Translation Review

ISSN: 0737-4836 (Print) 2164-0564 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/utrv20

Haunted Compositions: Ventrakl and the Growth

of Georg Trakl

Lisa Rose Bradford

To cite this article: Lisa Rose Bradford (2016) Haunted Compositions: Ventrakl and the Growth
of Georg Trakl, Translation Review, 95:1, 41-54, DOI: 10.1080/07374836.2016.1174502

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07374836.2016.1174502

Published online: 26 Jul 2016.

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 HAUNTED COMPOSITIONS: VENTRAKL AND
THE GROWTH OF GEORG TRAKL

Lisa Rose Bradford

Ventrakl is a book of translational collaboration in which author Christian Hawkey summons early-
twentieth-century Austrian poet Georg Trakl through an epigraphic, multimodal, lyrical series of texts
that dialogues not only with its central object of interpellation—Trakl’s texts and photographs—
but also with other poets of similar modes of writing. Weaving essays, poetry, fictitious scenes, and
pictures in a “heady mix of psychic and political drives,” Hawkey attempts to produce poems that
“texture us.” Along with his generative translation procedures, the paratext plaits the fabric of the
book with sounds that convey non-semantic meanings or puns and imaginings that explore the
“inclination of the gaze.” Sharing with Trakl the threads of war-torn melancholy and filling “holes”
(ventricles, mouths, silences, etc.) with a quickening creativity, Hawkey grows and tenders an assort-
ment of objets trouvés in order to generate a memorial to this Austrian poet and a revival of his
spirit while composing a compelling book of verse. Confronted with an amalgamation of voices and
languages, the patient reader strives to find meaning through sounds and patterns, not always suc-
cessfully at first, but, by the end of the series, is captivated by two voices and languages that sing an
eerie duet.

The ghost orchid (Epipogium aphyllum) is a hardy, though now rare, mycoheterotrophic orchid that
harnesses an array of fungal symbionts. Large plants of this species can produce a stunning woodland
display with a dozen flower stalks that bear up to four flowers each while growing out of coniferous
leaf litter.

What is lost in translation? The answer is quite simple: nothing. Always present behind a
translation stands the ghostly and often ominous presence of an original text, intact, but not
untouchable, so that, as Pierre Joris has recently commented, “different versions can only add to
the original”1 and, in this fashion, reenliven the source and thus make it flourish. Indeed, digging
into the humus of a text through translation, many a thing is unearthed. As archeologists and
curators of written creations, translators discover, cultivate, and tender words in such a way as
to generate new works and, in some cases, living memorials. Moreover, many of these discover-
ies and regrowths later become sources of generative translations, in which a given text serves
as a trigger for a new creation that functions to reveal and revive the original articulation as a
continuation of the seminal frisson, but it grows up to be quite different. This type of version-
ing reflects the genius of both the original author and the translating author, as is the case of
Christian Hawkey’s Ventrakl, which harnesses the energy of Georg Trakl’s poetry to make it grow
in symbiotic interchange, much like the rare European ghost orchid, blossoming in the debris of
leaves.
Ventrakl’s very design draws us into a world of the unheimlich. The title and byline emerge
as ghostly apparitions: faint red letters can barely be seen on its off-white cover behind the blue
“Christian Hawkey,” “Ventrakl,” and “Ugly Duckling Press Brooklyn 2010”; however, in turning
the book over to see the back cover, we find they spell out, now in red mirrored letters with

Translation Review 95: 41–54, 2016

Copyright © The Center for Translation Studies
ISSN: 0737-4836 print/2164-0564 online
DOI: 10.1080/07374836.2016.1174502
42 LISA ROSE BRADFORD

the front pale blue ones behind, “Georg Trakl,” “Gedichte,” and “Kurt Wolff Verlag Leipzig 1913.”
Leafing through, we find a commingling of prose, poems, epigraphs, and photographs—faces,
hyperpixelated fragments, row upon row of WWI hospital beds, weapons—which, all in all, defy
categorization regarding a traditional set of generic conventions with which to read this book.
The “paratextual” epigraphs and preface are equally apt in their importance in the build-
ing of this strange text, becoming just as vital as the poems, commentaries, and pictures found
within. The very first page of the preface offers us quotations from other dead poets—Mallarmé
and Pound to begin—thus initiating an epigraphic text that invokes like-minded poets. Hawkey
(Florida, 1969) shares many features with the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, among them, a dis-
tinct penchant for explaining his work. “Ask ye what ghost I dream upon,” he cites from Pound,
from there creating a preface that describes the book as a “collaboration,” one that developed
from a shared anxiety: Hawkey for the US participation in Iraq, Trakl for WWI, thus forming a
“locus of resonant and courageous melancholy.”2 Composing his book from the prism of trans-
lation, Hawkey departs from the poetry of Austrian writer Georg Trakl (1887–1914), mediating
through a looping, “a voice over,” whose double blooms form “a ghost, a host,” “a being between
state.”3 In a lyrical prose style, Hawkey details the process of his composition (though he will fur-
ther discuss his procedures in prose poems/lyrical notes scattered throughout the entire body
of the work), outlining various procedures: poems built around the colors that are repeated in
Trakl’s poetry in a “poetics of inventory”4 ; the use of words produced in English spell checks and
translation engines unleashed on the German texts; homographonic imitations that fuse the two
languages through auditory and visual “hallucinations” (Hawkey did not speak or read German
when he began his work, but more about this later); and finally the re-composition of the literal
decomposition of texts (either perforated with a 12 gauge or left in the ground), exposing them
to the violence of nature and time that become the loose-leaf litter of his text.
Because of this shared anxiety regarding the realities of war, social and political issues
inform this volume with eerie images of conflict. Haunted by Trakl while residing in the pow-
erfully grounded stability of the US and Germany, at a time when war was raging in the Mideast
in order to maintain that luxurious stability, Hawkey tunes in to the Austrian’s voice in order
to represent the angst of war: “a form of understanding, the soldiers, their cheeks unfolded by
shrapnel, sitting up, leaning toward the camera, toward life, a man left in charge of a tent of
90 dying soldiers, let the song remember the boy, July 28th, 1914, March 20th, 2005.”5 Trakl was
one of the 90 percent of the soldiers who did not die of war wounds in WWI (it is calculated that
10 percent did), and this remaining percentage in great part languished shell-shocked in hospi-
tals, where Trakl tended to many, only to voluntarily lay down his own life, unable to bear the
agonizing truth of war.
The body of the poetic text begins with quotations from an array of writers—Oppen,
Michaux, Walser—including one from Trakl himself that reads: “Golden cloud and time. In a
lonely room /you often ask the dead to visit you” (tr. D Simko).6 We then find a family photo-
graph of Trakl on a beach, which invites Hawkey to invent a story, a “history of holes.” I cite this
text in its entirety to demonstrate how Hawkey flows from fact to conjecture and on to the lyrical
meanderings that typify this book:

How is such a narrative possible—the mother and two children in the background for example, stand-
ing (it seems) on the surface of the mineral heavy water; the mother lowers a string into the depths,
the boy tilts toward her, the girl stands one step back from the hole. Here, then, is a triangle: The
mother addicted to drugs, the sister who was the only person who understood you, who became an
 VENTRAKL AND THE GROWTH OF GEORG TRAKL 43

alcoholic and shot herself and you, leaning forward as if running—or falling—into a hole, the chloro-
form hole, the cigarette hole, the opium hole, the morphine hole, the veronal hole, the cocaine hole,
the moth hole, the nose hole, the vein hole, the food hole, the language hole, breathing hole, word
hole. Here, as if the figures are held behind your back, in the palm of your hand, a history, a history of
holes and what we put inside them, lose inside them. You claim that until the age of 20 you noticed
nothing in your environment save for water, perhaps, then you were falling through it or through the
word for it, bottomless— 7

Hawkey formulates a biographical narrative around a “you” as would a medium trying to channel
the dead with a chanting, metaphorical prose.
Hawkey employs a variety of compositional strategies—apart from the processes he delin-
eates in his introduction—among them a poetics of Q&A, often accompanied by an ekphrastic
use of photographs (rather in the fashion of Sebald) that leads him to craft dialogues prompted
by these images. After commenting on this particular shot of the Trakl family, conjuring possible
stories to be found therein, Hawkey imagines a scene—“desk-shaped table with two chairs”—
where he leads with statements or questions that sometimes follow a biographic, metaphysical,
or psychological logic but are answered in lyrical riddles:

You once, as a child, walked into a pond.

Yes.
And your mother located your body only by the position of your hat floating on the surface?
The stars at midnight can be a lonely tent.
I see. Submersion, then becomes a kind of companionship?
The stars at midnight can be a lonely tent.
I’m not sure I follow you . . .
Listen can you point me to the nearest whorehouse?8

Hawkey writes up his interviews, conceiving answers—suggestive and often ironic, distracted,
or impatient—that both he and the reader strive to understand, though they point in so many
directions at once that comprehension diffuses like a fragrance in the breeze.
This scene-making with Trakl’s trumpeted voice leads into the poem “Ten Holes,” key to
understanding the title, “Ventrakl,” which plays on the pronunciation of “ventricle” and its ref-
erence to the heart’s cavities but also recalls a host of associations: venting, summoning, and
ventriloquy as the author seeks to channel the Austrian poet:

“the dark one”

“the sick one”
“the patient one”
[. . .]
“the one moldering”
“the one observing this”
“the one gone”9

One, one, one: the /o/suggesting a mouth rounding its lips and forming holes. Hawkey continues
to ponder “hole” in various poems that follow, looping possibilities while provoking ever-new
connections (I was taken to Laurie Anderson’s portrait of depression: “It’s not the bullet that
kills you, it’s the hole /Like a ventriloquist I been throwing my voice”). Hawkey defines “hole”
44 LISA ROSE BRADFORD

according to various dictionary entries—“Hole \hohl\n [ME, fr.OE Hol] [. . .]”—enumerating

many accepted meanings from gap to flaw, but ending: “3: the suspicion that one’s face is being
erased in the act of kissing,”10 thus inventing a new meaning and widening the scope of the
word. He then goes on to describe it rather as a riddle:

Everyone here aware of where: the photographer is, the lens is, the point toward which the faces
lean, converge, swarm the frame. they do not swarm, inhabit the frame, no, appear as a frame, better,
or a face, any one face, its eagerness, I see you I want to say I see eyebrows, the muscles beneath them
arranged in a shape we name surprise, or worry, that’s it, therefore facial expressions were the first sys-
tem of why first, surely before human speech evolved—can you read the space between the flesh that
covers the teeth, you mean the lips, no the space between them, which a mouth inhabits, delimits, circles,
a non-space, a void perhaps, don’t be pretentious, what then, picture someone speaking, now erase the
face, the lips in motion, and leave the space between them widening, shifting, momentarily disappear-
ing, a shadow, a moving shadow, a moving shadow on any surface, all sensation is a moving surface,
a bird’s shadow wrinkling the ocean, if you like, in this way we learn to read each other’s faces from
day one, the moment a shape, oval, hair falling around the light, the waves of light, lowers itself into
our field of vision, odd, territorial phrase, the space of our own face, a between space, what about the
tongue, what about it, all tongues are disgusting.11

Again, Trakl’s voice or some schizophrenic otherness materialized in italics corrects and com-
ments on Hawkey’s word choice, finally contemplating the language-hole as the space between
our lips, “all tongues are disgusting,” signaling perhaps a quest to subvert and renew the limits of
language while underscoring the virtues of silence.
Trakl’s verse, as it speaks through nature and scene, has been often characterized as a
poetry of silences, of hushed imagery that whispers—rather like Hawkey’s image of “a bird’s
shadow wrinkling the ocean” we found in the last quotation. This poetry relies on a patient
expansion in our minds that leads to a purling of thoughts to fill in the gaps. For example, in
Trakl’s “The Sun,” we read, “The sun breaks from gloomy ravines”12 ; or “In Hellbrun,” “The oak
turns green /In such a ghostly way over the forgotten footsteps of the dead.”13 The imagery of
nature’s lusty, unstoppable behavior stands at odds with the impending specter of death.
Hawkey’s poems translate this pregnant silence, and it is indeed translation that lies
at the heart of the book. One pivotal prose poem (which flows toward a hyperpixelation
of a photograph of Trakl on the following page) serves to fill in more holes regarding the
compositional/reading logic of the book:

Umdichtung: not a poem translated from another but a poem woven around another, from another,
an image from another image, a weaving or an oscillation around or from, [. . .] seeking to repeat
itself, a weaving or an oscillation around or from, form from form, hence this slow sinking into the
forehead of a stranger, a stranger long departed.14

These voices pass through our consciousness as ghosts inhabiting a new host, the “slow sinking
into the forehead of a stranger,” representing an essential modus operandi in the book. Thus,
the reader enters a world of Umdichtung: a word also utilized by poets such as Stefan George
in his version of Shakespeare in lieu of the usual Übersetzung in order to underline the action
of repoemizing or reforging texts as “afterpoems” or, in the words of Hawkey, “a poem woven
around another.”15 This insinuates the Greek roots of the word “text,” i.e., a fabric or tissue, or a
 VENTRAKL AND THE GROWTH OF GEORG TRAKL 45

yarn with which Hawkey knits his book, purling and looping this ghostly glow of a memorial to
“let the song remember the boy”:

What persists despite efforts to translate around you, with you, read you, are the singular perfor-
mances of decay and decompositions [. . .] an organic process, de- and re-composing itself, [. . .]
systems that underwrite—great word [. . .] perhaps when I leave this room I should see myself as a
corpse, a zombie, a limb thudding onto the floor, one soft eyeball rolling out, two, the word two,
comma,16

Stitching together bits and pieces of the body of discourse in transubstantiation, Hawkey creates,
as Michael Davidson has explained, a “palimtext” of visible traces of the cognitive processes in
play. By this word, Davidson emphasizes,

the intertextual—and inter-discursive—quality of postmodern writing as well as its materiality. The

palimtext is neither a genre nor an object; but a writing-in-process that may make use of any number
of textual sources. As its name implies the palimtext retains vestiges of prior writings out of which it
emerges. Or more accurately, it is the still-visible record of responses to those earlier writings.17

One could, of course, consider all writing to be a question of palimtexts, “in translation,” a work
in progress or versions of previous written works as a cognitive zone of discovery and growth.
As Borges wrote regarding reading, composition, and translation, “ . . . time, which despoils the
alcazar, enriches the line of verse,”18 alleging that great images are not a question of instan-
taneous marvel but rather of unhurried expansion. It is in this fashion that Hawkey uses the
source texts as triggers for new poems and thus exacerbates the limits of “translation” as it is
considered within traditional parameters. The process itself becomes significant, since the object
refuses to stay fixed in one place, and its restive visibility remains “in translation,” pending new
readings, misreadings, reelaborations, and memory. As Javier Marías has recently commented:
“A translator owns only what he can remember of the original text. He must reconstruct what
has become de-composed in his memory, fragmentary—all language, as his own memory, as
his forgetfulness, is fragmentary, partial—and he must endow it with a particular form that each
translator subjectively forges [. . .].”19 Thus, the de-composed memory, the afterglow of Trakl’s
poems become the afterpoems of Ventrakl’s recreations.
Hawkey acknowledges Spicer’s groundwork in the translational and Q&A poetics of this
book and in generative translation as a whole by citing an interesting phrase from After Lorca—
“The dead are notoriously hard to satisfy.”20 These words appear in the Spicer/Lorca opening
apocryphal letter:

It must be made clear at the start that these poems are not translations. In even the most literal
of them Mr. Spicer seems to derive pleasure in inserting or substituting one or two words which
completely change the mood and often the meaning of the poem as I had written it. More often he
takes one of my poems and adjoins to half of it another half of his own, giving rather the effect of an
unwilling centaur. (Modesty forbids me to speculate which end of the animal is mine.) Finally there
are an almost equal number of poems that I did not write at all (one supposes that they must be his)
executed in a somewhat fanciful imitation of my early style.

. . . The dead are notoriously hard to satisfy. Mr. Spicer’s mixture may please his contemporary
audience or may, and this is more probable, lead him to write better poetry of his own.21
46 LISA ROSE BRADFORD

In this ghostly “pointing of a finger,”22 as Spicer calls it, not to represent but rather to direct the
gaze—to reality and especially to the reality of extant texts—Hawkey constructs a tacit disserta-
tion on generative translation as a source of creation. It is as if the seedpods of García Lorca and
Trakl had “snatched” the bodies of Spicer and Hawkey, who revel in this possession in order to
produce new works and leave their fresh designs to move us readers to become enthralled.
The resonant works created by such translational practices abound in the history of lit-
erature. Thinking back to the sixteenth century, we can observe that Thomas Wyatt’s sonnets,
often versions of Petrarch’s verse, provided a transitional space in Wyatt’s writing, a betterment,
as it were, as well as in the development of English literature as a whole. Though nineteenth-
century criticism, influenced by Romantic tenets of originality, tended to consider Wyatt to be
a mere imitator, later scholars such as Reed Way Dasenbrock and Joe Glaser have explored and
praised the lyrical value of his “mistranslations” and “transformations.” Furthermore, we read his
sonnets today not as translations but as original poems, even though many of the tropes and
themes clearly stem from Petrarch’s works. Much of the same can be said of Chaucer, whom no
one would traduce by calling derivative or plagiaristic; but interestingly Ezra Pound, in his ABC of
Reading, referred to him as “Le Grand Translateur,” meaning that he was a genius at tapping and
rebrewing the various European literary traditions of his day and before.
It is not until the nineteenth century that “stealing fire” through overabundant borrowing
or arrant plagiarism becomes a damnable activity. The Copyright Act of 1709, or the “Statute of
Anne,” may be cited as the early stages of modern copyright legislation and thus of the weak
beginnings of its enforcement, which concur with the inchoate ideology behind the Romantics’
high regard for originality. However, this sin will be relativized through the translation work of
one of the most influential, revolutionary, and controversial writers of the twentieth century.
With the publication of Cathay in 1915, a work that eventually attracted countless writers both
to the literature of Asia and to the wonderful possibilities of free verse, Ezra Pound aggravated
the seemingly clear-cut difference between translation and original writing. In his versions, he
both channels new waters into the ocean of the English language and alters traditional English
poetics by imposing his imagist ideals. For years his translations were scrutinized regarding their
“faithfulness”; yet his “assaults,” as he called them, on foreign expressions served to create some
of his greatest contributions to contemporary literature in English.
Hawkey is one of the most interesting contemporary examples of this haunting, creative
process as he further questions the expectations of lyrical conventions in his merging of pho-
tographs, languages, and melodic prose and poetry, often interpolating words we suppose have
come from Trakl’s mouth or pen, which fascinate while holding us in suspense regarding their
origins and meanings. We even have biographical entries that flow into musing on those facts:

Georg Trakl, born in Salzburg, Austria, on February 3, 1887, fourth of six children [. . .] was rumored
[. . .] moon-bright sonata, the dark gold of rotting sunflowers, ant-light from which at times a gen-
tle animal emerges. A stomach hovers over velvet lawns. A small blind girl runs trembling down the
boulevard. In the light cast by our sternums let our song remember the boy. 23

Here begins another looping, not only of Trakl’s colors but also of repeated homographonic
words such as “sternums,” words that we now find repeated, which will eventually (but not until
the end of the book) re-join their German counterparts in Trakl’s poem “Grodek”—Unter gold-
nem Gezweig der Nacht und Sternen (under the golden branches of night and stars)—but at this
point, the reader must keep the faith in this deferment of meaning, settling with “sternum” as
 VENTRAKL AND THE GROWTH OF GEORG TRAKL 47

the covering of the ventricle, believing a pattern will eventually befigure some sort of ectoplasm
as the sounds accumulate in his or her mind.
Hawkey also translates the perplexing texture of Trakl’s poems, which arises from the mar-
riage between a colorful romantic contemplation of nature and the torturous topics of war and
death, though, again, Hawkey expresses this uncomfortable incongruence in a language that
often resists interpretation:

In summer utterance: orphans

Of stillness-mittens. Without ant-light
In a green world, a glass of wine
Offers vertical stars, offers
A handful of tiny, wilted ears.

I am willing to teach my sister

Zeros lie around wondrous bends.
Our mother is a shuffling singer.
A gaunt water-shaft. A two-way river.
I am humming to a gelatinous king.

Again Fall glitters in locked cellars

Where smooth, river-polished stones
Glow in the wide mouths of toddlers.
These children fluster my inner night.24

Certain ideas resonate from his prose section—mouths, bottomless words, a sister, a mother.
Summer’s decline becomes “Fall,” perhaps capitalized to evoke a paradise lost and/or German
orthography. We ask ourselves what exactly are these water-shafts, stillness-mittens, and ant-
lights. Furthermore, the constant use of hyphenated terms spawns another question: does it
represent a throwback to the Anglo-Saxon/Germanic tradition of kennings and compound
words to express a different angle of perception or the ineffable? Or is the fact that the hyphen is
a punctuation that draws together without erasing the distance between words of more impor-
tance for our reading process? Partial answers lie in a poem that comes much later, “Reasons why
Orphans wear Stillness-mittens”:

1. It is difficult to think in the presence of an orphan.

2. It is difficult to think in the presence of the word “orphan.”
[. . .]
8. It is not, in fact anything like silence, anything like stillness, anything like coming upon an empty
meadow the day after a heavy snow storm, a meadow that is no longer a meadow but simply an
expanse, a white expanse, wind in the bordering birch trees, leafless, nothing around but your own
breathing, your own pause, nothing around but the moment you realize this pause.
9. It is not even like any mitten any category of mittenness.
10. How small a hyphen is. How effortless its great work.25

Absence and presence, smallness and greatness in the form of a hyphen.

Lines from “You Bent my Megahertz” offer further social and political imagery, while again
reaching out to both languages, since the English “bent” and the “hertz” oscillate between the
48 LISA ROSE BRADFORD

German Abend (evening) and Herz (heart). Opposite a photograph of the Trakl siblings, the poem
begins, “I am unfolding a moth into a fluttering mouth, into /The unlimited access of a Visa card.
/Dim Wanderer, shining wedge /Of visual decline . . . ,”26 thus mixing the hole of the mouths
and the marriage of worlds: 1914 and 2004 with the Visa card wedging its way into the Austrian
poet’s mouth. Trakl wrote of blood “blooming in the altarstone” in his poem “Song of the Western
Countries,”27 and Hawkey uses this ghostly presence to silently speak of his own anxiety regard-
ing the voracious wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the result of the “unlimited access of a Visa card”
and Western “decline.”
Puzzling words and slanted allusions continue to mount in the poem “Melancholy
Decibels”:

—Dear Walt, the verse-orb is breaking.

If a scattered cinder beckons, if a white comet

zithers over our green necks

indecent as a lease
on the glands of Bach, we hum,

veil-light

awkward about our shining sternums.28

“The verse-orb is breaking”: because of time? War? Poetic endeavor? In this poem of chiming
words, the allusions to previous poets and possible reminiscences of German expressions are
set in nearly nonsensical combinations of words: for example, “Walt” with Wald (woods) and,
of course, with Walt Whitman (also summoned by Spicer in After Lorca); “veil-light” flickers with
the German vielleicht (perhaps); “lease” with lies (read); “cinder beckons” with zerbrochenen (bro-
ken); while the “shining sternums” link both heart ventricles and Sternen (stars). However, what
of the beckoning of a scattered cinder? The zithering of a comet “over our green necks”? Are
they images of bombings and decomposed bodies? The assemblage pushes us to the limits of
understanding, or, at times, over the edge.
Opacity, paradox, and irony abound in the amalgamation of these texts. The spirit-words
emerging from the German often transport the expression to the point of near incomprehen-
sibility in their English contexts because the words are employed as sound objects and their
meanings are at best aleatory or extremely personal. The pure aesthetics of the series gener-
ates meaning, but, of course, the mystified reader will seek coherence and patterns in these
uncanny associations. Here we might ask, to what degree might a knowledge of German inform
our reading? Will a naïve reader come to the same impression? Of course, the same is true of all
instances of intertextuality, as literary and linguistic competence is always a question of unique
individual growth and the willingness to deconstruct and reconstruct in search of coherence.
Indeed, Hawkey’s own ignorance of German spawned much of the creativity of this text and each
reader in his or her ignorance will mold new meanings from these unusual collocations. From
the decomposition present in these poems—of words, of bodies: Abend (evening), herbstlichen
(autumn), tödlichen (deathly), Sternen (stars), stille sammelt (quietly gather) grow into “bending,”
“herbs,” “licking,” “toads,” “sternums,” “stillness-mittens,” all homographonically related to their
 VENTRAKL AND THE GROWTH OF GEORG TRAKL 49

German “roots.” Trakl’s hand thus “underwrites” (unterschreibt) all this outlandishness, creating
an obscurity that “textures” us with a “black joy,”29 “texturing” again playing on text as textile
and texturing in the form of an interwoven creation. Is this texturing a tendering? A lyrical soft-
ening of our brains so as to absorb the languages and poetry of both poets? The darkness is both
hellish and pleasurable, creating a constant oxymoronic undercurrent of euphonic sordidness.
This is an aphasic verse that depends on traces: words, puns, sounds, and games that seem
to draw from lists of words to fill in blanks as if they were “mad-libs” that jar us into reassessing
the meanings of words according to their sounds and echoes and not their semantic or syn-
tagmatic relationships. In “unsung weasels,” we expect to hear “unsung heroes”30 ; “Ant-light”
further on shifts to “trauma-light,” “dice-light,” “hyacinth-blue light”; whereas “Azrael, //Shaken,
backs his red go-cart through the wall”31 seems to be a case of Hawkey channeling Spicer
channeling Williams. Later we perceive that “stunted uncles” may be the “ungebornen Enkel”
(unborn grandchildren) from “Grodek,” and Azrael, the angel of death, harks back to Ezra, the
father of twentieth-century generative translation.
Nor can Derrida be missing from this fete, sparking ideas of traces and deconstruction,
partly in the very mention of his name and because one section is actually entitled “Traces.”32
However, more importantly, Hawkey’s citation initiates a discussion regarding the “gaze” by
retelling an anecdote about Derrida’s cat: “[. . .] being caught by the gaze of his cat as he stepped
naked out of the shower. Undressed in the moment of address. The awareness of fur on my neck.
The sense, in a dream, that someone is watching you dream.”33 The conjectured gazes of Trakl’s
photographs are part and parcel of the text, sparking many of its lyrical meditations, and one
of the most significant is found on page 82, a picture of Trakl as an adult, looking at the cam-
era with an enigmatic seriousness that Hawkey studies, superimposing Trakl’s words on his face
and conversing about the gaze, specifically according to Paul Celan’s notion of Neigungswinkel or
angle of inclination. These meditations come to fruition in the poem “All Seeing Sealant,” which
arouses associations with many poets, including Celan (Tsay’lan, See’lan, Say lan’):

[. . .]
O where in these scattered winter war zones
Are the angst-ridden voles, the . . .
An herbal-infused wind circles unborn dreams.
A dork mutters Milton. The green wagon

Is suffering around the bend

And to return from the region of likeness
One must learn to unravel April’s wounds.
Mr. Leben, for example. He is not so tall,
Though his tubes protrude. (Aging, circles.)

Nuns wearing Diesel jeans embalm him in a ditch

While the Sameness Wand, still as a sternum, sails aloft.34

The verses confound us with their allusions: to Milton’s Paradise Lost, Eliot’s Wasteland, Celan’s
“Deathfugue,” opening doors to a plethora of associations, as do the semantics. An interpretation
based purely on the words, without literary or language links, seems surreal. On another level and
according to the preface, we may wonder: Are “dork” and “ditch” spell check corrections for dort
50 LISA ROSE BRADFORD

and Dichte? Is the “mutter” actually mother in German? Does “nun” refer to now? “Mr. Leben,” Mr.
Life? The “Sameness Wand” a German expression (likeness/fellow-wall)? The “sternum,” the stars
that sail aloft? “How beneficial it would be . . . to gain a vision of the irreducible differences which
a very remote language can, by glimmerings, suggest to us,”35 Hawkey quotes from Barthes.
Again, each reader, hallucinating meanings, lugs along his or her baggage of associations and
languages in order to navigate this verse, and the silences will become significant according to
each person’s gaze and the light s/he might glimpse from them.
Silence and its communicative force are also discussed by Hawkey: “Schweigen: the silence
of one who could speak, but chooses not to [. . .] a child’s close-lipped, furious gaze . . . a breath-
ing gaze, where surfaces and faces contract on the inhale, [. . .] a blue pond, [. . .] bypass the
visual by walking up to an eye and simply licking it, or a text, yes.”36 With this silence, both Trakl and
Hawkey appeal to the reader’s senses of taste and smell and sight to accompany or even override
the semantic and auditory fields of cognition, though the pleasure of euphony in these poems is
not to be underestimated. The speaker(s) recommend we synesthetically approach by means of
olfaction, not audition or vision: “I mean widen your nostrils when approaching any text.”37 Trakl’s
poems, for example, use colors as unmixed brush strokes, not in surreal fashion as in Nolde or
Marc but rather in naive but terrifically strident combination that nudges them toward the sur-
real: the juxtaposition of black horses and red maples, black wind and black wings; or lines such
as, “The wild heart grew white,”38 “The fish rises with a red body in the green pond,”39 “The green
silence of the pool.”40 Trakl’s use of black in particular brings to mind war paintings such as those
of Otto Dix.
Many of Hawkey’s poems rework these colors as chromatically intensified reflections to
conflate the serene and the dreadful. For example, from “Grodek,” with its uncanny use of
German idyllic tradition à la Goethe, shot through with firing weapons, bleeding heroes, and
unborn grandchildren in a meadow of golds, blues, and particularly reds: “Ihren zerbrochenen
Münder” (their broken mouths); “Im Weidengrund /Rotes Gewölk, darin ein zürnender Gott wohnt
/Das vergossne Blut sich” (red clouds, inhabited by an angry god, /gather below the willows /spilt
blood); “die blutenden Häupter” (the bloody heads); “Die heiβe Flamme des Geiste” (the hot flame
of the spirit) (“Grodek”). Ventrakl rebuilds these lines in “Redtrakl”:

Red laughter in the dark shade of the chestnuts.

Snow gently drifts from a red cloud.

Crossing in red storms at evening

The mysterious red stillness of your mouth.

Red wolf, strangled by an angel.

Golden red robes, torches, the singing of psalms, the soft rustling
Of red plane trees, red ship on the canal.
We wander quietly along red walls.
Red clouds, spilled blood, gather silently below willow trees.
A red flame leaps from your hand.41

Wandering red clouds, mouths, willows, the flame: all reenergizing Trakl’s words and colors, join-
ing bitingly discordant terms. Later, in another poem, this collision of opposing sensations is
poignantly figured as “the angelic perversity of burning swans.”42
 VENTRAKL AND THE GROWTH OF GEORG TRAKL 51

As an attempt to cultivate the phenomenon of Trakl’s poetics through the afterlife of

his texts, Hawkey incorporates Trakl’s original mode of signification by reproducing this mor-
dant coexistence of beauty and horror and by recasting his colors. As is to be expected, Walter
Benjamin, carrying his store of analogies, is also brought on stage by our author in order to
evoke his ideas on “the poetic” and “a language of truth” in translation, reminding us of his
now so familiar concept of modes of signification in translation and the fragments of a greater
language-vessel:

Fragments of a vessel which are to be glued together must match one another in the smallest details,
although they need not be like one another. In the same way a translation, instead of resembling the
meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s mode of signification,
thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language,
just as fragments are part of a vessel.43

Hawkey produces a greater language in just this fashion, emulating the mode of Trakl’s writ-
ing and melding languages. This collision between the lyrical and the romantic as the moonlit
refuse of a reality fashioned through strangely wrought colors and images is again beautifully
represented in “Nocturne”:

Odors, unbequeathed. A tiered sheath

For the blue of error-stars, heaven’s klieg light.
Gilded is the wagon instead.

Masks covered with night-lichen. A vent steams.

Unidentified a vent steams. History
A bubble forming on a sleeper’s half-open lips.

O, one hour still of speech’s warfare.

The sameness-wand, once more thrown aloft:
Fallen error-stars in the watery, tiered ears of angels.44

“Fallen error-stars in the watery, tiered ears of angels” with its resonant assonance coheres with
the romantic tradition in sound and gothic bleakness, but the odor of death and war take it
one step closer to the repugnance involved in silently portraying the reality of war. English and
German seem coupled in “heaven’s klieg light” as it glares with a possible “Krieg light.” Moreover,
the “error-stars” become eros tars when read aloud. The trope of decomposition and fungal
growth reappear in the chiming “night-lichen” and the repetition of the magic wand/wall fall
on the tiered/teared/tired ears. Meanings tend to expand and explode instead of finding fixity.
The book’s rhythm changes in its last pages. After registering biographical dates for Trakl,
with a list which is half dedicated to his interactions with his sister (with whom it has been sug-
gested the poet maintained an incestuous relationship), Hawkey again reads the photographs of
both sister and brother and proceeds to create 14 pages of one-line poems that build to a grand
finale of a “Nachwort” (afterword) that is composed of Hawkey’s moving translation of “Grodek.”
This poem was born of the war as people lived it in this Polish city, which, to a certain degree,
brought Trakl to the end of his days. This concluding, bilingual presentation finally provides the
reader with one of the major references for Ventrakl, and it is not until here, through the repe-
tition of words and their recontextualizations, that constituent meanings begin to sprout from
52 LISA ROSE BRADFORD

the fragmented sensualities—both dismal and delightful—of this interwoven verse. There is, in
fact, only one conventional translation in the entire book, all else being piecemeal reworkings
of words and stories about Trakl’s life and, probably, the fieldwork Hawkey realized in order to
translate this poem.
As a final bit of paratextual amalgamation, the last page of the book contains a photo-
graph of Hawkey, photoshopped with Trakl’s face, and a short bio sketch of the translator/writer,
a modern technological gesture to paste these two authors together in what seems to be an
appropriation of the Austrian’s gaze. But, of course, every gaze is unique, and as the reader is
transformed into the role of the author, the inclination of his or her gaze begins to possess the
text.
The manipulation of images and the incorporation of excerpts of writing scored by another
poet seem to follow the ways of sampler operations in music and intermingled documentary
footage in cinematography: all of them participate in a parodic principle of citing and recycling
measures of meaning, which underscores our dependence on former works for comprehen-
sion. Some have referred to these practices as “postmodern,” “conceptual,” “uncreative” or
“necropastoral” poetics. Generative translation, such as we experience in Ventrakl, in many ways
borders on all of these practices and sets a text into dialogical motion while instilling a transna-
tional texture in these creations. Pound’s legacy arises from a similar muse, who, as Richard
Sieburth recently stated, “was nothing if not the vital global exchange between languages.”
Hawkey seconds this idea when he speaks of a new and increasing interest in translation “as
a kind of generative, non-monolingual creative engine and muse, one that is fundamental to our
hyper-media/mediated age.”45
The globalizing thrust of joining languages and traditions through this lyrical rewriting
cattle-prods these expressions to intellectually hair-raising limits. Teasing dialogue from pho-
tographs and poetry from the leaf litter left by time and readings and translations, a haunted
Hawkey muses on writing amidst the anxiety of war and death. But the reader too is haunted
by this book as s/he becomes immersed in its melodiously provocative poetry and tries to catch
the glimmerings of truth through beauty. Apropos are David Constantine’s recent ideas on the
impact of poetry: “Whatever your subject is, if your premise is truth and beauty, truth is made
apparent in a form of beauty which shocks. The world is so ugly [. . .] that if you make something
beautiful, that is a radical gesture against it. Truth comes with a force you can barely support.”
In pointing to the work of Trakl, Christian Hawkey has made a gesture of translation, creating
a symbiont of perplexing and fascinating prose and poems that flow into a w/hole, inspiriting
the reader to embrace these ghosts of war and pleach the twigs of languages and photographs
and poems, and so convert mycotic materials into the fresh and wondrous growth of Trakl and
Hawkey both.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lisa Rose Bradford teaches Comparative Literature at the Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, Argentina.
She has published poems and translations in numerous magazines and edited various books on
translation (Traducción como cultura, La cultura de los géneros) and of translations into Spanish (Usos
de la imaginación: poetas latin@s en EE.UU. Los pájaros, por la nieve. Antología de la poesía femenina
contemporánea de los Estados Unidos). Also, four of her bilingual volumes of Juan Gelman’s verse
 VENTRAKL AND THE GROWTH OF GEORG TRAKL 53

have appeared since 2010: Between Words: Juan Gelman’s Public Letter (National Translation Award),
Commentaries and Citations, Com/positions, and Oxen Rage. She is currently translating Gelman’s last
book of poems, Hoy.

NOTES

1. “Translating Prosody,” AWP Minneapolis, 2015.

2. Hawkey, Ventrakl, 9.
3. Ibid., 6.
4. Ibid., 7.
5. Ibid., 45.
6. Ibid., 11.
7. Ibid., 19.
8. Ibid., 25.
9. Ibid., 28.
10. Ibid., 34.
11. Ibid., 52.
12. Bly, The Winged Energy of Delight, 140.
13. Ibid., 144.
14. Hawkey, Ventrakl, 45.
15. Idem.
16. Ibid., 92.
17. Davidson, “Palimtexts: Postmodern Poetry and the Material Text,” 78.
18. Borges, “La busca de Averroes,” 586–7.
19. Marías, Literatura y fantasma, 379. My English translation.
20. Hawkey, Ventrakl, 26.
21. Spicer, After Lorca. 11–12.
22. Ibid., 35.
23. Hawkey, Ventakl, 29.
24. Ibid., 23.
25. Ibid., 97.
26. Ibid., 32.
27. Bly, The Winged Energy of Delight, 143.
28. Hawkey, Ventrakl, 44.
29. Ibid., 55.
30. Ibid., 63.
31. Ibid., 47.
32. Ibid., 73.
33. Ibid., 64.
34. Ibid., 84.
35. Ibid., 68.
36. Ibid., 67.
37. Ibid., 49.
38. Bly, The Winged Energy of Delight, 146.
39. Ibid., 140.
40. Ibid., 143.
41. Hawkey, Ventrakl, 57.
54 LISA ROSE BRADFORD

42. Ibid., 93.

43. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 78.
44. Hawkey, Ventrakl, 103.
45. Personal communication, 2011.

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