Ventrakl

Blending verse, prose, biography, photographs and reflections on translation, Christian Hawkey's Ventrakl works in close dialogue with Georg Trakl, the German Expressionist poet who wrote at the turn of the twentieth century. Hawkey draws two writers together across roughly a century, one long dead and one working today, and the result is an intimate portrait of both.

The book keeps returning to questions about reading. It asks how we make sense of written words and pictures, how writers are shaped by those who came before them, and how the act of translating, errors included, can decorate and enlarge the territory between literature and everyday life.