by W. G. Sebald
46 Memo SL, ZET, ÜLW, H.
47 Barometer Reading SL, ÜLW, H. ignoring their ladders: weather frogs (tree frogs) were kept in preserve glasses with some water in the bottom and a small ladder. If the weather was changing for the better, the frog would climb the ladder; if rain was imminent, the frog descended the ladder. Propertius: Sextus Propertius, Latin poet (ca. 50–15 BCE). In book 3 of his Elegies, Phoebus advises the poet: “Why have your pages left their set course? / Do not overload the boat of your skill. / With one oar skim the water, with the other the sand. / You will be safe: the storm is out at sea” (my translation).
48 K.’s Emigration SL, ZET, ÜLW, H. Bohemian Switzerland, the High Tatras, and Franzensbad are all places frequented by Kaf ka. The final stanza cites a postcard, written by Kafka (dated June 1921) from Matliary in the High Tatras, to his parents, who were taking a Kur in Franzensbad. The postcard picture shows Kaf ka surrounded by fellow patients and staff. The “you” and “your”—at least in the context of Kaf ka’s postcard—addresses Kaf ka’s parents.
49 Through Holland in the Dark PT, ÜLW, H. Kaiser Wilhelm II, sometimes referred to colloquially as “Kaiser Willem,” abdicated as German emperor and king of Prussia in November 1918 and went into exile in the Netherlands, where he lived in the town of Doorn until his death in 1941. The “Willem II” brand of cigars, however, was named after Prince William II of Orange (1626–50).
50 Abandoned ÜLW. Goethe’s abominable nature: entry for January 31, 1912, in Kaf ka’s diary: “Wrote nothing. Weltsch brings books on Goethe that leave me in a distracted and useless state of excitement. Plan for an essay: ‘Goethe’s Abominable Nature.’ Fear of the two-hour walk I’ve started taking in the evenings” (my translation).
51 Mölkerbastei SL, ZET, ÜLW, H. Title: Beethoven lived in the Pasqualati House, at Mölkerbastei 8 in Vienna. polished: a pun is lost in translation; the German has gewienert, “polished,” which contains the word wienern, to speak with a Viennese accent. chair: Beethoven sat at the piano in a chair, not on a piano stool. From the tidy room, through the missing chair to the proviso, it is clear that the museum must not be disturbed. History must be kept tidy. Beethoven is allowed in at night, provided his compositions are more or less inaudible.
52 A Galley Lies off Helsingborg ÜLW. Title (“Liegt eine Galeere bei Helsingborg”): Sebald is quoting a quotation. Heinrich von Kleist cites an entry from no. 997 of the “Privilegierte Liste der Börsenhalle” (12 October 1810) in his curious article entitled “Miscellen” (“Miscellany”), published in the Berliner Abendblätter (15 October 1810), a daily newspaper of which he was editor. One of three short entries in the “Miscellen” ran as follows: “Se. Hoheit der Kronprinz von Schweden ist in Hamburg angekommen, und es liegt eine Galleere (sic) bei Helsingborg, um ihn zugleich bei der Überfahrt zu begrüßen” (“His Highness the Crown Prince of Sweden has arrived in Hamburg, and a galley lies off Helsingborg to welcome him when he crosses”). Kleist’s reduction of an official announcement in a Hamburg newspaper to a seemingly absurd detail deliberately placed out of context had satirical intent. See also Roland Borgards: “Experimentelle Aeronautik. Chemie, Meteorologie und Kleists Luftschiffkunst in den ‘Berliner Abendblättern,’ ” in Kleist-Jahrbuch 2005, ed. Günter Bamberger und Ingo Breuer, Stuttgart: 2005 (p. 156). The port of Helsingborg in Sweden faces the Danish town of Helsingør, the Elsinore of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, across the Öresund Strait.
53 Holkham Gap PT, SL, ÜLW, H. Title: on the Norfolk coast between Blakeney Point and Wells-next-the-Sea. The sea lion was Operation Sea Lion (1940), Hitler’s only serious plan for the invasion of Britain; following British success in the Battle of Britain, it was continually postponed. Uncle Toby wishes for war in chapter 32 of book 6 of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.
54 Norfolk SL, ZET, ÜLW, H. The physical (or, rather, metaphysical) attitude of the passenger, who is sailing backwards … with banished time, is reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history”: the “storm [from Paradise] irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward” (Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, London: 1973 [p. 260]). The reason for the poem’s description of Norfolk as a Louisianian landscape is obscure. If the adjective refers to the U.S. state Louisiana, the comparison is not entirely unfounded; the American state has some six thousand miles of navigable waterway, including three thousand miles of canals, while the 1961 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (published five to ten years before the poem was written) states that the “low regions” of Louisiana, consisting largely of alluvial lands and reclaimable swampland, make up half of the entire state. Egyptian: Many years after the poem was written, the narrator in chapter 4 of Sebald’s East Anglian peregrination The Rings of Saturn would remember Denis Diderot’s description of Holland as “the Egypt of Europe,” where one could sail through the fields in a boat. Perhaps Sebald had in mind the renowned Norfolk “wherry” Hathor, designed in 1905 using Egyptian hieroglyphics and mythological images. Wherries, of which only half a dozen survive today, may be said to resemble Egyptian feluccas.
55 Crossing the Water ÜLW. The poem, with the exception of the date, is almost identical to lines at the end of section 1 of “Dark Night Sallies Forth,” in After Nature, op. cit. (p. 85). In Michael Hamburger’s translation, the passage reads: “and a little later, / crossing to Floridsdorf / on the Bridge of Peace, / I nearly went out of my mind.” The German (in Nach der Natur) is: “und wenig später hätte ich / bei einem Gang über / die Friedensbrücke fast / den Verstand verloren,” in Nach der Natur, Frankfurt am Main: 2004 (p. 75). Did Sebald ask Michael Hamburger to insert Floridsdorf? Interestingly, various bridges do cross the Donau to Floridsdorf, but the Friedensbrücke (Bridge of Peace), which crosses the Donau-Kanal more or less from the Franz-Josefs-Bahnhof in Alsergrund to Brigittenau, is not one of them.
56 Natural History SL, ÜLW. Title: in English in the German text. Another of Sebald’s “found” poems, taken verbatim from Johann Wilhelm Ritter’s Fragmente aus dem Nachlaß eines jungen Physikers, Bd. 2, Heidelberg: 1810 (p. 61); see also note on “Trigonometry of the Spheres” below. Ritter explains the position of Man in relation to the other “quarters” of the world: birds, worms, fishes, insects. Man is at the center of a cross formed by the intersection of lines joining these four regions of being. However ironic, Sebald’s use of the found material illustrates the continuity of his fascination with matters arcane, alchemical, and astrological.
57 Ballad PT, SL, ÜLW, H. Title: “Ballad” refers less to the poetic genre of Sebald’s poem than to the preferred form of its subject’s compositions. Carl Löwe, or Carl Loewe, is known to have set several hundred ballads to music. The poem is an exercise in negotiating the Uncertainty Principle. It all seems simple—or even slight—at first, but the choice of words, the order in which they appear and the question form itself allow for a baffling range of variables. Is Carl Löwe’s (or Loewe’s) heart (or is it in fact his liver, or tongue, or indeed somebody else’s heart?) really immured (or has it been hung or buried?) in a column (or is it the pulpit?) of St. Jacob’s Church, or the Jacobus or Jacobi Church, or the Church of St. James, or the Cathedral Basilica of St. James the Apostle in Stettin, or, more politically correct, in Szczecin? Well, is it? Go and see (if you can see through stone, that is). If you can’t find the heart where the poem suggests it is, you might try searching for a recess in the great C-pipe of the organ. Loewe was the church organist at St. James’s for forty-six years.
58 Obscure Passage SL, ÜLW, H. did not apprehend … the word: readers who—as I have attempted to do and failed—wish to identify the source of misunderstanding or incomprehension the poem refers to may find it useful to know that “Wort”—here translated as word—can also mean “dictum” or “expression.” It need not therefore be merely a single word we are looking for. Perhaps understanding itself is the key. In German verstehen not only stands for the cognitive process but may denote th
e physical act of comprehension, symbolically and actually located, at least partly, in the faculty of hearing. Archytas of Tarentum, who was active in the third century BCE, was one of the first and most influential classical proponents of a theory of the limitations of hearing. Archytas maintained, for example, that harmony might be developed far beyond our limited physical apprehension of sound, and that its ultimate understanding could not therefore be attained via our senses, “for the great sounds do not steal into our hearing, just as nothing is poured into narrow-mouthed vessels, whenever someone pours a lot.” See Carl A. Huffman, Archytas of Tarentum, Cambridge: 2005 (p. 107).
59 Poetry for an Album ÜLW, H. The first stanza appears in different versions in Sebald’s volumes For Years Now, London: 2001 (p. 48) and Unrecounted, op. cit. (p. 23). It consists largely of a quotation from Jean Paul’s novel Flegeljahre (Uncouth Youth) (Jean Pauls Sämtliche Werke, 26, Berlin: 1827 [p. 61]): “Gefühle, sagt’ er, sind Sterne, die bloß bei hellem Himmel leiten, aber die Vernunft ist eine Magnetnadel, die das Schiff noch ferner führt, wenn jene auch verborgen sind und nicht mehr leuchten.” (“Feelings, he said, are stars which guide us only when the sky is clear; but reason is the needle that carries on guiding the ship even when the former are hidden and no longer shine out.”) palsied: Schumann suffered from digital paralysis. A revised version of the fourth stanza appears in After Nature, op. cit., p. 91. Carnaval (with this spelling) is a piano work (op. 9) by Schumann. For Ormuzd and Ariman, see note on “Mithraic” above. The conventional spelling is Ahriman. whistling sound: a slightly different version of these lines is found in For Years Now, op. cit. (p. 75).
60 Eerie Effects of the Hell Valley Wind on My Nerves ÜLW, H. Title: the Höllentäler, translated here as Hell Valley Wind, is an evening wind in Freiburg (where Sebald studied), blowing from east to west through the Höllental and Dreisam Valley. In a different context, perhaps, the word Höllental need not have been translated, but the poem requires the reader’s alertness to a notion of human hell—the world of Daniel Paul Schreber. Schreber was a presiding judge in Dresden who was admitted to an asylum at the height of his career and believed God was turning him into a woman. Freud wrote on his case, as did C. G. Jung, Elias Canetti, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Lacan. Schreber wrote accounts (Memoirs of My Nervous Illness) of his various periods of treatment in asylums. In one, it is clear that some of his oppressors and the malevolent changes they made in the world were linked to Cassiopeia. The phrase Order of the World is a quotation from Daniel Paul Schreber’s memoirs. li più reconditi principii della naturale filosofia (the most secret principles of natural philosophy): from Prodomo (1670) by Francesco Lana de Terzi (1631–87), a Jesuit who proposed the idea of a vacuum airship and invented an early form of Braille. In his memoirs, Schreber describes himself as a stony guest who has returned from the distant past to a world grown unfamiliar. Open … into hell: English in the original text.
61 Unidentified Flying Objects ÜLW. Title: in English in the German text. lake of Idwal: Llyn Idwal, a small lake overshadowed by the Glyders at the head of Ogwen Valley in Snowdonia. According to legend, the Welsh prince Idwal, a son of Owain Gwynedd, was murdered there.
62 The Sky at Night ÜLW. Title: in English in the German text.
63 A Peaceable Kingdom ÜLW. Title: in English in the German text. A number of works by the Quaker “naïve” artist Edward Hicks (1780–1849) were known as the Peaceable Kingdom paintings, and based on Isaiah 11:6: “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.” The paintings are reminiscent of the Paradise Landscape works of Jan Brueghel; see note below on the final poem of “The Year Before Last” section, “In the Paradise Landscape.” Parts of the text derive from the abecedarian “Shaker Manifesto” of 1882, republished as a preschool text in 1981 under the title A Peaceable Kingdom: The Shaker Abecedarius, illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen. Crocodile … bear: original text in English. Are these … our love: original text in English.
64 Trigonometry of the Spheres ÜLW, H. the moon is the earth’s work of art: “Der Mond ist ein Kunstwerk der Erde” is cited from Johann Wilhelm Ritter’s Fragmente aus dem Nachlaß eines jungen Physikers, op. cit. (p. 142), where we also read: “Der Mond ist ein Thier” (the moon is an animal). See also note for “Natural History” above. The notion that a holy man sits where night turns to day (“wo die Nacht sich wendet”) is adapted from the Talmud (Berachot 3a), whose German translation writes not of “ein Heiliger” (a holy man) but of “der Heilige”: “At every watch the Holy-One-Blessed-Be-He sits and roars like a lion.”
65 Day Return ÜLW, H. Title: original text in English. tatzelwurm: fabled Alpine dragon with a long, snakelike body. the Hunter Gracchus: the title of a story fragment by Franz Kaf ka. Gracchus, after his death, remains perpetually trapped between life and death, traveling from place to place in a small boat in search of the “beyond,” occasionally going ashore but never finding what he is looking for—a state of permanent exile. Gracchus is a recurrent figure in Sebald’s work, and is especially prominent in Vertigo. Hands off Caroline: original text in English. Who knows the noises … whistle a new song: original text in English. People taking to boats … Windsor Park: original text in English. Baybrooke: Sebald has dropped an “r”; the incident described in Pepys’s diary concerns Bishop Braybrooke. This passage does not appear to be cited directly from Pepys’s diary for 1666 but from an entry in the Index Volume, edited by Robert Latham, of The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 11, Berkeley: 1983 (p. 105). The scene, pulling out of Liverpool Street Station while reading Samuel Pepys’s diary, recurs in the final pages of Vertigo.
66 New Jersey Journey ÜLW, H. Title: original text in English. Several passages here later return in the chapter “Ambros Adelwarth” in The Emigrants, in which a visit to the narrator’s uncle Kasimir in the Lakehurst and Dover Beaches area is similarly described. See The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse, London: 1996 (pp. 72–73, 80–81, and 88–89). The third stanza is echoed in part 4 of “Dark Night Sallies Forth,” the final section of After Nature, op. cit. (p. 97).
67 The Year Before Last DK, H. Some parallels (the motor-cyclist, the “firs growing all the way down to the outlying houses,” the white-haired waiter bringing “Cuban cigarettes”) may be found in Sebald’s prose work Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell, London: 2001; Penguin: 2002 (pp. 290–92, 299–300). It might therefore be inferred that these details traveled from the poem to the later prose work. While this may indeed be the case, the common ancestor of both works is undoubtedly a chapter entitled “Marienbad” in Heinrich Laube’s Reisenovellen, vol. 1, Leipzig: 1834 (pp. 426–38). Several passages and identical turns of phrase, as well as scenic structuring in Laube’s text, are cited in the present poem, references that reveal the former’s significance as a subtext (including foreshadowing of the themes of anti-Semitism and the Marie character) for the Marienbad episode in Austerlitz. “The Year Before Last” contains a number of additional references and quotations. pertrified magical city: from Novalis, Schriften, Berlin: 1837 (p. 149). Is not the world here still … upon the cliffs? Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Marienbader Elegie,” in Gedichte und Epen, band 1, Hamburger Ausgabe, München: 1981/1996 (p. 382); Rabbi of Belz: in letters to Max Brod (17/18 July 1916) and Felix Weltsch (19 July 1916) Franz Kafka described his impressions of the Belzer Rabbi and his entourage. The match game … an inch closer: Alain Robbe-Grillet and Alain Resnais, L’année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad): various scenes. I am wholly yours (“ich bin ganz dein”): Goethe wrote such words on several occasions (to Charlotte von Stein: November 1783 and 26 January 1786; to Christiane Vulpius: 25 August 1792), but a more likely source is the performance of a play entitled Rosmer—possibly a reference to Ibsen’s Rosmersholm (1886), among whose characters are Rosmer and Rebecca—at the beginning of L’année dernière à Marienbad, which closes with the (the play’s) charac
ter Rebekka’s words: “Voilà … maintenant … je suis à vous” (“That’s it … now … I am yours”), after which, however, she does not move “an inch closer” to Rosmer. the corridors … crimson tapestry: Friedrich Schiller, Wallenstein’s Death (act 5, scene 11).
68 A Waltz Dream JPT, H. Title: Ein Walzertraum (A Waltz Dream) was one of Oscar Straus’s many operettas in the popular Viennese style. Completed in 1907, it was composed to a libretto by Felix Dörmann and Leopold Jacobson, who based their work on Hans Müller’s Das Buch der Abenteuer. Straus adapted the score for The Smiling Lieutenant, a 1931 Hollywood film. The title of Jan Peter Tripp’s picture of 1990 is The Land of Smiles, a reference to Franz Lehár’s operetta Das Land des Lächelns. Tripp, who lives in the Alsace region of France, had been Sebald’s friend since their schooldays in Oberstdorf in the early 1960s. They collaborated on the volume Unrecounted, and Sebald published a study of Tripp’s work in his volume of essays Logis in einem Landhaus (A House in the Country), 1998. The essay—“As Day and Night, Chalk and Cheese: On the Pictures of Jan Peter Tripp”—is included in Michael Hamburger’s English translation of Unrecounted, op. cit. (pp. 78–94). Dr. Tulp is the surgeon at the center of Rembrandt’s painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632). The painting is reproduced in Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.
69 Donderdag GG1. Title: the events referred to in “Donderdag,” the activities of the notorious “Bende van Venlo” (the Venlo gang), were reported in various newspapers in the Netherlands in February 1995 and later at their trial. The passages in Dutch are quotations from a report by Hans Moleman in the Volkskrant (23 February 1995). & Frankfurt: from approximately 1995—in a process completed by 1999—Sebald’s poems tend to prefer the ampersand to the more conventional conjunction “and.” In these final years of his life, as a writer frequently invited to readings and other literary events, Sebald would sometimes jot down first drafts of his poems “on the road”—on menus or on hotel stationery. In his subsequent fair copies, however, the author generally retained the shorthand ampersand, apparently (and his penchant for the short, two-stressed, railroad-rhythmic line may be another instance of this) adapting poetic form to a life of passing “in a train / from here to there,” across the land and the water. Translations of passages in Dutch: Donderdag: Thursday: carnavalsmoorden / van Venlo: the Venlo carnival murders; koffieshop branche: coffee-bar business; twee oude mensen / met doorgesneden / keel op de grund: two old people with their throats cut, lying on the ground; turkse / gemeenschap & / duitse clientèle: Turkish community and German clients; een zwarte Merce / des een rode BMW / & twee kogels van / dichtbij in het hoofd: a black Mercedes, a red BMW, and two bullets in the head fired at close range.