Description
Poetry. Translated from the German by Daniele Pantano. "Pantano, a renowned poet and translator, has brought both of these talents to bear on his project. His process was to loosely translate all of the poems of Georg Trakl, then order the lines in alphabetical order by their first words. One further aspect of the organization is that while these lines share this overt linguistic kinship—due to the alphabetical ordering, but also due to the frequent repetition of a starting word—the lines do not share any apparent meaning relations. Like the Persian ghazal, where each couplet is meant to stand alone, seemingly disconnected from the others, yet also force by way of lyric disjoint a powerful effect on the reader, Pantano's conceptual poetry forces us to leap from line to line, navigating the voids along the way. There is a jarring-yet-also-pleasurable effect created by this structure and organization. Also, the reader will immediately notice that the title of the book is only one letter off from Trakl's name, transforming it into an oracle of sorts. This is entirely fitting, given that the lines in Pantano's collection echo the enigmatic pronouncements of an oracle from ancient myth and given that Pantano himself serves as a sort of oracular medium in translating/altering/arranging these lines."—from the Introduction by Okla Elliott
Author Bio
Georg Trakl was born in Salzburg, Austria, in 1887. He served as a medical officer during World War I, an experience that led to a suicide attempt. As a lyric poet, he set a dark, introspective tone that deeply influenced the course of German expressionism. He died in 1914 in Kraków, after an overdose of cocaine.
Author City: Salzburg AUT
Daniele Pantano is a Swiss poet, translator, critic, and editor. His individual poems, essays, and reviews, as well as his translations from the German by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Georg Trakl, and Robert Walser, have appeared in numerous magazines, journals, and anthologies worldwide. Pantano's poetry has been translated into several languages, including German, Albanian, Bulgarian, Kurdish, and Farsi. Pantano taught at the University of South Florida, served as the Visiting Poet-in-Residence at Florida Southern College, and directed the Creative Writing program at Edge Hill University, England, where he was Reader in Poetry and Literary Translation. Pantano lives somewhere at the end of a line. For more information, please visit www.pantano.ch.
Author City: USA