De Profundis By Georg Trakl

This summer I decided to read one book and two poems (one classical and one contemporary) from Austria. The classical poem I read was De Profundis, by Georg Trakl. This poem is about death, and specifically a disease. However, is not only about death but about his death. He shows it to us by saying: "Spiders look for my heart". A poem that is very different from this one, is the poem The Black Death, by Matthew Henning. Both poems talk about death and a disease, however, there is a very big difference. In the poem De Profundis, the author talks in a way which shows he does not want to die, while in Henning's poem, we can see he is scared and wants this disease to disappear: "Will the slop of our miserable lives ever be washed clean?"
The other
poem I read was the contemporary poem called As soon as the cybermen. This poem talks about the similarity of the humans and the cybermen, as the author wrote: "they play the piano/ procreate discreetly in the attic/". In addition, the author also writes that the only ways to deal with them, if they start acting like us, are: "... to mutate into angles/ or/ rather more likely/ turn outrageously evil". This poem is very similar to a Brazilian poem called Poema do amor fóssil, by António Gedeão. These two poems share a common topic, which is our future with the cybermen. Gedeão talks specifically about the feelings we have and the cybermen don't have: "Que palavras há-de o poeta reservar/para o coração de plástico dos homens que hão-de vir?". The book I read is called Greed, by Elfriede Jelinek. This book is about a country policeman who kills a 16-year old girl and dumps her in the lake. The author tells the story in a way I'm not used to. She develops the plot very little, and instead of developing it, she talks about other issues, such as environmental issues. The main one she talks about is the water of the lake: "They first took the material for the road away from the ground and then gave back cheap water in return"(Jelinek, 58). What she is saying is that when they take the material from the lake, the lake will be unstable because it will be "missing"something. This book is different, in the environmental issues aspect, from the Brazilian book called Capitães de Areia, by Jorge Amado. Instead of criticizing nature in his book, he admires it, especially the ocean: "o mistério do mar-oceano, as noites diante dele eram de um verde escuro, quase negras, daquela cor misteriosa que é a cor do mar à noite".