W. G. Sebald’s Poetry of the Disregarded

Posted by Teju Cole

 

Throughout his career, W. G. Sebald wrote poems that were strikingly similar to his prose. His tone, in both genres, was always understated but possessed of a mournful grandeur. To this he added a willful blurring of literary boundaries and, in fact, almost all his writing, and not just the poetry and prose, comprised history, memoir, biography, autobiography, art criticism, scholarly arcana, and invention. This expert mixing of forms owed a great deal to his reading of the seventeenth-century melancholics Robert Burton and Thomas Browne, and Sebald’s looping sentences were an intentional homage to nineteenth-century German-language writers like Adalbert Stifter and Gottfried Keller. But so strongly has the style come to be associated with Sebald’s own work that even books that preceded his, such as those by Robert Walser and Thomas Bernhard, can seem, from our perspective as readers of English translations, simply “Sebaldian.”

Sebald’s reputation rests on four novels—“Vertigo,” “The Emigrants,” “The Rings of Saturn,” and “Austerlitz”—all of them reflections on the history of violence in general, and on the legacy of the Holocaust in particular. Our sense of this achievement has been enriched by his other works: the ones published in his lifetime (the lectures “On the Natural History of Destruction” and the long poem “After Nature”), and those that were released posthumously (including the essay collection “Campo Santo,” and the volumes of short poems “Unrecounted” and “For Years Now”). Sebald’s shade, like Roberto Bolaño’s, gives the illusion of being extraordinarily productive, and the publication now of “Across the Land and the Water,” billed as his “Selected Poems 1964-2001,” does not feel surprising. Ten years on, we are not quite prepared for him to put down his pen.

“Across the Land and the Water” is different from every other Sebald book in one important respect: it contains his early work. Because literary success came to him late (he was in his fifties when the first of his books was translated into English), the Sebald we know is the mature one. One of the pleasures of the present volume is the way it shows us the development of the author’s poetic voice over more than three decades, beginning in the nineteen-sixties, when he was a student. A section in one of those early poems reads:

Glass in hand

They come and go

Stop still and expect

The metamorphosis of hawthorn

In the garden outside

Time measures

Nothing but itself.

Another poem, about Manchester, contains the lines “Bleston knows an hour / Between summer and winter / Which never passes and that / Is my plan for a time / Without beginning or end.” Elsewhere, there are roses, garden paths, Victorian patterns. The guiding intelligence here, rather surprisingly, seems to be that of T. S. Eliot (an influence not so easily discernible in Sebald’s later work), in particular the vatic and circumambulatory Eliot of the “Four Quartets”.

These early poems of Sebald’s also contain the concerns that would later be seen as distinctively his. Trains feature prominently, as do borders, journeys, landscape, memories, and solitude. There is a debt to Hans Magnus Enzensberger, in the reportorial interrogation of vanished things, that would remain true of all of Sebald’s work. But what is most notable is how clotted the poems are with references, untranslated fragments from different languages, and classical allusions (Horace and Virgil seem to be particular favorites); the assemblage, unlike in his later work, can seem hectic. Nevertheless, they are a pleasure to read, thanks to the translator Iain Galbraith’s excellent endnotes, which guide the bewildered reader through the codes and secrets of the work. Without Galbraith’s notes, some of the poems are dense almost to the point of opacity:

Strasbourg Cathedral

bien éclairée.—Between thresholds

lines from Gregorius, the guote sündaere,

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

The later poems are cleaner, clearer. Many of these helped lay the groundwork for the long poem “After Nature,” Sebald’s first published book, either as sketches for ideas that would then be reworked, or as pieces that were incorporated whole. Other poems were neglected once his prose-writing career took off; gathered here, they constitute a magnificent corpus. Some of these later poems are bracingly concise, a compression underscored by the way titles frequently also serve as first lines:

Somewhere

Behind Türkenfeld

a spruce nursery

a pond in the

moor on which

the March ice

is slowly melting

It’s a fine little idyllic lyric. We are looking at small German town, perhaps, possibly as seen from a passing train. But the meaning of the poem darkens irrevocably when we read in the notes what is “behind Türkenfeld”: it was the location of one of ninety-four sub-camps linked to Dachau, and it was a station on the railway linking Dachau with the munitions towns of Kaufering and Landsberg. Sebald leaves all this out of the poem, leaves out the fact that this railway was called the Blutbahn (“the blood track”), and that many thousands were transported along this very route to their deaths. As ever, he draws us into history’s shadow in an indirect way.

But “Across the Land and the Water” is by no means a collection about the Holocaust. The material ranges widely, and among the most memorable poems it contains are those based on small incidents from the lives of historical personages. Some of these poems begin (as he began all four of his novels) with a precise date stamp. “On 9 June 1904…” opens the one about Chekhov’s last days, in which a small circle of mourners, likened to a “black velvet caterpillar,” meet Chekhov’s coffin at a train station and are overshadowed by the band assembled there to meet the coffin of a now forgotten general. “In the summer of 1836…” is the beginning of the poem about Chopin’s disappointed love for Maria Wodzinska, a great pain that he concealed for the rest of his life. A woman who did not respond to the aging Goethe’s love is the subject of another poem; Daniel Paul Schreber, a German judge who suffered from psychosis and whose “Memoirs of My Nervous Illness” were analyzed by Freud, features in yet another. As Sebald once explained in an interview, “I do like to listen to people who have been sidelined for one reason or another.” He is, among other things, a poet of the disregarded.

He had a feeling for the inanimate, too, for ruins and comminuted landscapes, places that have been reduced to their smallest units by the forces of nature and history. He is, in many of these poems, an adept of what Nabokov calls, in “Transparent Things,” “the dream life of debris.” And he understood especially well the private life of objects. As he wrote in an essay in “Unrecounted”: “Things outlast us, they know more about us than we know about them: they carry the experience they have had with us inside them and are—in fact—the book of our history opened before us.” Everywhere in “Across the Land and the Water” is a vigilance about the world of things. Greenhouses are “home-made crystal palaces,” a power station is “a sick elephant / still just breathing / through its trunk,” someone’s “pigskin suitcase gapes,” and the poem entitled “Room 645” describes, with deadpan humor, and with all the seriousness of an assistant janitor going through an inventory, the various objects in a garish hotel room in Hanover.

Sebald had a special love for paintings: they are half object, half window into another world. Recognizing that they served as self-contained Wunderkammers, he summoned their magic simply by close description of their contents. “The Rings of Saturn” ends with an evocation of Dutch landscape painting, and in “Across the Land and the Water” the last of the translated poems is “In the Paradise Landscape,” a gently ekphrastic reading of a painting by Jan Brueghel the Elder: “goat & a few sheep / two polecats or martens / a wolf a horse / a peacock a turkey / & in the foreground / at the bottom edge / two spectacled / monkeys one of which / is gingerly plucking / strawberries from a little / shrub.” A painting becomes, in Sebald’s hands, a world of enumerated wonders.

Often, in describing the actual world, he paints it similarly, detail by detail, attentive always to effects of the light. In “Calm November Weather,” he gives an account of a reading given by a Greenlandic poet that he’d attended:

…the

sounds of her feathery

language taavvi

jjuag she says the

the great darkness &

lifting her arm

qaavmaaq the

shimmering light.

What earns Sebald the gratitude and affection of readers, and makes this book a splendid addition to an already extraordinary oeuvre, is encapsulated in the fragment above: the great darkness, the shimmering light. He was able to pin both down, time and again and with impeccable technique, onto the printed page. His are the books of our history opened before us.

Photograph by Ulf Andersen / Getty Images.