The Mysterious Music of Georg Trakl
Stanley Cavell liked to talk about the two myths of reading
subscribed to by Western philosophers. “According to one myth the
philosopher must have read virtually everything, at least the whole of
Western philosophy, broadly conceived,” he wrote in his memoir, Little Did I Know (2010). The
other myth specified that philosophers, pure thinkers that they are,
should read virtually nothing. “Heidegger is an obvious exemplar of the
former myth,” Cavell observed, “Wittgenstein of the latter.”
And yet, both philosophers, the voracious reader and the seemingly reluctant one, found themselves, at pivotal moments in their careers, turning to the arresting work of the early twentieth-century Austrian poet Georg Trakl (1887–1914). Not surprisingly, Wittgenstein and Heidegger responded to Trakl’s striking and still mysterious poems in sharply divergent—one might almost say opposite—ways. James Reidel’s recently completed three-volume translation of Trakl’s major work, timed to coincide with the centennial of the poet’s suicide, allows readers to speculate on what Heidegger and Wittgenstein (along with many other poetry-lovers) may have found so alluring.
Read more at the NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
See and listen Video at Youtube: Georg Trakl, Der Herbst des Einsamen, read by Haimo L. Handl
And yet, both philosophers, the voracious reader and the seemingly reluctant one, found themselves, at pivotal moments in their careers, turning to the arresting work of the early twentieth-century Austrian poet Georg Trakl (1887–1914). Not surprisingly, Wittgenstein and Heidegger responded to Trakl’s striking and still mysterious poems in sharply divergent—one might almost say opposite—ways. James Reidel’s recently completed three-volume translation of Trakl’s major work, timed to coincide with the centennial of the poet’s suicide, allows readers to speculate on what Heidegger and Wittgenstein (along with many other poetry-lovers) may have found so alluring.
Read more at the NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
See and listen Video at Youtube: Georg Trakl, Der Herbst des Einsamen, read by Haimo L. Handl
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