by W. G. Sebald
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
* 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 pass 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 Saturday—
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 façades,
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 Assisi.
At the end of September on the
battlefield at Waterloo fallow grass grows
over the blood of the lost Marie-Louises
of Empereur Bonaparte
you can get there by bus
at the Petite-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. Genèse
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. Müller’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 Musée Royal.
Départ 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 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
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
phosphorescence 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 dick
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-cock
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.
God is in his heaven.
Child Jesus in Flanders.
Believe and be saved.
The Three Wise Men
Are walking the earth.
Lines for an Album
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. Fête 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.
Appears in the ensuing
Era to have been
A bleak and forsaken place
Bleston knows an hour
Between summer and winter
Which never passes and that
Is my plan for a time
Without beginning or end
Bleston Mamucium Place of
Breast-like hills
The weather changes
It is late in our year
Dis Manibus Mamucium
Hoc faciendum curavi
III. The Sound of Music
An unfamiliar lament
And the astonishment that
Sadness exists—one’s own
Never the other of those who suffer
Of those whose right it really is
Life is uncomplaining in view of the history
Of torture à travers les âges Bleston
Uncomplaining is this mythology without gods
The mere shadow of a feast-day phantom
Of a defunct feast-day Bleston
From time to time the howls
Of animals in the zoological
Department reach my ears
While I hold in my hands
The burnt husks of burnt chestnuts
The silence of revelation
Sharon’s Full Gospel—the sick are
Miraculously healed before our eyes
The ships lie offshore
Waiting in the fog
IV. Lingua Mortua
He couldn’t help it Kebad Kenya
If the years of all humanity lay
Strewn abou
t him in their thousands debris
Erratic and glacial white in the moonlight
Reclining in silence on the river of time
Hipasos of Metapontum by the Gulf of Tarentum
Made bronze disks of varying thickness ring out
Five hundred years before Christ
Et pulsae referent ad sidera valles—
It was Pythagoras however of whom it was said
He possessed the secret of listening to the stars
The valleys of Bleston do not echo
And with them is no more returning
Word without answer fil d’Ariane until your blood
Hunts you down with opgekilte schottns
Alma quies optata veni nam sic sine vita
Vivere quam suave est sic sine morte mori
Only in the wasteland does Rapunzel find bliss
With the blind man Bleston my ashes
In the wind of your dreams
V. Perdu dans ces filaments
But the certitude nonetheless
That a human heart
Can be crushed—Eli Eli
The choice between Talmud and Torah
Is hard and there is no relying
On Bleston’s libraries
Where for years now I have sought
With my hands and eyes the misplaced
Books which so they say Mr. Dewey’s
International classification system
With all its numbers still cannot record
A World Bibliography of Bibliographies
On ne doit plus dormir says Pascal
A revision of all books at the core
Of the volcano has been long overdue
In this cave within a cave
No glance back to the future survives
Reading star-signs in winter one must
Cut from pollard willows on snowless fields
Flutes of death for Bleston
Didsbury
Sunday was fed
Up to the teeth
