Die Ausgewanderten Audiobook

I’m grateful to a Vertigo reader for letting me know that W.G. Sebald’s book Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants) is available as a German-language audio book on 7 CDs, published by Winter & Winter.  The reader is Paul Herwig.  It can be ordered directly from their website or from Amazon.de.  It was apparently released in late 2007.

Previously, the Max Ferber section of Die Ausgewanderten was available on  a pair of CDs issued by Eichborn Verlag in 2000, with Sebald himself reading.

Robert Walser, My Constant Companion

“Walser has been my constant companion.”

Some artists obfuscate when it comes to talking about those who influenced them, while others readily identify their own artistic forerunners for us.  When W.G. Sebald reflected back on Robert Walser’s writings in an essay first published in 1998, he also traced a deliberate path connecting his own writing with Walser’s.  The essay, Le Promeneur Solitaire, which recently appeared in English in the guise of an Introduction to the new translation of Walser’s novel The Tanners (New Directions, 2009), is every bit as revelatory about Sebald as it is about Walser.

Originally published in his book of essays Logis in Einem Landhaus,  Le Promeneur Solitaire begins with photographs of Walser – specifically seven portraits that span Walser’s lifetime, plus a series of snapshots of Walser posing during his infamous hikes.  Every time he looks at those photographs, Sebald writes, “I think I see my grandfather before me,”  and he reproduces two unidentified snapshots that seemingly show himself as a young boy hiking with his grandfather (the two photographs at the top of the right hand page below).  After enumerating several similarities between the lives of Walser and his grandfather, Sebald asks:

What is the significance of these similarities, overlaps, coincidences?  Are they rebuses of memory, delusions of the self and the senses, or rather the schemes and symptoms of an order underlying the chaos of human relationships, and applying equally to the living and the dead, which is beyond our comprehension?

There is scarcely a better description of the pattern behind Sebald’s own prose than this.

Sebald identifies so closely with Walser that he “has the persistent feeling of being beckoned to from the other side.”  So, when he writes about Walser, it can be instructive on occasion to simply substitute Sebald’s name for Walser’s.

[Sebald] hoped, through writing, to be able to escape the shadows which lay over his life from the beginning…transforming them on the page from something very dense to something almost weightless.  His ideal was to overcome gravity.

[Sebald was the] clairvoyant of the small.

Sebald pays much attention to Walser’s fragile state of mind, his remoteness from other people and from the momentous events of his own time, his utter lack of possessions, his lonely hikes, his eventual institutionalization.  “He was the most unattached of all solitary poets.”   He sees the handful of portraits of Walser as “stations in a life which hint at the silent catastrophe which has taken place between each.”  Sebald turns all of this into something resembling a state of grace.  “On the subject of the collective catastrophes of his day he remained resolutely silent.  However, he was anything but politically naive.”  For Sebald, Walser’s “purity” becomes the source for what he sees as Walser’s “aesthetic and moral assurance.”

Le Promeneur Solitaire is surely one of Sebald’s most personal essays about literature and it is wonderful to have it translated into English at last.

Michael Hersch’s “Last Autumn” and Sebald

David Patrick Stearns of The Philadelphia Inquirer reviews a world premiere composition by Michael Hersch entitled Last Autumn, a work for horn and cello and “built around poetic fragments of the late W.G. Sebald”, according to a publicist for the event.  Check out Hersch’s website for more information about the composer, including several video clips of the composer at the piano performing some of his pieces.

Forthcoming: Sebald’s “A Place in the Country”

Somewhat buried in the notices on the copyright page of the recently published novel The Tanners by Robert Walser is the first notice I have seen that an English translation of W.G. Sebald’s Logis in einem Landhaus is in the works.  The Tanners opens with Sebald’s essay on Walser called Le Promeneur Solitaire (more in this in a forthcoming post), and the related copyright notice indicates that this essay from Logis in einem Landhaus has been translated by Jo Catling “from the forthcoming work A Place in the Country by W.G. Sebald to be published by Random House.”  There is currently no mention of the book on the Random House website.

As I have written earlier, Logis in einem Landhaus (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1998) includes essays on Robert Walser, Gottfried Keller, Johann Peter Hebel, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Eduard Mörike, and Jan Peter Tripp. Undoubtedly influenced by his earlier forays into fiction – Die Ausgewanderten (1992) and Die Ringe des Saturn (1995) – Sebald inserts images of all types into the essays in Logis in Einem Landhaus. In fact, each of the six essays receives a large foldout image in full color.  Will Random House spring for the expense to do the same?  Until Catling’s translation of Le Promeneur Solitaire, the only essay from Logis in Einem Landhaus to have appeared in English is the one on artist Jan Peter Tripp, which is included in the British and American editions of Unrecounted, the book on which Sebald and Tripp collaborated.

Kiefer and Sebald

Anselm Kiefer, Buch (The Secret Life of Plants) mixed media on lead

Tim Hill has written a nice article in the New Statesman that references similarities between W.G. Sebald and the painter Anselm Kiefer.  Recommended reading.