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

  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