Georg Trakl
trans. by Ryan Wilson
In Autumn
Sunflowers by the fence are glistering,
Silently sit the sick in the sunshine.
Out in the fields, the women toil and sing,
Where convent bells toll out their anodyne.
The birds communicate the foreign news,
The convent bells toll out their anodyne.
From the courtyard, soft fiddle tunes effuse.
Today’s the day they’re treading the brown wine.
Now men display themselves, at ease and glad.
Today’s the day they’re treading the brown wine.
Wide open are the chambers of the dead
And painted beautifully by late sunshine.
Georg Trakl (1887-1914) was perhaps the most important of the Austrian Expressionist poets. His poems gained popularity in the United States largely because their importance to poets of the Deep Image school such as Robert Bly and James Wright.
Ryan Wilson is the author of The Stranger World (Measure, 2017), winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, How to Think Like a Poet (Wiseblood, 2019), and Proteus Bound: Selected Translations 2008-2020 (Franciscan, forthcoming). His work appears in periodicals such as Best American Poetry, Five Points, the Hopkins Review, the New Criterion, the Sewanee Review, and the Yale Review. Editor-in-Chief of Literary Matters, he teaches at the Catholic University of America.