05/05/2021 W. G.

Sebald’s Poetry of the Disregarded | The New Yorker

Page-Turner

W. G. Sebald’s Poetry of the

Disregarded
By Teju Cole
April 5, 2012

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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 re ections 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.

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“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 fties
when the rst 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 in uence 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,

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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 rst 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 magni cent corpus. Some of these later
poems are bracingly concise, a compression underscored by the way titles frequently also serve as
rst lines:

Somewhere

Behind Türkenfeld
a spruce nursery
a pond in the
moor on which
the March ice
is slowly melting

It’s a ne 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

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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

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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.

Teju Cole is the author of four books, including the novel “Open City” and the essay
collection “Known and Strange Things.” His newest book is “Blind Spot.”

More: Teju Cole W. G. Sebald

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