Forthcoming: Sebald’s “A Place in the Country”
October 11, 2009
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.
October 12, 2009 at 11:31 am
So, again, we’re still waiting for translations of his essay or essays on Thomas Bernhard, one of the central influences on Sebald’s work (which he confirms in the KCRW BookWorm interview). What is going on?
October 13, 2009 at 2:04 pm
The Rousseau piece in “Logis” is truly beautiful!
October 18, 2009 at 12:49 pm
Terry,
Can’t find an email address to send this to, so I’ll leave it here. There is a short article on Frank Auerbach, the painter who was one of the models for Max Aurach/Ferber, in the current London Review of Books. The article is available at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n20/feav01_.html.
cheers
October 27, 2009 at 3:26 pm
A beautiful book, translated and published in French in 2005 ( Actes Sud) , the French title being “Séjours à la campagne”