W. G. Sebald
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.
