Christian Hawkey

Two Trakls

Piotr Gwiazda
Kraków, the city where Trakl died in 1914.

The poetry of Georg Trakl (1887–1914) has attracted numerous English translators, from Eugene Jolas in 1927 to Robert Firmage, Stephen Tapscott, and James Reidel only within the last decade. In the twentieth century, composers like Anton von Webern and Paul Hindemith set Trakl’s poems to music, producing what Roman Jakobson calls “intersemiotic transpositions.” In addition, in recent years, two poets, Christian Hawkey and Daniele Pantano, subjected Trakl’s work to recreative processes that go beyond the conventional notion of translation.

Notes on the translational Gothic

Or, how the weird enters the world, part two

Joe Milutis
The poems of George Trakl mulling/translating themselves in preparation for Chri
The poems of George Trakl mulling/translating themselves in preparation for Christian Hawkey's ‘Ventrakl.’ Image courtesy the artist.

The term “Gothic” is marvelously, if disconcertingly, fluid, designating at times both barbarian horde and proto-nationalist regime, pagan chieftain and Christian theocrat, aesthetic atrocity and high art; thus to speak of the “translational Gothic” is to speak of both the wild mutations possible through “infidel” translation and the wild translations implicit in the survival of the term Gothic itself. John Ruskin describes the Gothic as “the rough mineral … submitted to [the analysis] of the chemist, entangled with many other foreign substances, itself perhaps in no place pure, or ever to be obtained or seen in purity for more than an instant.” He nevertheless thinks that this instant — knit into the mess of centuries — is definable, much like Walter Benjamin’s faith in a translation that only momentarily, fleetingly touches upon the meaning of the original — or the meaning of “originality,” for that matter.

Ashbery's silences sampled

'It reads a kind of ecopoetics back into the poet’s auditory performance.'

Al Filreis

In the spring of 2012, Christian Hawkey was invited to participate in a festival celebrating John Ashbery at the New School (called How to Continue: Ashbery Across the Arts). Each participant — poets, dancers, filmmakers — was invited to engage his or her work using a variety of media and disciplines, and Hawkey chose to explore his audio archives, or rather, the various recordings of John Ashbery that Pennsound has compiled over the years, beginning with his 1961 reading for the Living Theater. 

He became especially interested in listening to the room tone and background noise in all the recordings: the recorded texture of the room, the sound made by the recording device itself, and the non-vocal presence of Ashbery himself (a page turning, lighting a cigarette, sipping from glass of water and swallowing). Working with a friend, the artist Simone Kearney, Hawkey scanned the roughly 45 extant recordings on Pennsound to find, in each one, a clip of “silence” — a brief 3-to-7-second non-vocal moment (longer proved impossible to find) between poems, or between commentary and poems, or between title and poem. They then assembled the clips into one audio file.

It was surprisingly difficult to do this, they found, since most sound engineers remove as much dead sound and background sound as possible, or they snip off the silence at the beginning or end of a reading.

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