Winfried Sebald: After Nature

Come, my daughter, come on,

give me your hand, we’re leaving

the town, I’ll show you the mill

set twice each day in motion

by the sea’s current,

a groaning miraculous construct

of wheels and belts

that carries water power

right into stone, right

into the trickling dust and

into the bodies of spiders.

The miller is friendly,

has clean white paws,

tells us all kinds of lore

to do with the story of flour.

A century ago Edward FitzGerald,

the translator of Omar Khayyám,

vanished out there. At an advanced age

one day he boarded his boat,

sailed off, with his top hat

tied on, into the German ocean

and was never seen again.

A great enigma, my child,

look, here are eleven barrows

for the dead and in the sixth

the impress of a ship with forty oars

long since gone, the grave of

Raedwald of Sutton Hoo.

Merovingian coins, Swedish

armour, Byzantine silver

the king took on his voyage,

and his warriors even now

on this sandy strip keep their weapons

hidden in grassy bunkers

behind earthworks, barbed wire

and pine plantations, one great

arsenal as far as your eye can see,

and nothing else but this sky,

the gorse scrub and now and then,

an old people’s home,

a prison or an asylum,

an institution for juvenile delinquents.

In orange jackets you see

the inmates labour

lined up across the moor.

Behind that the end

of the world, the five

cold houses of Shingle Street.

Inconsolable a woman

stands at the window,

a children’s swing

rusts in the wind, a lonely

spy sits in his Dormobile

in the dunes, his headphones

pulled over his ears.

No, here we can write

no postcards, can’t even

get out of the car. Tell me, child,

is your heart as heavy as

mine is, year after year

a pebble bank raised

by the waves of the sea

all the way to the North,

every stone a dead soul

and this sky so grey?

So unremittingly grey

and so low as no sky

I have seen before.

Along the horizon

freighters cross over

into another age

measured by the ticking

of Geigers in the power station

at Sizewell, where slowly

the core of the metal

is destroyed. Whispering

madness on the heathland

of Suffolk. Is this

the promis’d end? Oh,

you are men of stones.

What’s dead is gone

forever. What did’st

thou say? What,

how, where, when?

Is this love

nothing now

or all?

Water? Fire? Good?

Evil? Life? Death?

Lord, I dreamed

that to see Alexander’s battle

I flew all the way to

Munich. It was when darkness

crept in and far below me

I saw the roof of my house,

saw the shadows falling

on the East Anglian landscape,

I saw the rim of the island,

the waves lapping the shore

and in the North Sea the ships

motionless ahead of the foam-white wakes.

As a stingray hovers deep down

in the sea, so soundlessly I glided,

scarcely moving a wing,

high above the earth

over the Rhine’s alluvial plain

and followed upstream

the course of the water

grown heavy and bitter.

Cities phosphorescent

on the riverbank, industry’s

glowing piles waiting

beneath the smoke trails

like ocean giants for the siren’s

blare, the twitching lights

of rail- and motorways, the murmur

of the millionfold proliferating molluscs,

wood lice and leeches, the cold putrefaction,

the groans in the rocky ribs,

the mercury shine, the clouds that

chased through the towers of Frankfurt,

time stretched out and time speeded up,

all this raced through my mind

and was already so near the end

that every breath of air made my

face shudder. A high surf,

the mountain oaks roared on the slopes

of the Odenwald and then came a desert

and waste through whose valleys

the wind drove the dust

of stones. A twice-honed

sword divided the sky

from the earth, an effulgence flowed

into space, and the destination

of my excursion, the vision

of Altdorfer, opened up.

Far more than one hundred thousand,

so the inscriptions proclaim,

number the dead over whom

the battle surges for the salvation

of the Occident in the rays

of a setting sun. This is

the moment when destiny turns.

At the centre of the grandiose thronging

of banners and flags, lances and

pikes and batons, the breastplated

bodies of human beings and animals,

Alexander, the western world’s

hero, on his white horse

and before him in flight

towards the sickle moon

Darius, stark terror

visible in his face. As fortunate,

did the clever chaplain, who

had hung up an oleograph

of the battle scene beside

the blackboard describe the outcome

of this affair. It was,

he said, a demonstration

of the necessary destruction of all

the hordes coming up from the East,

and thus a contribution to the history

of salvation. Since then I have

read in another teacher’s writings

that we have death in front of us

rather like a picture of Alexander’s battle

on our schoolroom wall.

Now I know, as with a crane’s eye

one surveys his far-flung realm,

a truly Asiatic spectacle,

and slowly learns, from the tininess

of the figures and the incomprehensible

beauty of nature that vaults over them

to see that side of life that

one could not see before.We look

over the battle and, glancing

from north to south, we see

a camp with white Persian

tents lying in the evening glow

and a city on the shore.

Outside, with swollen sails

the ships make headway and

the shadows already graze

the cypresses, and beyond them

Egypt’s mainland extends.

The Nile Delta can be made out,

the Sinai Peninsula, the Red Sea

and, still farther in the distance,

towering up in dwindling light,

the mountain ranges,

snow-covered and ice-bound,

of the strange, unexplored,

African continent.

This translation of After Nature is published posthumously. W. G. Sebald approved a final version of the text before his death.

W. G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgau, Germany, in 1944. He studied German language and literature at Freiburg, Switzerland, and Manchester. He taught at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, for thirty years, becoming professor of European literature in 1987, and from 1989 to

1994 was the first director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. His books have won a number of international awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Berlin Literature Prize, and the Literatur Nord Prize. He died in December 2001.

Michael Hamburger has written, translated, and edited across the fields of German, French, and Italian literature. He has held visiting posts at universities and colleges in America and Great Britain and has received many awards and honors, including two honorary doctorates, several prizes for his translations and, in 1992, an OBE. He has produced poetry throughout his writing life; his Collected Poems 1941–1994 appeared in 1995 and his latest volume, Intersections, in 2000. His critical work on the subject, The Truth of Poetry, was published in 1972 by Penguin. He has also written his memoirs, String of Beginnings (1991).