The Austrian poet Georg Trakl (1887–1914) wrote with a singular voice that captivated a wide range of admirers: the philosophers Heidegger and Wittgenstein; fellow writers and poets like Beckett, Rilke, and Walser; and composers such as Webern and Hindemith.

Two collections of his poetry were prepared for publication during his lifetime. The vast majority of poems in the first book, Poems (1913), feature crystalline meters and regular rhyme schemes that produce a hypnotic music. In the second book, Sebastian in a Dream (1915), the reverse is true, and most poems are written in free verse.

These translations reproduce the musical experience of the first book for the English reader. Here the formal elements provide a little air, a little lift on which the poet's simple words and surprising invocations go gliding by in all their mystery.