Sebald’s Poems To Appear in English – in 2010
April 29, 2009
An alert Vertigo reader has picked up the fact that Booktrade.info is announcing that the English rights to W.G. Sebald’s posthumously issued collection of poems have finally been picked up at the recent London Book Fair:
Looking forward to autumn 2010, Hamish Hamilton has bought UK and Commonwealth rights to W.G. Sebald’s collection of poems, Across Land and Water: Selected Poems 1964-2001, from Theo Collier at the Wylie Agency.
No advance word of this on the Hamish Hamilton website. With the June 2007 death of Michael Hamburger, who translated Sebald’s other two books of poetry, I wonder who will do the translation?
April 29, 2009 at 11:18 pm
Grand news, hopefully. Is there much of Sebald’s work yet to be translated? I like to think there would be a steady drip of posthumous publications.
April 30, 2009 at 12:24 am
I think the poems pretty much wraps it up as far as posthumous publication is concerned.
I wish I were doing the translation, but I’m not!
April 30, 2009 at 9:28 am
What I really want translated are the untrans’d critical writings — like the untrans’d one on Handke and the early one on Doblin and the one on death and The Castle!
May 1, 2009 at 6:45 am
Aslan, you could commission me to translate an essay or two …
May 25, 2009 at 9:27 am
The chosen translator is one Ian Galbraith. Max’s first essay on Kafka’s Castle – “The Undiscover’d Country” – was first published in English, in The Journal of European Studies (1971). It differs from the slightly later German versions. Even so … Max originally wrote his Doeblin book in English, as a Ph.D. thesis for UEA (1974). He then translated it (c. 1977-79)but made significant changes to it as he did so. An article dealing with all of this will shortly appear in a book primarily dealing with Doeblin – Beyond the Alexanderplatz, ed. Steffan Davies (de Gruyter, Berlin). Max’s Doeblin-book has little to say about Doeblin and more to say about Max himself – but you have to know a lot about his work to see what this is all about. I gather that Max’s critical books of critical essays are being translated in English by Jo Catling. But even so: that will leave quite a lot of critical material uncollected and untranslated. Best wishes to all Sebald-fans, Yours, Richard Sheppard.
May 25, 2009 at 9:36 am
http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/german/flaschenpost/galbraith.htm