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A review by keight
Across the Land and the Water by W.G. Sebald
4.0
Translator Iain Galbraith’s introduction is one of the best parts of this book, as it includes “an example … of the difficulty of translating Sebald’s poetry”:
Many of the poems in this volume—which opens with a train journey—reenact travel “across” various kinds of land and water (even if the latter is only the fluid of dreams). Indeed, several, as the writer’s archive reveals, were actually written “on the road,” penned on hotel stationery, menus, the backs of theatre programs, in cities that Sebald visited.
He goes on to talk about a poem titled “Somewhere” that involves a small town called Türkenfeld, which is an area Sebald would have passed through often, yet:
… it is well for a translator to be aware that landscapes in Sebald’s work are rarely as innocent as they seem…. In the metaphorical sense, the poem puts the traveler’s gaze itself at the center of its encounter with a cryptic landscape, exploring the difficulty of inciting a historical topography to return that gaze by divulging its secrets. Many of Sebald’s poems enact the battle of the intellect and senses with the hermetic or repellent face of history’s surface layers. The impression is one of traveling across a land in which the catastrophic events of the twentieth century have left a pattern of shallow graves under the almost pathologically hygienic and tidy upper stratum of civilization. What, then, is “behind” Türkenfeld?
Galbraith finishes by revealing the area’s connections to Dachau and how “[o]ur first unknowing reading of the poem … points to the perilous consequences of our loss of cultural memory.”
Read more on my booklog
Many of the poems in this volume—which opens with a train journey—reenact travel “across” various kinds of land and water (even if the latter is only the fluid of dreams). Indeed, several, as the writer’s archive reveals, were actually written “on the road,” penned on hotel stationery, menus, the backs of theatre programs, in cities that Sebald visited.
He goes on to talk about a poem titled “Somewhere” that involves a small town called Türkenfeld, which is an area Sebald would have passed through often, yet:
… it is well for a translator to be aware that landscapes in Sebald’s work are rarely as innocent as they seem…. In the metaphorical sense, the poem puts the traveler’s gaze itself at the center of its encounter with a cryptic landscape, exploring the difficulty of inciting a historical topography to return that gaze by divulging its secrets. Many of Sebald’s poems enact the battle of the intellect and senses with the hermetic or repellent face of history’s surface layers. The impression is one of traveling across a land in which the catastrophic events of the twentieth century have left a pattern of shallow graves under the almost pathologically hygienic and tidy upper stratum of civilization. What, then, is “behind” Türkenfeld?
Galbraith finishes by revealing the area’s connections to Dachau and how “[o]ur first unknowing reading of the poem … points to the perilous consequences of our loss of cultural memory.”
Read more on my booklog