Whose Voice?
July 5, 2008
Ireland’s non-profit RTE Radio 1 recently interviewed poet and translator George Szirtes and Aengus Woods, a philosophy student at the New School, about W.G. Sebald. The eighteen minute conversation is fascinating, intelligent, and much too short. Aengus reads a short section from The Rings of Saturn and George reads briefly from Austerlitz, which made me think again about the differences between reading literature and listening to it. To listen to a good reading (and both of these speakers have wonderful voices) is a seductive experience – perhaps too seductive, I realized, as I found myself building a different narrator to suit each of their voices. But on further reflection I also realized that even when I read silently to myself I am somehow shaping a narrator around my own voice and pronunciation. Curiously, when the program’s host Seán Rocks asks George and Aengus about Sebald’s “voice,” he’s referring to something about Sebald’s style, not Sebald’s voice.
Just as a reminder, if you really want to hear Sebald’s voice you can, thanks to Michael Silverblatt’s program “Bookworm” for radio station KCRW.
July 7, 2008 at 5:57 pm
Sebaldians should try and see Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World, which features a voiceover by Herzog that is so strange and so Germanically appalled that I could not help thinking what a perfect reader of Sebald he would make. Has made, for all I know.
July 14, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Yes indeed, Herzog’s voice has many Sebaldian resonances. Listen to his musings on the destructive tendency of Nature in ‘My Best Fiend’ to hear the same appalled view – “the birds don’t scream, they just screech in pain”. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjjnZvtwtqA
Also, thank you Terry for the mention.