{"id":4370,"date":"2012-08-18T20:31:05","date_gmt":"2012-08-19T00:31:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books\/?p=4370"},"modified":"2012-08-18T20:31:05","modified_gmt":"2012-08-19T00:31:05","slug":"across-the-land-and-the-water-selected-poems-1964-2001-by-w-g-sebaldtranslated-by-iain-galbraithrandom-house-2011-originally-hamish-hamilton-2011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/across-the-land-and-the-water-selected-poems-1964-2001-by-w-g-sebaldtranslated-by-iain-galbraithrandom-house-2011-originally-hamish-hamilton-2011\/","title":{"rendered":"Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964-2001 by W.G. SebaldTranslated by Iain GalbraithRandom House, 2011 (Originally Hamish Hamilton, 2011)"},"content":{"rendered":"

In his Translator’s Introduction to Across the Land and the Water<\/em>, Iain Galbraith lists some of Sebald’s concerns (in both his poetry and prose) as follows: “borders, journeys, archives, landscapes, reading, time, memory, myth, legend, and the “median state” (Edward Said) of the exile, who is neither fully integrated into the new system nor fully free of the old” (ix). Journeys and landscapes, in particular, are present throughout the book, starting with the very first poem, which is as follows:<\/p>\n

\nFor how hard it is
\nto understand the landscape
\nas you pass in a train
\nfrom here to there
\nand mutely it
\nwatches you vanish. (3)\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Galbraith talks about the muteness of the landscape in his introduction; Ruth Franklin also quotes this poem in her review of the book in The New Republic<\/a>. It’s a striking image, the twist of the landscape watching you, not just you watching it, and the landscape and its silences and the secrets it holds are another thing that Galbraith and Franklin both discuss in depth: Sebald’s work has a lot to do with the troubled history of the twentieth century in Europe, particularly with the horrors of the Holocaust, though not necessarily in a straightforward way: his poems move through the land where horrors took place, and that history is an undercurrent, not a focus.<\/p>\n

But the poems I liked best in this volume aren’t the obscurely allusive ones, but rather the more apparently allusive ones: the ones that are lists, that are “found poems” (as Galbraith puts it), and also the images in some of the poems about cities and journeys. I like “Nymphenburg”<\/a>, about a palace-turned-museum, and I love “Baroque Psalter,” below, which Galbraith notes is “taken almost verbatim from a review by Heinz Ludwig Arnold [\u2026] of the Baroque poet Quirinus Kuhlmann’s [\u2026] so-called Kühlpsalter<\/em> of 1684″: <\/p>\n

\nAfter numerous
\nproselytizing expeditions
\nto Paris
\nGeneva Smyrna and
\nConstantinople
\nhe was burned at the stake
\nin Moscow (50)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I like poems drawn from life and from texts, poems collaged together from bits and pieces from newspapers and historical snippets and things seen or overheard. “Donderdag,” which quotes from a Dutch newspaper report about some murders in the city of Venlo and has the speaker reading about the murders while on a plane, is one example of this kind of style; there’s also a really pleasing poem that draws from events near the end of Chekhov’s life, and a great list poem<\/a> that features the titles of books “assembled\/by chance\/in the display\/of a junk shop\/near a railway\/underpass” (101). “My ICE Rail-Planner” is another collage-poem, which quotes bits of various advertisements, with a humorous tone, juxtaposed with lovely landscape-images: it starts like this, and continues similarly:<\/p>\n

\nHerrenhausen is offering
\na cruise to Denmark two
\nvisits to the seawater wave-
\nbath thrown in someone
\nwill be waiting at the station
\n& will say how nice<\/p>\n

to meet you & how
\nabout a Fitness-Week
\nin Eckernförde. Outside
\nthe light is thinning the
\nribbon of a road glistening
\nin the drizzle [\u2026] (123)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Other highlights of this book, for me, were “Day Return” and “New Jersey Journey”<\/a>, both of which feature really great city-scapes, wonderful observed or invented detail of things\/places\/signs seen from a train or a car. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In his Translator’s Introduction to Across the Land and the Water, Iain Galbraith lists some of Sebald’s concerns (in both his poetry and prose) as follows: “borders, journeys, archives, landscapes, reading, time, memory, myth, legend, and the “median state” (Edward Said) of the exile, who is neither fully integrated into the new system nor fully […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4370"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4370\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}