Dilemma

'Thus the sound of speech strives to "express" subjective and objective happening, the "inner" and the "outer" world; but what of this it can retain is not the life and individual fullness of existence, but only a dead abbreviation of it*.' Literature can transcend this dilemma only by keeping faith with unsocial, banned language, and by learning to use the opaque images of broken rebellion as a means of communication.

W. G. Sebald, "Strangeness, Integration and Crisis: On Peter Handke's Play Kaspar" Campo Santo, Anthea Bell (trad.), Sven Meyer (ed.), Penguin Books, 2005, p.67.

*Citação de Ernst Cassirer, Sprache und Mythos (Leipzig e Berlim, 1925, pp-6-7).

Crossing the water

In early November 1980
walking across
the Bridge of Peace I almost
went out of my mind

*

Natural History

In Man it is
the Quadruped
in the Woman the Amphibian
who has the upper hand

*

Abandoned

like Kafka's essay
on Goethe's abominable
nature

*

Obscure Passage

Aristotle did not
apprehend at all
the word he found
in Archytas

W. G. Sebald, Across the Land and Water, Ian Galbraith (trad.) Everyman, New York, 2013.

V. Perdu dans ces filaments

But the certitude nonetheless
That a human heart
Can be crushed - Eli Eli
The choice between Talmud and Torah
Is hard and there is no relying
On Bleston's libraries
Where for years now I have sought
With my hands and eyes the displaced
Books which so they say Mr. Dewey's
International classification system
With all its numbers still cannot record
A World Bibliography of Bibliographies
On ne doit plus dormir says Pascal
A revision of all books at the core
Of the volcano has been long overdue
In this cave within a cave
No glance back to the future survives
Reading star-signs in winter one must
Cut from pollard willows on snowless fields
Flutes of death for Bleston

W. G. Sebald, de "Poemtrees", Across the Land and Water, Ian Galbraith (trad.) Everyman, New York, 2013

Timetable

Grown sheepish
by morning I study
the grounds of my coffee

At midday I cut
a slice for myself
from the hollow pumpkin of summer

And not until dark do I risk again
the Cretan trick
of leaping between the horns

W. G. Sebald, Across the Land and Water: Selected Poems, 1964-2001, Ian Galbraith (trad.), Modern Library, New York, 2013.

Although he was losing his sight, he spent many days in archives, making endless notes – on the events in Gunzenhausen, for instance, on that Palm Sunday of 1934, years before what became known as the Kristallnacht, when the windows of Jewish homes were smashed and the Jews themselves were hauled out of their hiding places in cellars and dragged through the streets. What horrified Paul was not only the coarse offences and the violence of those Palm Sunday incidents in Gunzenhausen, not only the death of seventy-five-year-old Ahron Rosenfeld, who was stabbed, or of thirty-five-year-old Siegfried Rosenau, who was hanged from a railing; it was not only these things, said Mme Landau, that horrified Paul, but also, nearly as deeply, a newspaper article he came across, reporting with Schaudenfreunde that the schoolchildren of Gunzenhausen had helped themselves to a free bazar in the town the following morning, taking several week's supply of hair slides, chocolate cigarettes, coloured pencils, fizz powder and many other things from the wrecked shops.

W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants, Michael Hulse (tr.), Vintage Books, London, 2002