Between Melancholy and Drunkenness: Composing Sebastian im Traum

ONE SIGN OF Trakl's more sustained literary productivity in the two years between autumn 1912 and summer 1914 is the relative speed with which he was able to start planning a new book after the appearance of Gedichte in July 1913. Just six months later he already had sufficient material to set about compiling a further collection (W, 156), a first complete version of which he submitted to the Kurt Wolff Verlag in Leipzig in early March 1914 (HkA, 1/533). He received notification of its acceptance one month later from Wolff in person, who told the poet that the script had made “einen starken Eindruck” on him (HkA, 2/796); Wolff was the first of many readers in whom Sebastian im Traum would provoke a similar or even stronger response. Trakl's work on the book continued for several further months, involving a revision no less thorough than the one to which he had subjected Gedichte a year earlier. His initial division of the collection into three numbered parts (HkA, 2/807) became a division into five cycles, the first four taking their titles from one of the poems they contain, the last consisting solely of the long prose poem “Traum und Umnachtung” (HkA, 145–50); several poems were replaced with others written in the meantime; at least one poem among the late additions, “Abendland” (HkA, 1/139–40), was itself significantly shortened and reworked in the second half of May (HkA, 1/537); and the order and contents of at least one of the new cycles—Gesang des Abgeschiedenen—was altered to render it “unvergleichlich geschlossener und besser,” a judgment with which the poet was confident his publisher would concur (HkA, 1/538). Trakl's preoccupation with his new collection is apparent in the extent to which discussion of the book with Wolff and his colleagues dominates his surviving correspondence of the spring and early summer of 1914, and the extant letters show that the discussion must have been even more extensive. For example, further alterations to the collection's fourth cycle must have been specified after June 10, because even the “tighter and better” version detailed in Trakl's letter of that date does not fully correspond to its published form.