Across the land and the water: selected poems, 19642001.
W. G. Sebald.
Translator"s Introduction.
"My medium is prose," W. G. Sebald once declared in an interview, a statement that is easily misconstrued if a subtle distinction the German author added is overlooked: "... not the novel." Far from disavowing his attraction to poetic forms, Sebald"s sworn allegiance to what he called "prose" deliberately placed his work at arm"s length from the generic exactions (plot, character development, dialogue) levied by the more conventional modes of writing fiction. Indeed, it is perhaps only in reading Sebald"s poetry-whose breathing and tone, especially in the later poems, frequently recall the timbre of the narrative voices in Vertigo, The Emigrants, and The Rings of Saturn-that we may begin to sense the poetic consistency of his literary prose itself, and also that of his writing as a whole. Reversing the focus, readers of Sebald"s prose fiction who are coming to his shorter poetry for the first time may be surprised to find that many of the concerns of his acclaimed later prose works are prefigured in his earliest, most lyrical poems: borders, journeys, archives, landscapes, reading, time, memory, myth, legend, and the "median state" (Edward Said) of the exile, who is neither fully integrated into the new system nor fully free of the old. Following the development of the poetry from its lyrical beginnings to the later narrative forms, we can trace the trajectory of the author"s gradual reach for the epic scope of his work in the 1990s, a quest that, I argue, initially culminated in the tripart.i.te, book-length, narrative poem Nach der Natur (After Nature, 1988). On the way, we will discover poems to value for their singular artistic achievements: some puzzling, some dazzlingly hermetic, others deceptively slight or simple, several witty or ironic, each in its different way an encounter with life"s unresolved questions and mysteries, each gazing into the abyss of twentieth-century European history.
W. G. Sebald began publishing poetry as a student in the 1960s, and he continued to write poems throughout his life, publishing many in German and Austrian literary magazines. Among the work he had prepared for publication shortly before his untimely death in 2001 were the volumes For Years Now and Unerzahlt (Unrecounted), while a host of shorter poems that he had intended to publish in the 1970s and 1980s did not come to light until after their posthumous removal to the German Literature Archive in Marbach. Before completing his first major literary work, Nach der Natur, in the mid-1980s, Sebald had prepared and paginated, apparently for publication, two collections of shorter poems-"Schullatein" ("School Latin"), and "uber das Land und das Wa.s.ser" ("Across the Land and the Water"), consisting altogether of some ninety poems-neither of which would find its way into print. Leaving aside work that has already appeared in English in the volumes After Nature, Unrecounted, and For Years Now, the present selection of Sebald"s poetry offers a representative viewing of work from the two unpublished volumes, while at the same time collecting almost all the shorter poems published in books and journals during his lifetime, including, in an appendix, two poems written by the author in English and published, in 2000, in the Norwich-based literary journal Pretext. Readers may be curious to compare Sebald"s own English poems with those which have found their way into English through translation, setting the author"s writing in a foreign tongue against foreign translations from his mother tongue.
The present volume presents Sebald"s poetic production from the poems and publications of his student years ("Poemtrees"), across the two unpublished volumes already mentioned, and through the narrative forms of the 1990s and the turn of the millennium (gathered in the section "The Year Before Last"). Of the eighty-eight poems published here in translation for the first time, thirty-three draw on unpublished* ma.n.u.scripts deposited for the Estate of W. G. Sebald at the German Literature Archive, while fifty-five are translations of poems in the German volume uber das Land und das Wa.s.ser (Across the Land and the Water), edited by Sven Meyer in 2008. The question that naturally arises is why Sebald did not publish "School Latin" or "Across the Land and the Water" after their completion-probably in 1975 and 1984 respectively. There may be no single answer to this question, but one explanation points to what could be called an "epic" or "narrative" turn in Sebald"s writing during the mid-1980s. In order to understand how this came about, it is necessary to briefly describe the sequence and composition of some of the ma.n.u.scripts deposited in the writer"s archive in Marbach.
Sebald"s papers, as we shall see, reveal the movement of his poetic work since the mid-1960s as a kind of "rolling" project or cascade, culminating in the publication of Nach der Natur (After Nature) in 1988. Significantly, however, the three sections of this volume were completed somewhat earlier, with the middle section completed by 1984. It is likely that this and the next year were decisive, marking both the moment of Sebald"s turn to longer narrative forms and, simultaneously, the provisional curtailment of his plan to publish a volume of shorter poems. The three sections of Nach der Natur first appeared in the Austrian journal Ma.n.u.skripte: "And If I Remained by the Outermost Sea" (October 1984); "As the Snow on the Alps" (June 1986); and "Dark Night Sallies Forth" (March 1987). Michael Hamburger"s English translation After Nature, whose three sections I have cited here, was published in 2002.
What the papers in the Marbach archive show us is that Sebald"s typescript volume "School Latin" inherited poems from an even earlier, albeit more fragmentary, file: "Poemtrees," more a loose bundle of poems than a collection. Twelve poems from this earliest grouping, which are included in the present volume as the first twelve translations in the section "Poemtrees," represent Sebald"s earliest publications, appearing in a Freiburg students" magazine (196465). The collection "School Latin" supplied seventeen poems, many of them in revised versions-to the subsequent collection "Across the Land and the Water." Similarly, the final section of this volume, consisting of the full text of "And If I Remained by the Outermost Sea," went on to form the second of the three sections of After Nature. Furthermore, the third and final section of After Nature ("Dark Night Sallies Forth") incorporates at least eighteen shorter poems, half of them in their entirety and all of them cut from the typescript of "Across the Land and the Water." Whole poems that Sebald pasted verbatim into the final section of After Nature have not been included in the present volume.
In conclusion, Sebald"s decision, in 1984, to publish the final section of "Across the Land and the Water" in Ma.n.u.skripte, and-possibly in the same year-to allow "Dark Night Sallies Forth" to "cannibalize" the shorter poems of "Across the Land and the Water," heralded the beginning of an entirely new poetic project and paved the way for the completed typescript of the tripart.i.te narrative poem Nach der Natur to be sent to various publishers in November of 1985. At the same time, however, the concomitant attenuation of the "uber das Land und das Wa.s.ser" typescript effectively ended any plans the author may have harbored to publish a collection of poems based on the material a.s.sembled since "Poemtrees." Some readers may agree with W. G. Sebald that prose was the medium to which his hand was best suited. Poems written after the mid-1980s, however, not only make it clear that poetry remained an important medium to Sebald until the end of his life (as volumes such as For Years Now and Unerzahlt [Unrecounted] attest) but also suggest that, had events unfolded differently, he might have returned to the project of a.s.sembling a volume-one that would surely have included many of the later poems in the present collection.
W. G. Sebald"s poems present the translator with a number of quandaries, at least one of which does not derive from disparities between the English and the German languages, or directly from the poet"s wide-ranging allusiveness. The problem I am referring to arises because the translation-in bodying forth a poem that claims to address exactly the same subject that the poem does in German, and even to represent the author"s language-has no choice but to turn itself into a vehicle of the very difficulties that may have prompted Sebald"s poem in the first place. This is most evident in relation to two of the poet"s perennial and interrelated concerns: reading and memory. Many of Sebald"s poems, for example, address elisions, or repression and suppression of memory, texts, and other forms of discourse. However sincerely motivated, however close to the source, the translation of a poem "perpetrates" just such elision. For in order to offer the best possible guidance to a text in the course of its transformation in the new hermeneutic environment, the translator must change not merely a few items but every single word of the poem. Even names-Kunigunde, Badenweiler, Landsberg, Hindenburg-have a different sound, with different connotations, and are likely to be read from a different perspective in the target language.
Entry to a new cultural context transfigures the poem and evidently regenerates its testimony. It may be argued, however, that this difficulty merely leads to a frequently visited aporia-that logical cul-de-sac whose sole outcome is to posit the impossibility of translation-and that by redefining the boundaries of the problem we can liberate the translator from the cavil of misrepresentation. For does not the poem itself-which the translation, by some sleight of hand, actually pretends to be, and whose movement it purports to reenact-construct perspectives from which it will be read, opening certain routes to the understanding of its world and, consequently, eliding others? The translation, inventing the original word by word (for without a translation there is no original), follows the "hard act" of the poem, rebuilding its place in a new terrain. In so doing, it harbors the hope that as many new readings of the poem will be added as those which, inevitably, have been lost. For in the end, the survival and continuing promise of the poem depend on just such access to new and engaging environments of intellectual sophistication and skillful acts of reading.
"Reading" in Sebald"s poetry, however, is a process that not only responds to text. His poems read paintings, towns, buildings, landscapes, dreams, and historical figures. The result is an encyclopedic wealth of literary allusion and cultural reference, much of which may not be named in the text itself. Sebald"s sentences can not only contain pitfalls but thread an uncomfortably narrow ledge along the abyss of what, in one poem, he calls "the history / of torture a travers les ages" ("Bleston"). The difficulties this creates for the translator are self-evident. Words are by nature as precise as they are ambiguous, and the translator must in each case explore the field of reference, resonance, and determination in the source text and language before deciding on one word rather than another. With Sebald"s poems, such explorations can prove long and complex, leading the explorer to a plethora of attendant historical and cultural "dark matter," in relation to which the poem itself may appear deceptively straightforward and even slight. Sometimes this dark matter-however aware the translator needs to be of its existence-does not, in the end, affect the words of a translation in any pivotal way.
Allow me to offer an example that will take us into the heart of the difficulty of translating Sebald"s poetry. Many of the poems in this volume-which opens with a train journey-reenact travel "across" various kinds of land and water (even if the latter is only the fluid of dreams). Indeed, several, as the writer"s archive reveals, were actually written "on the road," penned on hotel stationery, menus, the backs of theatre programs, in cities that Sebald visited. Train journeys const.i.tute the most frequently recorded mode of travel. The following poem may refer to one such journey. "Irgendwo," translated in English as "Somewhere," was probably written in the late 1990s and originally belonged to the sequence of "micropoems" that provided the material for Sebald"s posthumous collection Unerzahlt (Unrecounted), published in 2003: Somewhere.
behind Turkenfeld a spruce nursery.
a pond in the moor on which the March ice is slowly melting.
With its evocation of a wintry landscape and the suggestion that a thaw is on its way, this apparently simple poem seems nothing short of idyllic. The invitation to research possible frames of reference is expressed solely by the place name Turkenfeld: a small town-indeed, hardly more than a village-in the Furstenfeldbruck area of Upper Bavaria, on the so-called Allgau line, a route that Sebald would have taken often enough between Sonthofen and Munich. However, it is well for a translator to be aware that landscapes in Sebald"s work are rarely as innocent as they seem. The phrase "behind Turkenfeld" is itself already an indication of "how hard it is"-in the words of what could almost be read as a programmatic poem opening the present collection-"to understand the landscape / as you pa.s.s in a train / from here to there / and mutely it / watches you vanish." In this metaphorical sense, the poem puts the traveler"s gaze itself at the center of its encounter with a cryptic landscape, exploring the difficulty of inciting a historical topography to return that gaze by divulging its secrets. Many of Sebald"s poems enact the battle of the intellect and senses with the hermetic or repellent face of history"s surface layers. The impression is one of traveling across a land in which the catastrophic events of the twentieth century have left a pattern of shallow graves under the almost pathologically hygienic and tidy upper stratum of civilization. What, then, is "behind" Turkenfeld?
The only thing this "mute" landscape divulges to the traveler-reader is its name, a sign linking the idyll of the poem to the "dark matter" of its cultural-historical ambience. The poem shows us only the unsettled gaze. To the close reader of landscapes, however, the name itself is enough to admit the "cold draught" (the t.i.tle of another poem more visibly "freighted" than this one) of a relatively recent yet already almost forgotten history into the s.p.a.ce of the poem. Research tells us that one of the ninety-four sub-camps linked to Dachau was constructed in Turkenfeld, though it was never used. The surrounding landscape is the site of the eleven external camps of the Kaufering network of satellite camps. These were set up to facilitate arms manufacture in underground caverns and caves in an effort to evade Allied bombing, the geological composition of the Landsberg area proving favorable to construction of ma.s.sive underground installations. Turkenfeld was formerly a station on the Allgaubahn, and the railway linking Dachau with Kaufering and Landsberg, known as the Blutbahn ("the blood track"), pa.s.sed through Turkenfeld. As many as 28,838 Jewish prisoners were transported along this line from Auschwitz and Dachau to Kaufering to work as slaves on the construction of the underground aircraft plants Diana II and Walnu II. Some 14,500 died in the plant or were transported, when they had become too weak to work, back through Turkenfeld to the gas chambers. Our first unknowing reading of the poem, and with it the poem"s own translation of an unruffled, apparently unremarkable landscape "mutely" watching us "vanish," points to the perilous consequences of our loss of cultural memory. "To perceive the aura of an object we look at," wrote Walter Benjamin, referring more to the work of art than to landscapes, "means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return." Our struggle to "understand" the mute historical holdings of Sebald"s poetic landscapes in pa.s.sing-a form of engagement that his poems frequently invite the reader to explore-brings us face to face with our failure to make the crucial investment that Benjamin describes.
In translating this volume, I have enjoyed the advice, experience, and expertise of several people I should like to thank here. First and foremost among these is Sven Meyer, the editor of the German volume uber das Land und das Wa.s.ser, published by Hanser Verlag in Munich, whose groundbreaking work paved my own path to the Marbach archives. I have discussed aspects of W. G. Sebald"s poetry and writing life with a number of the author"s friends and colleagues, including Philippa Comber; Thomas Honickel; the late Michael Hamburger; Anne Beresford; Albrecht Rasche, the author"s friend during his Freiburg student days; Reinbert Tabbert, the young poet"s colleague at the University of Manchester in 1966 and 1967; and Jo Catling, his later colleague at the University of East Anglia. I am indebted to all of them for their helpful, and often extensive, responses to my queries. I am grateful to Volkmar Vogt of the Archiv Soziale Bewegung for supplying me with copies of Sebald"s early publications in the journal Freiburger Studenten-Zeitung; to the Estate of W. G. Sebald and the staff of the German Literature Archive in Marbach for giving their support to this project; and to the Inst.i.tute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities in Edinburgh, where some of the initial work for this volume was undertaken. Last but not least, I owe a special debt to Karen Leeder, who kindly provided critical comments, invaluable to me, on early drafts of the translations that follow.
Iain Galbraith.
* The hitherto unpublished German poems will appear in the journal Akzente (Munich) in December 2011.
A Note on the Text.
In the translations that follow, punctuation and orthography (e.g., in proper nouns) are generally consistent with the author"s typescripts, as held in the W. G. Sebald Archive at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach, or, in the case of material already published in German, with the texts of poems in journals and books, as sourced in the notes that conclude this volume. Accordingly, occasional irregularities or punctuational inconsistencies in the source texts have been retained in the present edition. Words and phrases that appear in English in the German poems are identified in the endnotes.
For how hard it is to understand the landscape as you pa.s.s in a train from here to there and mutely it watches you vanish.
A colony of allotments uphill into the fall.
Dead leaves swept into heaps.
Soon-on Sat.u.r.day- a man will set them alight.
Smoke will stir no more, no more the trees, now evening closes on the colors of the village.
An end is come to the workings of shadow.
The response of the landscape expects no answer.
The intention is sealed of preserved signs.
Come through rain the address has smudged.
Suppose the "return"
at the end of the letter!
Sometimes, held to the light, it reads: "of the soul."
Nymphenburg Hedges have grown over palace and court.
A forgotten era of fountains and chandeliers behind facades, serenades and strings, the colors of the mauves.
The guides mutter through sandalwood halls of the Wishing Table in the libraries of princes past.
Epitaph On duty on a stretch in the Alpine foothills the railway clerk considers the essence of the tear-off calendar.
With bowed back Rosary Hour waits outside for admittance to the house The clerk knows: he must take home this interval without delay Schattwald in Tyrol The signs are gathered settled at dusk"s edge carved in wood bled and blackened printed on the mountain Hawthorn in the hedgerow along a length of path black against winter"s papyrus the Rosetta stone In the house of shadows where the legend rises the deciphering begins Things are different from the way they seem Confusion among fellow travelers was ever the norm Hang up your hat in the halfway house Remembered Triptych of a Journey from Brussels White over the vineyard by Sankt Georgen white falls the snow across the courtyard and on the label of an orange-crate from Palestine.
White over black is the blossom of the trees near Meran in Ezra"s hanging garden.
Autumn in mind April waits in the memory painted on walnut like the life of Francis of a.s.sisi.
At the end of September on the battlefield at Waterloo fallow gra.s.s grows over the blood of the lost Marie-Louises of Empereur Bonaparte you can get there by bus at the Pet.i.te-Espinette stop change for Huizingen a stately home, sheltered by ivy, transformed into the Belgian Royal Ornithological Research and Observation Unit of the University of Brussels.
On the steps I met Monsieur Serge Creuve, painter, and his wife Dunja- he does portraits in red chalk on rough paper of rich people"s children from Genesius-Rhode.-Lures them into the house with the unique WC, well-known to neighbors.-One does like to visit an artist.
"Shall we buy the ferme in Genappe?"
In the evening at Rhode-St. Genese a timid vegetable man carries his wares up garden paths past savage dogs to the gate, for instance, of the Marquise of O."s villa.
A woman"s mouth is always killed by roses.
As a lodger on the third floor- the red sisal only goes up to the second- of Mme. Muller"s Cafeteria five minutes" walk from the Bois de la Cambre I"m the successor to Robert Stehmer student from Marshall Missouri.
Gold-rimmed jug-and-bowl on the dresser a hunting scene over the Vertiko cabinet door to an east-facing balcony.-At night noises on the road to Charleroi.
Chestnuts fell from their husks in the rain.
I saw them in the morning glossy on the sand of the patio.
I saw them in the morning- taking tea and Cook Swiss to be eaten with a knife and fork.
I saw them in the morning waiting behind the curtain for a trip to town in quest of Brueghel at the Musee Royal.
Depart quai huit minuit seize le train pour Milan via St. Gotthard I recognized Luxemburg by the leaves on its trees then came industrie chimique near Thionville, light above the heavenly vaults Bahnhof von Metz, Strasbourg Cathedral bien eclairee.-Between thresholds lines from Gregorius, the guote sundaere, from Au near Freiburg, rechtsrheinisch, not visible from Colmar-Haut Rhin.
Early morning in Basel, printed on hand-made Rhine-washed lumpy paper under the supervision of Erasmus of Rotterdam by Froben & Company, fifteen hundred and six.
Men on military service bound for Balsthal in the Jura shaved and cropped, several smoking, outside all changed.
Route of all images light gray river-sand ruddy hair minding swollen shadows lances and willows White leaf, you Green leaf, me Rafael, Yoknapatawpha, Light in August between leaves anxious mellowing before birth as a shadow over the sunny road Go to the Aegean to Santorini Land of basalt phosph.o.r.escence on the rudder Hold the water in your hand: it glows-at night- aubergines in front of the house shadowy in the dark against the whitewashed wall bright green in daytime purple raffia-threaded in the sun.
Life Is Beautiful Days when At the crack of dawn The early bird Squats in my kitchen.
It shows me the worm Which sooner than later Will lead me up the garden path.
I"ve already bought My pig in a poke It"s all Tom or d.i.c.k Kids or caboodle In the home and castle.
My day is truly Wrecked.
Matins for G.
There he stood In the early morn And wanted in.
It"s warm In front of the fire.
Lug a-c.o.c.k The man waited For some response To his knock.
Came a bawl from within: Jesus Mary A pain in the neck In the early morn.
Where no kitchen There no cook.
We don"t need no King.
The man has heard As much before.
He has heard enough.
Right then: all or nothing.
Winter Poem The valley resounds With the sound of the stars With the vast stillness Over snow and forest.
The cows are in their byre.
G.o.d is in his heaven.
Child Jesus in Flanders.
Believe and be saved.
The Three Wise Men Are walking the earth.
Lines for an Alb.u.m Quick as a wink, a star Falls from heaven Like nothing That grows on trees.
Now make a wish But don"t tell a soul Or it won"t come true Ready or not Here I come!
Bleston
A Mancunian Cantical
I. Fete nocturne
I know there exists A shuttered world mute And without image but for example The starlings have forgotten their old life No longer flying back to the south Staying in Bleston all winter In the snowless lightless month Of December swarming during the day From soot-covered trees, thousands of them In the sky over All Saints Park Screaming at night in the heart In the brain of the city huddled together Sleepless on the sills of Lewis"s Big Warehouse Between Victorian patterns And roses life was a matter Of death and cast its shadows Now that death is all of life I wish to inquire Into the whereabouts of the dead Animals none of which I have ever seen
II. Consensus Omnium
In eternity perhaps All we experience Becomes bitter Bleston Founded by Cn. Agricola Between seventy and eighty A.D.