Winfried Sebald: After Nature

“Before the four incomparable novels that made him a world figure in literature, W. G. Sebald wrote the free verse triptych After Nature, now fluently translated by Michael Hamburger. After Nature sets the pattern of the novels: reveries on distant lives alongside something like autobiography. This and the later books sustain a search for threads along which conscious and lost memories in private life connect with surviving and lost evidence about lives and worlds long gone. … As in Sebald’s novels, images and echoes link narrative meditations in this work.” — The San Francisco Chronicle

“[There are] three poems in After Nature. The first is about the sixteenth- century painter Matthias Grunewald, the second about the nineteenth- century botanist Georg Steller, [and the third] is an autobiographical prose poem. The scientist, the artist, and the writer all trying to make sense of life and death, pulled between images of white snow in the Alps and green forests and pastures. The late W. G. Sebald is a writer who often stops, in his quest for meaning, with the unexplained coincidence. [Sebald] will not translate coincidence for his readers, and this is the secret of his perfect timing. Here is the other secret: We are willing to be carried along in a haze of not quite understanding because Sebald also revels in the pure music of words. . Only by suspending readerly willfulness will you be able to float weightless through his writing.” — Los Angeles Times

“Remarkably lucid English translation. . After Nature consists of three interrelated narratives, spanning different historical periods. … It is Sebald’s graphic description of a subject in a Grunewald painting that seems to capture the random, irrational movements of nature most vividly.”

The Washington Post

“Europe … is a continent soaked in bloody history; its every street corner, its every green and lovely field has likely borne witness to some episode of war or religious terror or plague. W. G. Sebald. . was a master at evoking this haunted Europe. …By the time he died on a rural English road, he had been acknowledged as one of the great postwar European writers. . Now, After Nature, a book of three long poems by Sebald, is being published in

English for the first time. . This translation (by his friend Michael Hamburger) reveals him to be a poet of subtlety and lingering power.”

Time Out New York

“His work recalls Gustav Herling’s Journal Written at Night or, when he includes uncaptioned photographs, the early work of Sebald’s contemporary, Michael Ondaatje. Comparisons, however, do no justice to Sebald. Eventually, even the most familiar prose unit, the paragraph, dissolves in his hands. He was an original.” The Philadelphia Inquirer

“The three long poems in After Nature . . anatomize the correspondence between the life and the work, the work and the world, the world and the life. Wary of abstraction, alert to history’s detours and infernal turns, Sebald had the ability to consort with the unspeakable. . After Nature is Sebald’s alpha and omega, at once the first and last of his literary works, and a seedbed for his later projects. . Sebald, near the end of After Nature, under a lowering sky, writes, ‘What’s dead is gone/forever,’ then a shard from Lear: ‘What did’st/thou say?’ More questions follow, and the section dissolves into ‘Water? Fire? Good?/Evil? Life? Death?’ It’s the one moment in his entire body of work where he gives the impression of losing control, and the effect is liberating and haunting.” — The Village Voice

“The art that he created is of near-miraculous beauty.”

The New Republic

“After Nature, which now appears in an excellent translation by Michael Hamburger, is a work of considerable scope and ambition. . The aims of the Grunewald and Steller poems are not biographical or historical in any ordinary sense. Though the scholarship behind them is thorough. . scholarship takes second place to what he intuits about his subjects and perhaps projects upon them. … It is thus best to think of Grunewald and Steller as personae, masks that enable Sebald to project back into the past a character type, ill at ease in the world, indeed in exile from it, that may be his own but that he feels possesses a certain genealogy which his reading and researches can uncover. . ‘Dark Night Sallies Forth,’ the third of the poems in After Nature, is more overtly autobiographical. Here, Sebald, as ‘I,’ takes stock of himself as a person but also as inheritor of Germany’s recent history.”

-The New York Review of Books

Whoever closes the wings

of the altar in the Lindenhardt

parish church and locks up

the carved figures in their casing

on the lefthand panel

will be met by St. George.

Foremost at the picture’s edge he stands

above the world by a hand’s breadth

and is about to step over the frame’s

threshold. Georgius Miles,

man with the iron torso, rounded chest

of ore, red-golden hair and silver

feminine features. The face of the unknown

Grunewald emerges again and again

in his work as a witness

to the snow miracle, a hermit

in the desert, a commiserator

in the Munich Mocking of Christ.

Last of all, in the afternoon light

in the Erlangen library, it shines forth

from a self-portrait, sketched out

in heightened white crayon, later destroyed

by an alien hand’s pen and wash,

as that of a painter aged forty

to fifty. Always the same

gentleness, the same burden of grief,

the same irregularity of the eyes, veiled

and sliding sideways down into loneliness.

Grunewald’s face reappears, too,

in a Basel painting by Holbein

the Younger of a crowned female saint.

These were strangely disguised

instances of resemblance, wrote Fraenger

whose books were burned by the fascists.

Indeed it seemed as though in such works of art

men had revered each other like brothers, and

often made monuments in each other’s

image where their paths had crossed.

Hence too, at the centre of

the Lindenhardt altar’s right wing,

that troubled gaze upon the youth

on the other side of the older man

whom, years ago now, on a grey

January morning I myself once

encountered in the railway station

in Bamberg. It is St. Dionysius,

his cut-off head under one arm.

To him, his chosen guardian

who in the midst of life carries

his death with him, Grunewald gives

the appearance of Riemenschneider, whom

twenty years later the Wurzburg bishop

condemned to the breaking of his hands

in the torture cell. Long before that time

pain had entered into the pictures.

That is the command, knows the painter

who on the altar aligns himself

with the scant company of the

fourteen auxiliary saints. Each of these,

the blessed Blasius, Achaz and Eustace;