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Georg Trakl in the vision of Midjourney

Gross Eduard
2 min readApr 20, 2023

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I asked Midjourney to depict “Childhood Memory” by Georg Trakl. Austrian poet Georg Trakl was born in Salzburg in 1887. Despite having a brief life — he passed early in 1914 at 27 — he left behind a significant body of melancholy and expressionist poetry. Themes of death, decay, and the paranormal are explored in Trakl’s poetry, which has a dreamy and menacing air. His writing was frequently contrasted with that of Arthur Rimbaud and Rainer Maria Rilke.

Here is a translation of the aforementioned poem:

Childhood Memory

by Georg Trakl

The sun shines alone in the afternoon,

And quietly the tone of the honey-bees wavers off.

In the garden the sisters’ voices whisper -

There the boy listens in the wooden shed,

Still fevering over book and picture.

Weary the linden-trees wilt immersed in the blue.

A heron hangs motionless drowned in the ether,

By the fence fantastic shadow-shapes play.

The sisters go quietly into the house,

And soon their white clothes glimmer

Vaguely from bright rooms,

And confused the bushes’ bluster dies down.

The boy strokes the cat’s hair,

Bewitched by the mirror of her eyes.

An organ-sound far away on the hill

Lifts wonderfully into heaven.

Image generated by prompting the whole poem in Midjourney

The results are unexpected for Georg Trakl’s poetry, but it is certainly a depiction of Trakl’s universe such as he surely did not imagine. I will repeat this experiment with other poems. I’ll keep you updated.

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Gross Eduard
Gross Eduard

Written by Gross Eduard

Eduard-Claudiu Gross is a PhD student with a particular interest in researching the digital space and the impact of emerging technology on the individual.

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