A Skeleton Plays Violin by Georg Trakl and translated by James Reidel

This is poetry from Austria.

A Skeleton Plays Violin by Georg Trakl translated by James Reidel is published by Seagull Books. This is a Book originally written in German. This was published in 2017.0 and has the ISBN of 9.780857424297E12.

A Skeleton Plays Violin, by Georg Trakl and translated by James Reidel from German, brings Austrian German-language poetry into English through death-music, skeletal figures, and Trakl’s gift for making terror sing without losing its chill. The metadata gives the reader a doorway, but the real value is what happens once the poem begins making its own weather. I would read it for skeleton, violin, dusk, and the theatrical intimacy of a poem standing near death, not as a fixed lesson about a nation, period, or school. The best entry point is still the poem itself: the line that catches, the image that refuses to explain itself, the feeling that arrives before paraphrase. A Skeleton Plays Violin belongs in the translated poetry library because it deepens the library’s Austrian expressionist shelf with a darkly musical selection.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.