Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964-2001

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 tripartite, 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 Unerzählt (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 “Über das Land und das Wasser” (“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^[1] manuscripts deposited for the Estate of W. G. Sebald at the German Literature Archive, while fifty-five are translations of poems in the German volume Über das Land und das Wasser (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 manuscripts 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 Manuskripte: “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 (1964–65). 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 Manuskripte, 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 tripartite 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 “Über das Land und das Wasser” typescript effectively ended any plans the author may have harbored to publish a collection of poems based on the material assembled 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 Unerzählt [Unrecounted] attest) but also suggest that, had events unfolded differently, he might have returned to the project of assembling 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 à travers les âges” (“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 constitute 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 Unerzählt (Unrecounted), published in 2003:

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 Türkenfeld: a small town — indeed, hardly more than a village — in the Fürstenfeldbruck area of Upper Bavaria, on the so-called Allgäu 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 Türkenfeld” 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 pass 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” Türkenfeld?

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 title of another poem more visibly “freighted” than this one) of a relatively recent yet already almost forgotten history into the space of the poem. Research tells us that one of the ninety-four sub-camps linked to Dachau was constructed in Türkenfeld, 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 massive underground installations. Türkenfeld was formerly a station on the Allgäubahn, and the railway linking Dachau with Kaufering and Landsberg, known as the Blutbahn (“the blood track”), passed through Türkenfeld. 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 Walnuß II. Some 14,500 died in the plant or were transported, when they had become too weak to work, back through Türkenfeld 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 passing — 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 Über das Land und das Wasser, 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 Institute 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