Translation and Literature 22 (2013)

trout and water. Elsewhere, Kates’ misunderstandings – stemming from

a patchy knowledge of Russian grammar and idiom, and a failure
to consult a decent dictionary – weaken the impact of the poem. In
Derieva’s ‘An outsider looks at a star’ he ignores the double meaning
of svet (‘light’ or, when preceded by ‘this’ or ‘the other’, ‘world’),
so that when Derieva says that the Evangelist ‘has the next world,
Christ’s, in mind’, Kates reduces this ‘to a particular light in mind,
the light of Christ’.
Daniel Weissbort, apart from being a friend of Derieva’s (Kates
claims friendship only with Derieva’s husband), has the advantage of
decades more experience in translating from Russian. As a versifier,
he knows when the lines have to be bound together, if only by a couple
of half-rhymes per stanza. But even Weissbort misses a step from
time to time. There is one key poem, echoing Tiutchev’s ‘Silentium’:
‘Aposeoposis’ or ‘Aphasis’. This is mistranslated, without regard to
the technical rhetorical meaning of the Russian Figura umolchaniia, as
‘Passed over in Silence’. In this poem Derieva rejects writing at length
because you ‘still won’t have time to say everything’, and then writing
briefly, because ‘you won’t have the skill to say everything’: the key
distinction between ne uspeesh’ ‘won’t have time’ and ne sumeesh’ (‘won’t
have the skill’) is lost when Weissbort repeats ‘Can you ever hope to
tell all?’
Although we are offered roughly the same number of poems in
both selections, Weissbort has found a thematic thread of exile, as
well as examples of Derieva’s different techniques, that give a more
rounded view of Derieva. It cannot, however, be wholly accidental that
Kates, apart from Archangengland, chooses poems not translated by
Weissbort, so that the English reader will need both books to form a full
impression of a remarkably, if often disagreeably, perspicacious poet.
Donald Rayfield
Queen Mary, University of London
DOI: 10.3366/tal.2013.0106

Saturn’s Moons: W. G. Sebald – A Handbook. Edited by Jo Catling and

Richard Hibbitt. Pp. xv + 677. Oxford: Legenda, 2011. Hb. £45.

In the introduction to Unrecounted (2005), his translation of W. G.

Sebald’s sequence Unerzählt, Michael Hamburger recalled his puzzle-
ment over the divergent and apparently contradictory wording of two
versions of a poem (‘Feelings’) that cites a dictum of Robert Schumann.

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The passage in question, which revolves around a simile comparing

‘feelings’ to stars that guide us ‘only under | a dark sky’, had first
appeared in another form, in English, in Sebald’s volume For Years Now
(2001). But in the German version in Unerzählt, which Hamburger,
I think correctly, took to be the later of the two versions, the stars
guide us ‘nur am lichten Tage’ – ‘only | in brightest daylight’, in
Hamburger’s rendering. Hamburger, he told me at the time, felt suffi-
ciently unsettled by these conflicting versions, each with Sebald’s
authority behind it, to attempt to track down the source, which the
poem implied was a journal or letter by Robert Schumann. Hamburger
hoped to discover not only what Schumann wrote, but some clue as to
why Sebald should have decided to swap dark sky for daylight.
The phrase am lichten Tage is certainly more striking than ‘under
a dark sky’. It feels more recherché, too, and is unlikely to be found
in current, even literary German. It is, in fact, biblical. Where the
Authorized Bible has God exhorting Ezekiel to ‘prepare . . . stuff for
removing, and remove by day in their sight’ (12:3), in Luther’s he
says ‘nimm dein Wandergerät und zeuch am lichten Tage davon vor
ihren Augen’. In the context of Sebald’s poem the historical resonance
and distance of the phrase help to suggest it could have been used by
Schumann, and perhaps that was Sebald’s reason for changing it. But
Hamburger was unable to find a source in Schumann’s writings, and
ended up commenting that Sebald’s revision of Schumann’s night sky
to daylight revealed ‘one more instance of the freedom from literalness
that distinguished Sebald the imaginative writer from Sebald the
scholar’. It seemed to him an example of the licence Sebald took in
remodelling documentary material in fictional works.
The origins of the Schumann ‘conundrum’, as Hamburger called
it, lie not in the late 1990s, when Sebald was assembling the material
for Unerzählt and For Years Now, but most probably in the early 1980s,
when Sebald wrote a poem entitled ‘Poesie für das Album’ (‘Poetry for
an Album’). When I came to translate this poem for a posthumous
collection of Sebald’s hitherto untranslated shorter poetry, Across the
Land and the Water, I had been made aware of the textual variants
by Hamburger’s introduction in Unrecounted. ‘Poesie für das Album’,
a much longer poem than those mentioned above, begins: ‘Gefühle
mein Freund | schrieb Schumann | sind Sterne die bloß| bei hellem
Himmel | leiten’, which I translated as: ‘Feelings my friend | wrote
Schumann | are stars which guide us | only when the sky is | clear.’ As
I did so, I wondered whether the phrase bei hellem Himmel could have
contained the germ of Sebald’s later decision to amend the phrasing
to the more resonant am lichten Tage. In the early poem – a critique

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of Enlightenment ambitions – Sebald makes Schumann contrast the

reliable guidance afforded by feelings/stars with the dangers of a
blind fidelity to reason, whose lucid principles may offer guidance
irrespective of sense data, but may equally lead us (Sebald’s poem
continues) onto the rocks. The adjective Sebald/Schumann uses to
describe the clarity of the night sky is the German hell, which primarily
means ‘bright’. We do the same in English: a bright night sky is a sky
whose clarity allows us to see the stars, but a bright sky can also be
a light blue sky. Sebald’s rephrasing of a clear night sky in terms of
daylight seems to have transported into the final version of the poem
some of the antagonism between clear feelings and blind reason that
formed the crux of the passage in the earliest of the three versions. A
figure emerges by which feelings can be said to guide us when we are
least aware of them. The guiding stars are surely above us ‘in brightest
daylight’, too, only we cannot see them. But in addition to these
subtleties, the elusive source of the dictum can indeed be confirmed
as a letter Schumann wrote in July 1827 – a letter in which the passage
in question is itself a quotation from Jean Paul Richter. Translated, this
passage reads: ‘Feelings, he said, are stars which only guide when the
sky is clear; but reason is a magnetic needle that carries on guiding the
ship even when the stars are hidden and shine no longer.’ No mention
of ‘rocks’ here.
One thing all this goes to show is the kinds of use that readers,
critics, and researchers might have for a vade mecum to the intertextual
maze of Sebald’s writings. The fuss I have made of a couple of lines
of poetry suggests some of what might ideally be expected of such a
guide: conscientious scrutiny of biographical and bibliographical facts;
evidence of the compositional history and development of the texts;
explanation of how the English translations of Sebald’s work came
into being, and what may have been lost in the process. The present
volume, Saturn’s Moons, satisfies all of these desiderata admirably, in
a blend of facts, figures, essay, and memoir. At just under 1.5 kg,
this is a compilation which is unlikely to fit anybody’s pocket, but
the generic term ‘handbook’ suggests a deliberate departure from
the more common format of the ‘companion’. Here the editors
forego the characteristically uniform sequence of scholarly articles,
presenting a far less streamlined, and far more varied, enterprise. An
omnibus-sized holdall, this handbook is a heterogeneous collection
of genres and materials: essayistic witness (by Sebald’s friends,
students, and colleagues), previously unpublished work of Sebald’s,
scholarly commentary and information, and a generous assortment of
photographs and other documents.

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Among the most useful contributions are two essays in biography.

Mark M. Anderson’s annals of Sebald’s early years, influences, and
reading locates ‘the point where history and what one might call the
landscape of Sebald’s “imaginary homeland’’ begin to merge’. Richard
Sheppard’s scrupulous account of his student years (at Freiburg
and Fribourg) and early academic career (at Manchester and UEA)
points up Sebald’s immensely significant encounters with the works
of Benjamin, Adorno, Bloch, Horkheimer, and Marcuse. These helped
inspire his repudiation of werkimmanente Kritik (a German equivalent
of New Criticism) and encouraged him towards what Ruth Klüger
(cited in Uwe Schütte’s valuable chapter ‘Against Germanistik: W. G.
Sebald’s Critical Essays’) has described as the author’s ‘biographism’,
a taboo-flouting critical conflation of life and work resulting in
‘biographies which are partly authentic, partly invented’. For his part,
Sheppard finds himself wondering ‘how many of Max’s anglophone
admirers understand that a straight, albeit subterranean line runs
from his early saturation in revisionist Marxism to the nostalgia-
laden critique of the postmodern, “hamburgerized world’’ (Max’s
phrase) that informs his literary work of the 1990s’. Other essential
contributions to this volume include Michael Hulse’s and Anthea
Bell’s very different records of their collaboration with Sebald on the
translation of his major works, Clive Scott’s erudite analysis of ‘Sebald’s
Photographic Annotations’, Ulrich von Bülow’s ‘Reflections on W. G.
Sebald’s Nachlass in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach’, and Jo
Catling’s ‘Bibliotheca abscondita’, her description of Sebald’s personal
library. The final 280 pages will prove particularly helpful to those in
search of the bare facts: they include ‘A Catalogue of W. G. Sebald’s
Library’ ( Jo Catling), as well as primary and secondary bibliographical
surveys, and Richard Sheppard’s year-by-year, and sometimes day-by-
day chronology not only of the frequently peripatetic life of this author
and academic, but – intertwined therewith – the events, meetings, and
journeys of his narrators.
Besides essays in which Michael Hulse and Anthea Bell address
the subject of translating Sebald’s work and of collaborations between
author and translator, readers of this journal should be intrigued by
a hitherto unpublished interview conducted by Jon Cook. Here, the
author reflects on his decision to write in German rather than English,
the extent of his intervention in the English translations, the poetical
aspects of his prose, his view on what may be ‘lost in translation’ (this is
the title the piece is accorded), and the relationship with his translators.
It perhaps comes as no surprise – although much is made in this book
of Sebald’s excellent command of English – that what he looks for in

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a translator is ‘somebody with a good English ear, which I have not

got’, somebody, in particular, able to do justice to the rhythms of his
long sentences. At the same time, his translator needs a good ear for
German, too, if he or she is to respond appropriately to the Southern
regionalisms and ‘shadings of earlier forms of German’ – what Sebald
calls ‘the finer grain’ of his writing. This emphasis on the ‘ear’ in
translation is welcome, for it is a faculty frequently overlooked, and
difficult to describe. According to Sebald, ‘getting the rhythm right is
just a question of fiddling and changing and adding and shaving things
off and it’s very much a craft-type of work’. But when we speak of the
‘ear’ in translation, as in poetry, we are surely referring to a translator’s
response to the musical structure and overall auditory effect of the
text in all its complexity. A talent for singing is not universal, and
the invention of melody is, as Claude Lévi-Strauss put it, ‘le mystère
suprême des sciences de l’homme’.
As for the question, often asked, why an author with such ‘an
excellent command of English’ does not translate his work himself, the
assumptions this implies are questionable indeed. To translate one’s
own work into a different language is to rewrite it. If it were possible to
imagine Sebald writing The Emigrants without the German language,
the result would surely be an entirely different book. However, as
the pages of early draft translations that are reproduced in Michael
Hulse’s essay in this volume demonstrate, Sebald participated to no
little degree in turning his works into English – claiming, for example,
that ‘combing through The Rings of Saturn’ had taken 350 hours. In
one sense, the double presence of the author-translator in the English
text signifies a continuation of the writing process rather than a new
departure.
Writing a new book is rarely the stated aim of a translation, however.
At one point in the interview with Cook, Sebald is asked whether he
considers the translated or the German text to be ‘the original’. For
Sebald, the German is ‘certainly the original’. But can we speak of an
original if there is no translation? To write a translation is to enter a
dialogue between texts and, by implication, between languages and all
that they mean. It is a dialogue whose heroic intention is to construct
the original – translation’s own way of approximating to the real. To
get as close as possible is the usual aim, which, bearing in mind that a
translator changes every single word, calls for a degree of legerdemain:
‘no perfect translation can ever be achieved’, writes Anthea Bell, ‘but
we have at least to try to make the pretence convincing, and to walk
what I think of as the tightrope of illusion’. The hypnotic undertow of
Sebald’s prose in Austerlitz is a testimony to her sleight of hand.

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I am not sure that Michael Hulse, whose essay bravely and truthfully
sets out the patterns and difficulties of his collaboration with Sebald,
would wish to describe his translations in terms of pretence. ‘Fidelity’
is the operative word in his essay, and he writes that his ‘instinct’, even
with an author who has the temerity to rewrite passages from Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness, ‘is always that whatever exists as a historical document
should not be falsified’. Sebald himself describes his relationship with
Hulse as ‘complicated’, ‘subdued because we daren’t talk about the
complexities too openly’. This view of their affairs is confirmed by
Hulse, albeit between the lines. When he writes of his collaboration
with Sebald as a meeting between ‘two sets of ethics’, or describes
Sebald’s reply when Hulse wonders about the balance of ‘truth’ and
imaginative re-creation in his work as ‘canny, and perhaps even wily’,
one senses how much has been left unsaid. The ‘wily’ Sebald is the
one who not only feels free to invent or remodel quotations, but, in
the face of Hulse’s principles, describes his ‘biographism’ (see Ruth
Klüger, above) as ‘no more than extending the vectors a little’. The
relationship, whose clash of morals and aesthetics made it vulnerable
from the start, nonetheless commands our respect. It is difficult not
to admire the forbearance and professionalism on both sides of a
collaboration that produced such excellent translations of three of
Sebald’s major works. In light of their shared achievement, the final
sentence of Hulse’s essay adds a forlorn note to a book in which the
sense of loss seems already all but pervasive: ‘That was the last I heard
from him, and we never met again.’
Iain Galbraith
Wiesbaden
DOI: 10.3366/tal.2013.0107

Jade Ladder: Contemporary Chinese Poetry. Edited by W. N. Herbert, Yang

Lian, Brian Holton, and Qin Xiaoyu. Pp. 359. Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2012.
Pb. £12.

According to Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading (1934), the most trenchant

poetry declares itself as ‘news that stays news’. From one angle on the
Jade Ladder we can view recent Chinese poetry in translation as news
bulletins from foreign correspondents reacting with seditious verve to
the historical flashpoints of the last thirty-five years. They variously
document how officially sanctioned ‘slogans’ and rhymed propaganda
for the inoculation of dogma lapsed into the grotesque chaos of the
Cultural Revolution (Bai Hua, ‘Autumn’s Weapons’); how this gave way

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