicer.

What would Spicer have said of these new translations? He was, of course, obsessed with translation; if poems were only their words, they would be as provisional as their speakers. His translations may not always be "precise," but his version of Lorca's "Ode for Walt Whitman" is itself a great poem. "The perfect poem," Spicer said, "has an infinitely small vocabulary." The translator's problem would be to find the poem as it exists before it is set in language. From "Kaspar Hauser Lied" in Simko's version:

Saw that snow fell into leafless branches,
His murderer's shadow in the half-lit hallway.

And in Robert Firmage's:

Saw, that snow fell into naked branches,
And in the dusky hallway the shadow of the killer.

Firmage is closer to Trakl's order ("Sah, dass Schnee fiel in kahles Gezweig / Und im dämmernden Hausflur den Schatten des Mörders."), but according to Spicer's formulation, that doesn't matter. Trakl's images have a force that transcends their words, and Simko's version works on its own terms.

These two books transform Trakl into radically different "equivalents." Firmage often tries to indicate the formal mannerisms, word order, and rhyme schemes in the original, and his English can be moody and at times archaic, as in "Helian":

Simko, on the other hand, is usually more direct:

… they open their filthy and stained robes,
Crying out to the balmy wind blowing from the rosy hill.

In the same poem, Firmage translates "O wie trauwig ist dieses Wiedersehn" as "O how sorrowful is this reencounter," which is close to the original but awkward. Simko gives us "How sad this reunion is." Simko's phrasing is more effective here than Firmage's, but Firmage has obviously preserved something that Simko loses. Firmage translates "Umnachtung" as "derangement," while Simko chooses "madness." Firmage gives "heaven" as an equivalent for "Himmel;" Simko gives "sky." Simko's diction generally makes his versions more immediate and hence in that way powerful, but Firmage tends to be closer to the German construction and/or sound.

To give another example, Firmage translates "mondne Kiihle" in "Grodek," Trakl's last poem, as "lunar coolness," while Simko writes, "A cold moon." In Firmage: "All roads disgorge to black decay." In Simko: "All roads end in black decay." Simko says, "A sister's shadow staggers through the silent grove," and Firmage says, "The sister's shadow flutters…."

But the point, of course, is that even when one version is literally wrong (Trakl says, "The sister," after all), it doesn't matter. (Several years ago, Michael Hamburger decided that "The sister's shade now sways through the silent copse," and there are obviously many other ways to construct that line.) What does matter is not Trakl's language, but what has been done with it. Neither Firmage nor Simko offers merely a gloss, and both succeed on their own terms.

It is interesting to read these translations side by side. Often they both succeed, though for different reasons, and there are passages, of course, where one version is clearly more effective than the other. Here is the way Firmage begins "Kaspar Hauser Lied":

He truly loved the sun, which, crimson, descended the hill,
The paths of the forest, the singing blackbird
and the joy of green.

Simko's version of the first line may be stronger, but the third is comparatively awkward:

He truly loved the sun which sank crimson down the hill,
The forest paths, the singing blackbird,
And the pleasure of the greenery.

Trakl's third line is "Und die Freude des Grüns." In this instance, Firmage not only comes closer to the original but also creates the more powerful line.

Firmage argues that Trakl may have had a greater influence on German poetry than Rilke, yet Trakl has been translated much less frequently. Until now the most widely read translations have been those collected by Christopher Middleton and originally published in 1968 and reissued in 1984. (Hamburger's version of "Grodek" is printed there.) Among other versions, there is an important set of translations by Lucia Getsi (1973), and David J. Black published four of the prose poems as Winter Night in 1979. Perhaps the best versions in English are those by James Wright in Twenty Poems of Georg Trakl, edited by Robert Bly, and reprinted in an appendix in Middleton's book.

None of these versions should be overlooked, and there is room for many more. Each points, however obliquely, toward Trakl's initial revelation—poems that are finally outside all versions and all language. As Wright said in "Echo for the Promise of Georg Trakl's Life":

My own body swims in a silent pool,
And I make silence.