back to Georg Trakl

“Song of the Departed” by Georg Trakl 🇦🇹 (3 Feb 1887 – 3 Nov 1914)
Translated from the German by Jim Doss & Werner Schmitt
The flight of birds is full of harmonies. The green forests
In the evening have gathered to more silent huts;
The crystal meadows of the doe.
A dark shape calms the ripple of the brook, the moist shadows,
​
And the flowers of summer, which beautifully ring in the wind.
Already the forehead of the pondering man dusks.
​
And a small lamp shines, the goodness in his heart
And the peace of the meal; because bread and wine are sanctified
By God’s hands, and out of nocturnal eyes
The brother silently gazes at you, so that he rests from thorny wanderings.
O the dwelling in the soulful blueness of the night.
​
Lovingly the silence in the room also embraces the shadows of the ancestors,
The purple martyrs, lament of a mighty race,
That now dies piously in the lonely grandchild.
​
Because from black minutes of insanity the suffering/enduring one
Always awakens more radiant at the petrified threshold
And the cool blueness embraces him enormously and the bright end of autumn,
​
The still house and the telling of the forest,
Measure and law and the moony paths of the departed.