Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964–2001

THE REPUTATION OF an important writer will continue to swell in his or her absence, nourished by the unceasing attentions of friends, scholars, and devoted readers unwilling to forget an artist who changed the way they perceive the world. And so it is with W.G. Sebald. At the time of his shocking and untimely death, in 2001 at the age of fifty-seven, he was the author of only four works of fiction, which, despite their slender size and their occasional inscrutability, had already established him as a defining writer of his era. Starting with Vertigo, which first appeared in German in 1990, and continuing through Austerlitz, published a few months before his death, each was richer and stranger than the last. Part memoir, part travelogue, part biography, and part dream, they seemed to exist in an uncategorizable space beyond genre, at the intersection of history (both personal and collective) and imagination.

Despite their differences, all Sebald’s works inevitably circle back to the same fundamental question: how can we live under the shadows of past cataclysms? Most urgently, those are the disasters of World War II, but the griefs in Sebald’s books range from earthquakes to imperialism: “the marks of pain,” as he wrote in Austerlitz, that “trace countless fine lines through history.” From the sick and disoriented Kafka of Vertigo to the fictional Jacques Austerlitz, sent to England from Prague via Kindertransport in 1939 and forever after seeking his own identity, the figures who populate Sebald’s world are lost souls, breaking beneath the burden of their own anguish. This fixation on mourning gives Sebald’s writing a lugubrious cast that can occasionally verge on the parodic. But his occasional excess of mood or style does not make the questions that he asks—about our responsibility to our own history, as well as to the history of others—any less necessary.

In the absence of the dark star at its center, the Sebald universe has continued to expand. Just over a decade after his death, there is now a substantial body of criticism devoted to his writings, as well as an ever-increasing number of creative works inspired by them, including novels, art installations, and a new documentary film that follows the trek through East Anglia that Sebald loosely chronicled in The Rings of Saturn. And Sebald’s Nachlaß—some sixty-nine boxes of correspondence and manuscripts housed at the Deutsches Literaturarkiv in Marbach, Germany—has proved a dependable source of treasure. It has already yielded Campo Santo, a collection of unpublished prose that included drafts for yet another travelogue-cum-historical investigation, this time based in Corsica. And now we have Across the Land and the Water, a collection of poetry, almost all of it never before seen in English, spanning Sebald’s career from his student days to the end of his life. (A German volume, Über das Land und das Wasser, appeared several years ago, but the English version is better thought of as a companion volume rather than a translation, as it contains a somewhat different selection and includes a number of poems that did not appear in German.)

It is not news that Sebald was also a poet. His first book-length literary work was a triptych of three long poems called After Nature, first published without much fanfare in Germany in 1988 and then in a lovely English translation by Michael Hamburger just after Sebald’s death. Two other books of poetry appeared during his lifetime, both collaborations with artists who were his friends. In For Years Now, very brief, epigrammatic “micropoems” by Sebald in English were juxtaposed with collages by the Vienna-born English painter and printmaker Tess Jaray; Unrecounted combines similar poems (this time in German, the English edition again translated by Hamburger) and hyper-realist paintings of pairs of eyes by the German artist Jan Peter Tripp. If these works were somehow insufficient to establish Sebald as a poet with whom to be seriously reckoned, it could have to do with the fact that all three were deeply unconventional as books of poetry: the first because its lengthy narrative passages often scanned as prose (some critics called them prose poems), and the latter two because the poems were set on equal footing with the art.

But Across the Land and the Water demonstrates that Sebald—who throughout his life published his poems in German language literary periodicals infrequently but consistently—saw poetry not as a diversion from his primary literary endeavor but as a complement to it. The ninety poems gathered here are uneven. They range in length from a five-page “canticle” to imagistic neo-haikus of as few as four lines; some at least appear to be straightforward, while others are maddeningly cryptic collages of obscure literary allusions and enigmatic personal references. But they are uniformly recognizable as Sebaldian, deeply engaged with many of his primary themes: the search for patterns, in nature and in human life; the hidden meanings to be found, through apparent coincidence, in random items (the books on the shelves in a flea market, the advertisements in a travel brochure); the alarming way in which the secrets of the past, thought to be long buried, can unexpectedly turn up.