Trakl has a famous saying: "The soul is a stranger on the earth." Man wanders around the world endlessly, pursuing dreams that he cannot be sure of. All this may just be because life is a kind of By chance, the ideal is always on the other side, so no matter where you are in the world, you are still in a foreign land. ?
This poem makes us feel that we are suddenly in a popular concept. According to this popular conception, the earth is an earthly thing in the sense of a fleeting thing; the soul, on the other hand, is seen as an eternal and transcendent thing. Since Plato's teachings, the soul has been attributed to the supersensible realm. And if the soul appears in the sensible realm, it has merely fallen into it.
Here, "earth" is out of tune with the soul. The soul does not belong to the earth. The soul is here a "foreigner" (ein Fremdes). The body is a prison for the soul, or even worse. Therefore, there seems to be no other way out for the soul except to leave the realm of sensibility as quickly as possible; and in Plato's way, the realm of sensibility consists of non-real beings, only corrupt ones.
But how strange!
This verse actually comes from a poem entitled "Spring of the Soul" (pp. 149-150) [page number according to Trakl published by Otto-Müller Verlag (Salzburg) The first volume of his book "Poetry". The 1948 6th edition is used here. The complete collection of poems edited by his friend Carl Loeke was first published in 1917 by Kurt-Wulf Verlag (Leipzig).
The new edition (with biographical and reminiscence materials) was edited by K. Ovitz and published by Ehe Verlag (Zurich) in 1946. ——Original note]. The poem says nothing about the otherworldly home of the immortal soul. We are to think deeply, and better yet, pay attention to the poet's language. Soul: "Stranger".
In other poems, Trakl often likes to use other expressions, such as: "Mortal death" (page 55), "Dark One" (pages 78, 170, 177, 195) , "lonely one" (p. 78), "declining person" (p. 101), "sick person" (p. 113, 171), "human person" (p. 114), "old person" (p. 138 page), "the dead" (page 171), "the silent ones" (page 196).
Regardless of the differences in content of these expressions, their meanings are also different. "Lonely" and "foreigner" can refer to something individual, which is "lonely" under any circumstances, and accidentally "foreign" from a special and limited perspective. This kind of "foreigner" can be classified into the general category of foreigners. From this point of view, the soul may be just one of many situations of being a stranger.
But what does "foreign land" mean? People usually understand foreign lands as unfamiliar things, things that make people uninterested, and things that make people more troubled and uneasy. However, the so-called "foreign" (fremd), that is, "fram" in Old High German, basically means: to go somewhere else, on the way to..., contrary to what has been maintained before. Strangers wander first.
But it is not aimless and aimless. The stranger, in his search, moves toward a place in which he can remain a wanderer. Almost without knowing it, the "stranger" has heeded the call and is on the road to its own homeland.
The poet named the soul "the stranger on the earth." The place that the wandering soul has not been able to reach so far is precisely the earth. The soul first seeks the earth and does not hide from it.
Seeking the earth while wandering so that it can poetically build and dwell on it, and thus saving the earth as earth - this is the realization of the essence of the soul. The soul, therefore, is by no means first of all a soul, and moreover returns to the earth for whatever reason. Instead, this verse names the essence of that thing called "soul."
This verse does not contain any statement about this essentially familiar soul, as if it were merely a supplement to establish that the soul had encountered something incompatible and therefore strange, that is, : It finds neither shelter nor welcome on earth. On the contrary, judging from the basic characteristics of its essence, the soul is a "stranger on the earth" as a soul.
So, it is always on the way and follows its own essential form in its wanderings. At this moment, a question comes to us, that is: Where are the steps of the "foreigner" in the above sense called? A stanza from the third part of the poem "Sebastian in a Dream" (page 107) gives the answer:
Oh, what a silent march, down the blue river
Thinking about the forgotten, in the green bushes at this moment
The blackbird calls the stranger to decline.
The soul is called to decline. I see! The soul is about to end its wanderings in the world and leave the earth. Although the verses above do not say this, they do speak of "decline." Indeed. However, the so-called decline here is neither a disaster nor a simple disappearance in decadence. Those who go down the blue river,
It declines in peace and silence.
--"Beautiful Autumn Day" (page 34)
In what kind of peace? In the peace of the dead. But what kind of dead person was that? And in what kind of silence?
Soul, a stranger on the earth.
The poem that contains this sentence continues:
...full of spirits, hazy blue light
shrouded in the vast jungle...
The sun has been mentioned before. The steps of a stranger enter into the haze. "Hazy" first means getting darker. "Blue light hazy". Could it be that the blue light on a sunny day tends to become darker? Is it because night falls and the blue light disappears in the evening? But "hazy" doesn't just mean the fading of the day, or the day's light falling into darkness.
Fundamentally, obscurity does not necessarily mean decline. The morning light is also hazy. Day rises with morning. Haziness also arises. The blue light is hazy, shrouding the "wild" jungle covered with thorns. The blue light of night rises in the evening.
Extended information
Georg Trakl was born in Salzburg in 1887. His father was a small hardware merchant. He studied pharmacology in Vienna in 1908 and graduated in 1910. He later worked as a pharmacist. After the outbreak of World War I, he was drafted into the Austrian army and worked as a hygienist on the front line. However, the brutal war made him almost insane and he attempted suicide. He was then sent to a mental hospital, where he died soon after.
Character introduction
Family background
Georg Trakl was born in Salzburg, Austria on February 3, 1887, the same year that Mozart hometown. Trakl has been involved in an abnormal love relationship with his sister Grete since he was a teenager, as a transference to the love of his cold mother, whose only and fanatical hobby is to stay in a room all day and collect many antiques. meditate in the cabin.
In contrast, his loyal and honest father, a diligent hardware merchant, gave the Trakl siblings the warmest care. In this way, love for his father, hatred for his mother (perhaps still a love), and awareness of his sister's guilt are intertwined into Trakl's dark emotions that linger throughout his life.
Drug use in youth
Tracker began writing poetry when he was in middle school. At that time, he read the poems of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, and deeply understood their preference for "dead", "rotting" and "corpse". Of course, what is considered "fun" to the French is "deathly serious" to Trakl. He was also familiar with the piano and liked the grandeur of Liszt and the gentleness of Chopin, which was reflected in his later poems, which were naturally full of musical rhythm and exceptionally beautiful.
When he was 18 years old, he started taking drugs, and it is said that he had three purposes: to experience a ecstatic spiritual state; to forget the pain; and to consciously self-destruct. Undoubtedly, he did pay a sufficient price for this. He failed many subjects and was forced to drop out of school; in the end, he died here.
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