Vertiginous Links for the New Year

Photograph of Oradour-sur-Glane by Will Stone.

Five Dials #26 is focused on German writing, with a number of new short stories by young German writers, plus three essays on W.G. Sebald: Uwe Schutte’s “Teaching by Example,” Amanda Hopkinson’s “A History of Memory or a Memory of History?,” and Anthea Bell’s “A Translator’s View.”  These essays are three of the five originally commissioned and aired by BBC radio one year ago.  (The two essays not reprinted here are those of Christopher Bigsby and Georges Szirtes.)

Helen Finch has added her thoughts to the discussion about the recent BBC radio dramatization of Austerlitz in a blog post wonderfully called “Sebald was more interesting than the husband: Austerlitz and l’effet du réel.”   Finch makes the case that we should be judging the radio drama on whether or not it contains “the emotional truth” of the original book.

If Michael Butt tried to present the emotional truth of Austerlitz, as he felt it, in his radio drama, who is to say that his classic BBC drama version, complete with slamming doors and tearjerking music, does not represent that important affective aspect of Sebald’s work which might otherwise be lost behind his complex irony and academic erudition? Or is it the case that if we allow ourselves to be bewitched by Sebald’s artistry into thinking that his work is just a reproduction of the real, nothing more and nothing less, we have consigned ourselves to the realm of kitsch that is the death of art?

Over at The White Review is a nice piece by Will Stone called “Oradour-sur-Glane: Reflections on the Culture of Memorial in Europe” that speaks to some of Sebald’s preoccupations in Austerlitz with Holocaust sites, architecture, and memorials.

Entering Oradour and obeying bold signs to the memorial ruins, I was surprised to find myself in a vast car park, a limitless expanse of tarmac, more suited one would think to a sports complex or shopping mall. There on the sleek asphalt of the car park I observed luxury coaches with their tinted glass and climate controlled interiors spill their chattering cargoes, just as they will now in the newly constructed ‘reception area’ at Auschwitz I in Poland. Cars of suntanned visitors parked obediently between the freshly painted lines, disembarked and moved off all in the same direction, as if drawn by some unspecified magnetic source towards the giant modern bunker of a building that sat in a kind of man-made hollow. I realised as I followed them down the smart new concrete steps to the lower level that this was a relatively new visitors centre, inaugurated in 1999 by President Chirac, a largely superfluous building, the new scourge of every memorial site in Europe, whether merely ruins or formal cemetery. For today it is considered not quite enough to have solely the memorial itself before which to contemplate man’s destructive capability, the intricacies of murderous folly and the resulting nerve straining conclusion. Again and again some shadowy authority slips in between the individual and their private purpose and imposes an artificial construction in their path, which they have to wade through, straddle or circumnavigate before they can get back to the path they thought they were on.

Did Teju Cole deliberately write twelve essays in twenty twelve?  I wouldn’t put it past him.  Here are links to each and every one.

I’m sure of nothing, and writing essays is one of the ways I sort through my doubts.

And finally, among the books we can look forward to in 2013 is Jo Catling’s translation of Sebald’s important book A Place in the Country (originally Logis in einem Landhaus, by WG Sebald.  According to The Guardian, the book is due to be released in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton/Penguin May 2, but Amazon doesn’t have the US edition coming out from Random House until January 2014.  It looks as if Random House is going to use the same cover as the German edition, which is a beautiful watercolor by the Swiss writer Gottfried Keller, who is the subject of one of the biographic essays in this.  The only place I can currently find an image of a possible Hamish Hamilton cover is over at New Books in German, which shows something entirely different for the UK edition.

Happy 2013!

“Published in English with additional material…”

Riddle: When is a translation of a book not a translation of that book?

The earliest hint is buried in tiny print on the copyright page: “Published in English with additional material by Hamish Hamilton 2011.”  Despite the similarity in their titles, the recently released English volume Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems 1964-2001 by W.G. Sebald is dramatically different from it’s German counterpart of 2008 Über das Land und das Wasser, which was edited by Sebald’s longtime editor Sven Meyer.  Across the Land, edited and translated by Iain Galbraith, contains considerably more poems, but, puzzlingly, they are incorporated within a different structure.  Across the Land has five sections: Poemtrees, School Latin, Across the Land and the Water, The Year before Last, and the oddly-named Appendix, which contains two poems that Sebald originally wrote in English.  The German version has three sections: Schullatein, Über das Land und das Wasser, and Das vorvergangene Jahr, each of which is different from its English counterpart.

Gone Missing.

The English edition contains every poem from the German edition – except two: Analytische Sommerfrische and Physikalisches Wunder.

Shuffled Around.

 Across the Land opens with a section called Poemtrees, which contains seventeen of Sebald’s earliest poems.  In the German edition, there is no section by this name; instead, the first fifteen of these poems are in the section called Schullatein – along with four other poems that appear in the School Latin section of the American edition.  (Yes, this is confusing.)  The second section in Across the Land is called School Latin, containing twenty poems – fifteen of which do not appear in the German edition at all.  Four of the poems in School Latin were originally in the Schullatein section of the German edition and one was originally included in the Über das Land und das Wasser section.  (Confused even more?  Sorry, we’re not done.)   The third section in Across the Land is called, appropriately, Across the Land and the Water, which contains twenty-nine poems, ten of which do not appear in the German edition.  The fourth section is called The Year Before Last, which closely corresponds to the German section Das vorvergrangene Jahr, except that it contains six poems that did not appear in the German edition.  How this fourth section got its title is never made clear.  The fifth section is the Appendix, which contains two poems originally written by Sebald in English and, therefore, were not translated by Iain Galbraith.  (Got everything straight now?)

So, What’s Going on Here?

Iain Galbraith writes in his Translator’s Introduction to Across the Land that in the 1908s “Sebald had prepared and paginated, apparently for publication, two collections of shorter poems – ‘Schullatein’ (‘School Latin’) and ‘Über das Land und das Wasser’ (‘Across the Land and the Water’), consisting altogether of some ninety poems – neither of which would find its way into print.”  Sebald’s manuscript for “Schullatein” contained a number of poems that also appeared in an even earlier gathering (which Galbraith calls a “loose bundle of poems”) that he labeled “Poemtrees.”  To further complicate matters, some of the poems in “Schullatein” were included – sometimes in a revised manner – in the later manuscript for Über das Land und das Wasser.  (Endlessly cannibalizing his own poems, Sebald also took some of these early, short poems in their entirety and inserted them into his long poem After Nature.)

If I am reading Galbraith’s introduction correctly, his reshuffling of the poems is based upon the manuscripts in Sebald’s archive at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach.  Furthermore, Galbraith seems to have made at least some of his translations from Sebald’s manuscripts (where multiple version of the same poems can be found), rather than from the German edition of Über das Land und das Wasser.  This means that one cannot reliably compare Galbraith’s English translations with the published German version because Galbraith and Sven Meyer were, on occasion, using different source manuscripts for their respective editions.  It is very conceivable that every time that a poem was shuffled from one section in the German edition to a different section in the English edition, Galbraith and Meyer were using different manuscript versions of the same poem.

Riddle: When is a translation of a book not a translation of a book?
Answer: When the translator works from a different set of manuscripts.

[Please make sure to click on the Comments line below and read Iain Galbraith's extended comment to this post, in which he addresses all of my questions and assumptions. Notably, he explains that he and Meyer did use the same source manuscript, so that a direct comparison made be made between his translations and the German originals in Über das Land.]

Sebald’s Translator Troubles?

W.G. Sebald’s annotations to Michael Hulse’s draft translation of the ‘Conrad chapter’ (Part V) of Die Ringe des Saturn.
(From Saturn’s Moons)

The other night I continued to make my non-sequential way through Saturn’s Moons: W.G. Sebald – A Handbook by reading short accounts written by two of Sebald’s English-language translators: “Englishing Max” by Michael Hulse and “Translating W.G. Sebald – With and Without the Author” by Anthea Bell.  A fair amount has already been written about turning Sebald’s German into English, a process that always involved the considerable participation of Sebald, who, of course, was extremely articulate in English.  The two essays in Saturn’s Moons add to the well-established image of Sebald and translator collaborating almost as equals.  As the illustration above shows, Sebald was perfectly capable of rephrasing – or even completely rewriting – the work of his own translator, which might well have been unnerving for those who took on the task of “Englishing” his German.

But Hulse provides a rare glimpse into the break-up of their professional (and personal) relationship that seems to expose a rarely seen side of Sebald.  Having already translated Die Ausgewanderten into The Emigrants in 1996 and Die Ringe des Saturn into The Rings of Saturn in 1998, Hulse “agreed against my better judgment to translate Schwindel. Gefühle,” which, in 1999, became Vertigo.  Hulse says he had already heard reports of Sebald complaining in public that he had had to “correct” Hulse’s translations.  Hulse, who was juggling multiple literary projects at once, also sensed that Sebald thought he slowed the translation process down too much.  Eventually, Hulse says, he informed Sebald’s publisher (Harvill) that he would not translate Sebald’s next book.  In January 2000, Sebald wrote Hulse to say that “Perhaps you would agree that, from your point of view also, our partnership has now reached its limits.”  After that they never communicated again.

This admission by Hulse immediately reminded me of Michael Hamburger’s oddly confessional “Translator’s Note” at the beginning of Unrecounted, the book of poems that he posthumously translated from Sebald’s German in 2005.

Although Max Sebald had given me copies of all his books published since our first acquaintance, he never so much as mentioned the writings of these miniatures to me and gave me no copy of For Years Now [the 2001 book in which some of the same poems had been previously published in English, apparently translated by Sebald himself].

Hamburger described the final period of Sebald’s life “as a time of crisis…full of enigmas, conflicts and contradictions he chose not to clarify.”  As a longstanding friend, Hamburger expressed some pique that Sebald was “readily accessible for interviews that probed matters he would not divulge to his closest friends.”

In an intriguing aside, Hamburger mentioned that his wife had received an autographed copy of the English edition of Austerlitz that, surprisingly, “contained emendations in his hand.”  Was Sebald unhappy with aspects of Anthea Bell’s translation, as well?  Bell, who has both written and spoken in interviews about her experiences with Sebald, has never hinted at any issues.

Poem, Unfolding

Unfolded, Anne Carson’s book length poem Nox is nearly 1000 inches long – or wide, to be exact.

An accordion-fold book housed in a clamshell box, Nox is a single collage-like poem composed of dictionary entries, snapshots, scraps of paper, postage stamps, written memories, and other texts  in which we see Carson as she copes with the death of her brother, as she tries to comprehend “the smell of nothing,” “the muteness,” and the meaning of memories scattered across a lifetime.  Just as the physical book unfolds and then collapses back into itself, the unifying structure of Nox is the unfolding and collapsing of a short poem by the Roman poet Catullus.  Nox opens with the poem – known as Poem 101 – in Latin.  As you turn each page or further unfold the book (whichever way you choose to read Nox), you are confronted with the individual dictionary entries for every Latin word in Catullus’ poem.   As the dictionary entries mount up and you realize that Carson is working toward an English translation of the poem, these entries induce a kind of literary vertigo.  Each Latin word has multiple definitions that can be wildly different from each other, if not seemingly contradictory.  The net effect is to make the reader reel from the endless English permutations possible from sixty-three Latin words.

Poem 101 is an elegy to Catullus’ brother.  Several rudimentary translations can be easily found online, but none have the powerful ambiguity and hurt of the version Carson achieves.

In parallel with the unfolding of the Catullus poem, Carson examines the meager scraps that constitute her memories and communications with her brother, who lived his life largely abroad and estranged from his family.  Unlike Poem 101, however, the enigma of her brother’s life seems to expand in many directions without ever coming to any resolution.

While there are scores of novels that use embedded photographs, this is only the second book of poems I have run across in which photographs are used interchangeably with textual material.

With a retail price of $29.95, Nox is a remarkable piece of publishing.  They have produced an eerie facsimile of Carson’s rather crude home-made album.  New Directions has also issued a special signed version of Nox in in edition of 100 copies.

Sebald Podcast …en français

Table-ronde W. G. Sebald /Traduire…. a recent radio program about W.G. Sebald is currently available as a podcast on the Radio France website.   The program, which aired March 14, 2009,  is a discussion between two French translators, Christophe Claro and Bernard Hoepffner.   Claro has translated a number of contemporary American writers, including William H. Gass, William T. Vollman, and Thomas Pynchon.  Hoepffner has translated fiction by Robert Coover, Mark Twain, Gilbert Sorrentino, and many others.

(I’m told that this interview will be moved to a Radio France archive site after a while.  So if the link stops working, please leave me a comment and I’ll find and post the proper archival link.)  Listening to the program requires RealNetworks RealPlayer.

There’s also a nice interview with Claro primarily about translation at The Quarterly Conversation.