Ventrakl

Christian Hawkey

Envisioned in the form of a scrapbook, Ventrakl folds poetry, prose, biography, translation practices, and photographic imagery into an innovative collaboration with the 19th/early 20th century Austrian Expressionist poet Georg Trakl. Like Jack Spicer’s After Lorca, translation is the central mode of composition in this book, and it is also the book’s central theme, which Hawkey explores in a surprising array of different genres and modes of writing. What evolves is a candid and deeply felt portrait of two authors – one at the beginning of the 20th century, the other at the beginning of the 21st century, one living and one dead – wrestling with fundamental concerns: how we read texts and images, how we are influenced and authored by other writers, and how the practice of translation – including mistranslation – is a way to ornament and enrich the space between literature and life.