After Nature
Winfried Georg Sebald


After Nature, W. G. Sebald’s first literary work, now translated into English by Michael Hamburger, explores the lives of three men connected by their restless questioning of humankind’s place in the natural world. From the efforts of each, “an order arises, in places beautiful and comforting, though more cruel, too, than the previous state of ignorance.” The first figure is the great German Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald. The second is the Enlightenment botanist-explorer Georg Steller, who accompanied Bering to the Arctic. The third is the author himself, who describes his wanderings among landscapes scarred by the wrecked certainties of previous ages.

After Nature introduces many of the themes that W. G. Sebald explored in his subsequent books. A haunting vision of the waxing and waning tides of birth and devastation that lie behind and before us, it confirms the author’s position as one of the most profound and original writers of our time.


W. G. Sebald


After Nature


PRAISE FOR 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


AFTER NATURE


Or va, ch’un sol volere e d’ambedue:

tu duca, tu segnore e tu maestro.

Cos'i li dissi; e poi che mosso fue,

intrai per lo cammino alto e silvestro.

Now go, the will within us being one:

you be my guide, Lord, master from this day,

I said to him; and when he, moved, led on

I entered on the steep wild-wooded way.

    
Dante, Inferno, Canto II


…AS THE SNOW ON THE ALPS


I


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;

Panthaleon, Aegidius, Cyriax, Christopher and

Erasmus and the truly beautiful

St. Vitus with the cockerel,

each look in different

directions without knowing

why. The three female saints

Barbara, Catherine and Margaret on

the other hand hide at the edge

of the left panel behind the back of

St. George putting together their

uniform oriental heads for a conspiracy against the men.

The misfortune of saints

is their sex, is the terrible

separation of the sexes which Grunewald

suffered in his own person. The exorcised

devil that Cyriax, not only because

of the narrow confines, holds raised

high as an emblem in

the air is a female being

and, as a grisaille of Grunewald’s

in the Frankfurt Stadel shows in

the most drastic of fashions, derives from

Diocletian’s epileptic daughter,

the misshapen princess Artemia whom

Cyriax, as beside him she kneels on

the ground, holds tightly leashed

with a maniple of his vestments

like a dog. Spreading out

above them is the branch work

of a fig tree with fruit, one of which

is entirely hollowed out by insects.


II


Little is known of the life of

Matthaeus Grunewald of Aschaffenburg.

The first account of the painter

in Joachim von Sandrart’s German Academy

of the year 1675 begins with the notice

that the author knows not one person living

who could provide a written or oral

testimony of that praiseworthy hand.

We may trust that report by Sandrart,

for a portrait in a Wurzburg museum

has preserved him, aged eighty-two,

wide awake and with eyes uncommonly clear.

Lightly in grey and black,

he writes, Matthaeus had painted the outer

wings of an altarpiece made by Durer

of Mary’s ascension in the

Preachers’ convent in Frankfurt and

thus had lived at around 1505.


Exceedingly strange was the trans-

figuration of Christ on Mount Tabor

limned by him in watercolours, especially

one cloud of wondrous beauty, wherein

above the Apostles convulsed

with awe, Moses and Elijah appear,

a marvel surpassed.

Then in the Mainz cathedral

there had been three altar panels

with facing fronts and reverse

sides painted, one of them

showing a blind hermit who, as he crosses

the frozen Rhine river with a boy

to guide him, is assaulted by two murderers

and beaten to death. Anno 1631 or ’32,

this panel in the wild war of that era

had been taken away and sent off to Sweden

but by shipwreck beside many other

such pieces of art had perished

in the depths of the sea.

At Isenheim, Sandrart had not been,

but had heard of the altar-work there,

which, he writes, was so fashioned that

real life could scarce have been other

and where, it was said, a St. Anthony with

demons meticulously drawn was to be seen.

Except for a St.John with hands clasped

of which he, Sandrart, when at one time in Rome

he was counterfeiting the pope, had caught sight,

with certainty this was all that was not lost

of the work of the Aschaffenburg

painter of whom, besides, he knew only

that most of the time he had

resided in Mainz, led a reclusive

melancholy life and been ill-married.


III


We know there is a long tradition

of persecuting the Jews, in the City

of Frankfurt as in other places.

Around 1240, the records tell us,

173 were either slaughtered

or died of their own free will

in a conflagration. In 1349

the Flagellant Brothers instituted

a great massacre in the Jewish quarter.

Again, the chronicles tell that the Jews

burned themselves and that

after the fire there was a clear view from

the Cathedral Hill over to Sachsenhausen.

Thereafter the Jews only hesitantly

returned to the city on the Main.

In the mid-fifteenth century

a clothing statute is issued,

yellow rings to be worn on the tunic,

later a grey circle the size of

an apple, for the prevention of all

carnal intercourse between Christians

and Jews, for a long time to come

under the pain of death.

Then, at the expense of Frankfurt’s

high city council, in the train

of civic reform, progressive order

and hygienisation, a ghetto of their own

is built for the Jews by the Wollgraben,

fourteen houses and a new synagogue.

By Grunewald’s time, we learn,

there are twenty-three houses, and soon

the district counts more than three thousand souls

without the boundaries having been widened.

Each night-on Sundays at four in the

afternoon-they were locked up, and

might not walk into any place

where a green tree grew,

not on the Scheidewall

nor in the Ross, nor on the Romerberg

or in the Avenue. In this ghetto

the Jewess Enchin had been raised

before, not many months preceding

her marriage to Mathys Grune

the painter, she was christened in the name of St. Anne.

In the compendious book about the historical

Grunewald which Dr. W. K. Zulch produced

in ancient Schwabach type,

in the year 1938 for Hitler’s birthday

the story of this extraordinary union

could not be admitted. Grunewald

would have noticed this child,

remarkable, it was said, for her beauty

when she passed through the Bridge Gate

and the Preachers’ Lane on her way

to her workplace just outside the ghetto.

But there is no evidence that it was he who induced

this Anna, betrothed to him a year later,

to change her religious faith.

Rather it seems that she herself

had facilitated this step

attesting great strength of will,

or desperation, by looking the painter

straight in the eyes; perhaps

at first merely in love with

his green-colored name,

a conjunction which to the bachelor

master, who meanwhile had given up

the Mainz Court Painter’s appointment

in favour of the great Isenheim Altar

commission, will not have come amiss,

for without a household of his own

he could employ no assistant

or apprentice for his work.

When Grunewald buys a house

very close to the cathedral

on December 17th 1512

for twenty-three guilders

twelve shillings, already,

the documents record, he has taken

to wife the baptised Anna.

The much admired young proselyte,

who for the Frankfurt Christian

community, which even for her baptism

had overwhelmed her with gifts,

was no mean acquisition, and

could have founded Grunewald’s fortune.

If it fell out otherwise, for one thing

it was because the painter

who later lived as a recluse

and almost underground, himself

made impossible his recognition

by this community; and,

for another, as his pictures prove,

he had more of an eye for men,

whose faces and entire physique

he executed with endless devotion

whereas his women for the most part

are veiled, so relieving him of the fear

of looking at them more closely.

Perhaps that is why Grunewald’s

Anna grew shrewish, ill, a victim

to perverse reason, to brain fevers

and to madness.

In the end, awaiting recovery,

she is placed in hospital where

at the time of the painter’s death

still she lives on, infirm

in body and mind.


IV


In the Chicago Art Institute

hangs the self-portrait of an unknown

young painter which in 1929

passed into the Frankfurt art trade

from Sweden. The small maple panel

shows a scarcely twenty-year-old

at the window of a narrow room.

Behind him, on a shelf not quite

in perspective, pots of paint,

a crayon, a seashell and a precious Venetian

glass filled with a translucent essence.

In one hand the painter holds

a finely carved knife of bone

with which to trim the drawing-pen

before continuing work on a female nude

that lies in front of him next to an inkwell.

Through the window on his left a

landscape with mountain and valley

and the curved line of a path is visible.

This last, Zülch philosophises, is the way

into the world, and no one took it other

than the man, vanished without a trace,

to whom his research is devoted and whose art

he thinks he can recognise in the anonymous picture.

The reason for the signature “M.N.”

above the window-frame must be

that the painter Mathis Nithart,

discovered in archives but otherwise

not identified by any works of his own,

hid behind the name of Grünewald.

Hence the initials M.G. and N. on the Snow

Altar at Aschaffenburg, hence the merging,

most remarkable, given the difference in age,

of the young painter with the Sebastian

pierced with arrows at Isenheim.

And indeed the person of Mathis Nithart

in documents of the time so flows into

the person of Grünewald that one

seems to have been the life,

then the death, too, of the other.

An X-ray photograph of the Sebastian panel

reveals beneath the elegiac

portrait of the saint

that same face again, the half-

profile only turned a tiny bit further

in the definitive overpainting.

Here two painters in one body

whose hurt flesh belonged to both

to the end pursued the study

of their own nature. At first

Nithart fashioned his self-portrait

from a mirror image, and Grünewald

with great love, precision and patience

and an interest in the skin

and hair of his companion extending

to the blue shadow of the beard

then overpainted it.

The martyrdom depicted is

the representation, to be sensed

even in the rims of the wounds,

of a male friendship wavering

between horror and loyalty.

It is conceivable that Nithart

who was also a maker of water displays,

in later years furthered

the mistaking of his person for

the increasingly unsociable Isenheim master,

that perhaps he was the connecting link

between Grünewald and the world become

inaccessible to him in his misfortune.

Around 1527, about twelve

years after the work in Alsace,

Nithart moved from Frankfurt, where

for a time he must have continued to share

the life of Grünewald, to Halle

to build, for its celebrated salt springs,

watercourses and an array

of jet fountains driven

by a most complicated system of scoop

wheels and pipes like that on the Main

at Aschaffenburg, a masterpiece of

mechanical art much visited at the time.

It is said, however, that Nithart

never accomplished much in Halle and often

changed lodgings. In the summer of

’twenty-eight he fell into

deep dejection and then, it seems,

death very soon overtook him.

The Frankfurt magistrates, when the news

of Nithart’s passing had reached them,

ordered a register to be made

of the household effects in his

workshop. The long list embraces

an accumulation of the most diverse things:

spoons and pottage bowls, soup cauldrons,

drawing-belts for water, fifteen

white goatskins, silver talers,

and copper coins from Schwaz in the Tyrol,

books, proclamations, scripts and many

Lutheran printed tracts. All this

irradiated by the glory of a unique

store of paints: lead white and albus,

Paris red, cinnabar, slate green,

mountain green, alchemy green, blue

vitreous pastes and minerals

from the Orient. Clothing, too,

beautiful, item a gold-yellow pair of hose,

tunics, cinnamon-coloured, the lapels overlaid

in purpled velvet with black stitching,

a grey atlas doublet, a red slouch hat

and much exquisite adornment besides.

The estate in truth is that of two men, but

whether Grünewald, an inventor of singular

hues, shared his departed friend’s liking

for such gaudy arrayment

we cannot presume to say.


V


At the point where the great military road

from Strasbourg to the Burgundian portal, in line with

the run of the Vosges to the south,

crosses the Lauterbach’s course

from the Gebweiler transverse valley,

lies the village of Isenheim.

Here the Canons Regular,

the legendary history of whose order

is traced back to the anchorite

Antonius the Hermit who

in the year 357 departed this life

in the Theban desert, in 1300

acquired the site from the Murbach

Cluniacs to found an Antonian hospital

for the cure of St. Anthony’s fire

which raged throughout all Europe,

an infection of the blood that led

to the rotting away of the limbs

and with leprosy was among

the most dreaded diseases of the Middle Ages.

When gradually St. Anthony’s fire

died, the Antonian hospitals adopted

other ailments that afflicted body or mind

for their healing, such as epilepsy

and the so-called venereal scourges

which spread disastrously after 1490.

The treatment of patients who at their arrival

were usually half-destroyed already

tended towards this, that, as

hieratic witnesses to evil,

at first they were led to the altar

in the choir aisle, baptised in the name

of a martyr to God and so, as it were

despite and together with their perversion,

brought into the precincts of salvation.

In this it happened not infrequently

that from the relic of St. Anthony

encased in the shrine of the altar

a miracle emanated, or that

those in some part horribly disfigured were

later rid of their affliction by the repeated

application of Saint Vinage, an elixir

which the canons obtained annually

on the day of the Resurrection in the monastery

of St. Antoine de Viennois,

near St. Marcellin on the Isère

by pouring wine on the bones,

there preserved, of St. Anthony.

This liquid, twice purified,

was distributed by the monastery’s messengers

up and down the country, and with it

the peasants blessed that pig which

in their sties wore the bell of the saint,

who was also the patron of flocks and their keepers.

As for the hospital itself, where

of the twelve canons eight

usually studied philosophy

under a lector,

the rituals of purification

according to which the sick were treated

became a battle fought over their bodies

against the presence of death manifested

in madness; became indeed the most

fundamental of all confrontations

in which the altar-work commissioned

from Grünewald by Guido Guersi,

the Isenheim Preceptor, was to engage

the painter in a great therapeutic

task through the representation,

executed in beauteous and harrowing

colours, of the hour of the pale

streams of pus. At the latest

with the commencement of his work

in the Alsatian Home of the Crippled

where the most diverse material for inspection

of the manners in which a human being

creeps into himself, herself or

seeks to get out, was assembled,

Grünewald, who in any case must have tended

towards an extremist view of the world,

will have come to see the redemption of the

living as one from life itself.

Now life as such, as it unfolds, dreadfully,

everywhere and at all times,

is not to be seen on the altar panels

whose figures have passed beyond

the miseries of existence, unless it be

in that unreal and demented thronging

which Grünewald has developed around

St. Anthony of the temptation:

dragged by his hair over the ground

by a gruesome monster.

Low down in the bottom-left corner

cowers the body, covered with

syphilitic chancres, of an inmate

of the Isenheim hospital. Above it

rises a two-headed and manyarmed

androgynous creature

about to finish off the saint

with a brandished jaw-bone.

On the right, a stilt-legged bird-like beast

which, with human arms,

holds a cudgel raised up. Behind

and beside this, towards the picture’s centre,

crab-clawed together, shark- and dragon-like

maws, rows of teeth, pug noses

from which snot flows, fin-shaped

clammy limp wings, hair and horns,

skin like entrails turned outwards,

excrescences of an entire life,

in the air, on land and in water.

To him, the painter, this is creation,

image of our insane presence

on the surface of the earth,

the regeneration proceeding

in downward orbits

whose parasitical shapes

intertwine, and, growing into

and out of one another, surge

as a demonic swarm

into the hermit’s quietude.

In this fashion Grünewald,

silently wielding his paintbrush,

rendered the scream, the wailing, the gurgling

and the shrieking of a pathological spectacle

to which he and his art, as he must have known,

themselves belong. The panic-stricken

kink in the neck to be seen

in all of Grünewald’s subjects,

exposing the throat and often turning

the face towards a blinding light,

is the extreme response of our bodies

to the absence of balance in nature

which blindly makes one experiment after another

and like a senseless botcher

undoes the thing it has only just achieved.

To try out how far it can go

is the sole aim of this sprouting,

perpetuation and proliferation

inside us also and through us and through

the machines sprung from our heads,

all in a single jumble,

while behind us already the green

trees are leaving their leaves and

bare, as often they appear in Grünewald’s

pictures, loom up into the sky,

the dead branches overlaid

with a moss-like glutinous substance.

The black bird that in its beak

carries a break-time meal

to St. Anthony on his site

in the desert may be the one with

the heart of glass, the bird

flying ever closer to us,

of which another prophet

of the last days announces

that it will shit into the sea

so that the water boils itself out,

that the earth trembles and the great city

with the iron tower stands in flames,

whilst the Pope squats in a barge

and darkness comes and

with it a yellow dust

that covers the land.


VI


On the Basel Crucifixion of 1505

behind the group of mourners

a landscape reaches so far into the depth

that our eyes cannot see its limits.

A patch of brown scorched earth

whose contour like the head of a whale

or an open-mouthed leviathan

devours the pale green meadow plains,

and the marshily shining stretches

of water. Above it, pushed off

to behind the horizon, which step

by step grows darker, more glowering,

rise the hills of the prehistory

of the Passion.We see the gate

of the Garden of Gethsemane, the approach

of the henchmen and the kneeling figure of Christ

so reduced in size that in the

receding space the rushing

away of time can be sensed.

Most probably Grünewald painted

and recalled the catastrophic incursion

of darkness, the last trace of light

flickering from beyond, after nature,

for in the year 1502, when he was working

at Bindlach, below the Fichtelgebirge,

on the creation of the Lindenhardt altar,

on the first of October the moon’s shadow

slid over Eastern Europe from Mecklenburg

over Bohemia and the Lausitz to southern Poland,

and Grünewald, who repeatedly was in touch

with the Aschaffenburg Court Astrologer Johann Indagine,

will have travelled to see this event of the century,

awaited with great terror, the eclipse of the sun,

so will have become a witness to

the secret sickening away of the world,

in which a phantasmal encroachment of dusk

in the midst of daytime like a fainting fit

poured through the vault of the sky,

while over the banks of mist and the cold

heavy blues of the clouds

a fiery red arose, and colours

such as his eyes had not known

radiantly wandered about, never again to be

driven out of the painter’s memory.

These colours unfold as the reverse of

the spectrum in a different consistency

of the air, whose deoxygenated void

in the gasping breath of the figures

on the central Isenheim panel is enough

to portend our death by asphyxiation; after which

comes the mountain landscape of weeping

in which Grünewald with a pathetic gaze

into the future has prefigured

a planet utterly strange, chalk-coloured

behind the blackish-blue river.

Here in an evil state of erosion

and desolation the heritage of the ruining

of life that in the end will consume

even the stones has been depicted.

In view of this it seems to me

that the ice age, the glaringly white

towering of the summits in

the upper realm of the Temptation,

is the construction of a metaphysic

and a miracle like the one

in the year 352, when

at the height of the summer

snow fell

on the Esquiline

Hill in Rome.


VII


In the spring of 1525 Grünewald

rode through April light and showers

to Windsheim, where from the workshop

of Jakob Seckler he had ordered

the crowning piece for an altar,

an intricate carving of finials

and figures, vine leaves and

various birds.While Seckler

put the last touch to his work,

Grünewald fell into conversation

with Barthel and Sebald Beham,

etchers and draughtsmen from Nürnberg who,

seized on January 12th as godless painters

and driven out of their native city for heresy,

were lodging provisionally at the Windsheim master’s.

The brothers, on walks out into the still

discoloured fields and till late into the night,

told of Thomas Münzer, at one time in Nürnberg,

now gone through Swabia to Alsace,

to Switzerland and into the Black Forest

to raise the insurrection. For the sixth

trumpet was about to sound and the poor

letter must be released from its prison.

With clangour a great

pentecost was to begin,

the filling of the waters well nigh

completed, the seething

planets gathered in

the house of Pisces. The red

star was drawing into conjunction

with Saturn, the sign

of the peasants, and a fantastic

fire would flare up when,

in the imminent future,

a needy wretch would be revealed

as the Messiah Septentrionalis.

Grünewald said that once, in his childhood,

he must have been six or seven,

the kettle drummer of Niklashausen

had roused the people with promises

of earthly happiness for the poor.

Fifty thousand daily had thronged to him,

his prayer chapel filled with precious

donations and this had gone on for a while,

but then as a spectacle to the rabble

he had been roasted in Würzburg.

Already I can see, he resumed,

under the rainbow arching

over the land, the horsemen

advance from their camp.

Brothers, he said, when they were walking

along the Windsheim woods,

I know that the old coat is tearing

and I am afraid

of the ending of time.

In mid-May, when Grünewald

with his carved altarpiece had

returned to Frankfurt, the grain

whitening at harvest-time,

the whetted sickle passed

through the life of an army of five thousand

in the curious battle of Frankenhausen

in which hardly one horse soldier fell

but the bodies of peasants piled up

into a hecatomb, because,

as though they were mad,

they neither put up any resistance

nor took to their heels.

When Grünewald got news of this

on the 18th of May

he ceased to leave his house.

Yet he could hear the gouging out

of eyes that long continued

between Lake Constance and

the Thuringian Forest.

For weeks at that time he wore

a dark bandage over his face.


VIII


With the painter on horseback,

sometimes, too, high up on the cart

sits a nine-year-old child,

his own, as he ponders in disbelief,

conceived in his marriage to Anna.

It is a most beautiful ride, this last

in September 1527, along the riverside

through the valleys. The air stirs the light

between the leafage of trees, and from the hillsides

they look down on the land extending around them.

At rest, leaning against a rock, Grünewald

feels inside himself his misfortune

and that of the water artist in Halle.

The wind drives us into flight

like starlings at the hour when

the shadows fall. What remains to the last

is the work undertaken. In the service of

the family Erbach at Erbach, Grünewald devotes

the remaining years to an altar work.

Crucifixion again, and the lamentation,

the deformation of life slowly proceeds, and

always between the eye’s glance

and the raising of his brush

Grünewald now covers a long journey,

much more often than he used to

interrupts the execution of his art

for the apprenticing of his child

both in the workplace and outside in the green country.

What he himself learned from this is nowhere reported,

only that the child at the age of fourteen

for no known reason suddenly died

and that the painter did not outlive him

for any great length of time. Peer ahead sharply,

there you see in the greying of nightfall

the distant windmills turn.

The forest recedes, truly,

so far that one cannot tell

where it once lay, and the ice-house

opens, and rime, on to the field, traces

a colourless image of Earth.

So, when the optic nerve

tears, in the still space of the air

all turns as white as

the snow on the Alps.


AND IF I REMAINED BY THE OUTERMOST SEA


. . Immer steigender hebst,Woge, du dich!

Ach! die letzte, letzte bist du! das Schiff geht unter!

Und den Todtengesang heult dumpf fort,

Auf dem großen, immer offenen Grabe der Sturm!

. . Higher and higher, billow, you rise!

Ah, you’re the last, the last! the ship’s going down!

And muted, over the grave yet open and huge,

Still the gale howls its death-chant, its dirge.

    
Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, “The Worlds,” Feb. 1746


I


Georg Wilhelm Steller

born at Windsheim, in Franconia,

while pursuing his studies

at the University of Halle

repeatedly came across news

items in journals

that the Russian Czarina,

in the course of her empire’s expansion,

was preparing an expedition on an unprecedented scale

under the supreme command of Vitus Bering

to the Pacific coast, so that

the sea route from there to America

should become known.


II


Visions of this voyage of discovery,

Steller later recorded, had so seized

his imagination that he, the son

of a cantor, gifted with a

fine tenor voice and furnished

with a bursary for true Christians,

having abandoned Wittenberg and

theology for natural science,

could now, during his doctoral

disputations, which he passed

with the highest distinction,

think of nothing other than

the shapes of the fauna and

flora of that distant region

where East and West and North

converge, and of the art and skill

required for their description.


III


Although it was said that the authorities

would appoint him in the near future

to the Chair of Botany and so

accredit him to society,

Steller, without means though he was,

and with scarcely more than his notebooks

in his pocket, on the very day

after the Rigorosum set out in the

mail coach to the city of Danzig,

then occupied by Russian troops,

where he signed on as a medical assistant

on a packet-boat that was

to carry some hundreds

of invalids back to Russia.


IV


When the ship sailed out of Danzig Bay,

Steller, who had never yet confronted

the sea, stood on the deck for a while,

wondering at the passage

over water, at power and weight,

at the salt in the air and

the darkness pushed down to the deep

under the keel. To the left,

the outermost point of the Putzig spit,

to the right, the headland

fronting the Frische Haff,

a pale grey streak endlessly

merging into a still paler grey.

This behind him had been Germany,

it occurred to him, his childhood,

the woods of Windsheim;

the learning of ancient languages,

protracted throughout his youth

perscrutamini scripturas,

shouldn’t that read,

perscrutamini naturas rerum?


V


Kronstadt, Oranienbaum, Peterhof

and last in the Torricellian void,

a thirty-four-year-old bastard,

marooned on the Neva’s marsh delta,

St. Petersburg under the fortress,

the new Russian capital,

uncanny to a stranger,

no more than a chaos erupting,

buildings that began to subside

as soon as erected, and nowhere

a vista quite straight. The streets

and squares laid out according

to the Golden Section, jetty walls and bridges,

alignments, façades and rows of windows—

these only slowly come towards us

out of the future’s resounding emptiness,

so as to bring the plan of eternity into the city

born of the terror of the vastness of space,

overpopulated with Armenians, Turks, Tatars,

Kalmucks, immigrant Swedes,

Germans, French and the tortured-to-death,

mutilated corpses of criminals hung

all down the avenue on exhibition.


VI


On the other side of the river, in the famous

botanical gardens of the Marine Hospital

Steller escapes the city’s bustle.

Neatly he walks the paths

between the flowerbeds, marvels at

the hothouses, filled with tropical plants,

learns one new name after another

and is almost beside himself

with so much hope

when, from the half-shadow

of the mustard tree by the aviary,

the Patriarch of Novgorod,

Archbishop Theophon, steps towards him

with a tiny yellow parakeet in his hand,

and in the course of a Latin conversation

tells him a legend from the region of Dolyi,

which relates that God quite suddenly

and as though out of the blue came

into being on a lungwort leaf.


VII


For four years Steller remained

in Petersburg. The Primate, already

close to death, obtains for him the post

of an assistant in the Academy

and takes him into his own house

as a personal physician.

Under night’s biretta the old man

talks with his younger brother

of the winged end. To comfort him

Steller speaks of the light of nature.

But all things, Theophon says,

all things, my son, transmute

into old age, life diminishes,

everything declines,

the proliferation

of kinds is a mere

illusion, and no one

knows to what end.


VIII


The long Arctic journeys

had frayed the nerves of the

Academy member Daniel Messerschmidt.

Steller, who found Messerschmidt still living

in the summerhouse he occupied

with a baker’s daughter

from Sesslach, came too late

to get anything out of

the deeply melancholic man.

Instead, he now studies his papers.

He spends the whole summer

bent over the jumble of cards,

while the naturalist’s neglected

wife, gaudily dressed, sits

beside him and with her split

fin strokes the glans that throbs

like his heart. Steller feels science

shrinking to a single slightly

painful point. On the other hand

the foam bubbles, to him, are

a paradigm. Come, he whispers

into her ear in his desperation,

come with me to Siberia as

my true wife, and already hears

the answer: wherever

you go I will

go with you.


IX


When in 1736 Steller did indeed

receive the longed-for appointment

to join the Bering expedition,

this enterprise, launched ten years previously,

consisting of an army of carpenters,

blacksmiths, grooms, mariners,

clerks, commissioned officers,

scientists and assistants,

and of not only building materials, tools, instruments,

an arsenal of weapons and many hundreds

of books, but also endless

forage trains for the team’s provision,

crockery and clothing and crates

of claret for the higher-ranking

Academy emissaries, to be dragged onwards,

no different from a glacier pushing

great heavy masses of scree in its passage,

arrived at Yakutsk on the one hundred and

twenty-ninth degree of longitude, east.

Steller mastered the five thousand miles

in the course of the three and a half years

which Vitus Bering still needed

to convey everything, down to the last nail,

with his little Siberian packhorses

over the Yablonovy Range to

the Sea of Okhotsk. In the process

he accustomed himself to endure

deprivation and loneliness for

the sake of the baker’s daughter,

whom, in the hope that

perhaps even in far-off places

one might feel at home and on the grounds

of her seemingly unconditional

promise to travel gladly with him

to any parts wheresoever, he’d made his wife,

but who in the end, naturally, had not been willing

to make that journey halfway round the globe

together with him. In place of her, Steller

now had two young ravens,

which in the evenings dictated

ominous sayings to him.

When he wrote these down

he felt some comfort, although he knew

that even with these he would not

arrest the slow corrosion

that had entered his soul.


X


On the twentieth of March, 1741,

Steller stepped into the long

blockhouse of the Petropavlovsk

command post on the eastern shore

of the Kamchatka Peninsula.

In a windowless recess, no larger

than six feet by six, at the far end

of the building’s interior,

in no other way subdivided, he finds,

at a table of planks nailed together,

covered by land maps

and sea charts showing

vast tracts of whiteness,

Bering, the Commandant-captain,

his fifty-nine-year-old

head supported by his

right hand tattooed

with a bird’s unfolded wings,

the left hand holding

a pair of dividers,

sitting motionless

in a flickering light.

It takes an uncannily

long time, Steller thinks,

for Bering to open

his eyes and look

at him. What is this

being called human?

A beast, shrouded

in deep mourning,

in a black coat

lined with

black fur.


XI


For two weeks, with the wind fair,

the ships named after the saints

Peter and Paul had borne south

on the Arctic Ocean,

but the legendary land Gama entered

on Delisle’s map nowhere emerged

from the water’s waste. Only once on the

shimmering surface ahead did the watch

make out something black

covered with countless seabirds.

Plumbing the depth, they approached

till it was clear that the island rock

was no more than a dead whale many times magnified

by the mirage’s play, adrift belly up.

After that the course was set

to north-northeast. In the nights,

at times the sea lit up,

and to the sails splattered

by the crests of waves

sparks of that light adhered.

In a second mirage

one evening, across the horizon’s length

appeared a tract of land,

all crystalline marble,

but not until the morning of July 15th,

almost six weeks after setting sail

from the Bay of Avatsha,

did Steller, who always went on deck

in the early hours, truly see

between the low-drifting clouds

the feebly cross-hatched contour

of a mountain range.

In the evening of that day

the mist completely lifted.

A black sky

now overhung the sea and

the snow-covered, ragged merlons

of Alaska loomed “resplendent,”

the word that seemed right to Steller,

in rosy red and purple colours.

Vitus Bering, who throughout the voyage

had lain in his cabin staring

at the ceiling of beams above his head,

roused by the incessant jubilation

of the crew, for the first time came aloft

and contemplated the scene

in a fit of deepest depression.


XII


Unending flights

of screeching birds, which skimmed

low over the water,

from afar resembled

drifting islands. Whales

rotated around the ship, emitting

water-spouts high into the air

in all directions of the compass.

Chamisso, who later marvelled at

the same spectacular sight

on the Romanzov expedition,

was led to think that perhaps

these animals could be tamed

and — no different from geese

on a stubble field — be herded

with a rod, as it were, on the sea.

Bring up the young in a fjord, he wrote,

fasten a spiked belt buoyed up by

air-bladders under their pectoral fins,

let them unlearn their submersions,

make experiments. Whether the whale is

then to draw or to carry,

whether and how it is harnessed

or laden, how it is bridled

or otherwise governed, and who is to be the

mahout of this water-elephant — all this

will settle itself in time. Chamisso,

it is true, also writes

of the steam engine as

the first warm-blooded animal

created by humankind.


XIII


At the break of the following day,

St. Elijah’s Day,

Steller went ashore. Ten hours

Bering, with dread already imprinted

on his brow, had granted him

for a scientific excursion.

Now a deep blueness

pervaded both water and the forests

that grew right down

to the coast. Unperturbed

animals came close to Steller, black

and red foxes, magpies too, jays and

crows went with him on his way

across the beach. In the translucent darkness

between the trees he moved

with a tread more like hovering

over a cushion of moss a foot thick.

He came close to simply proceeding

towards the mountains, into

cool wilderness, but the constructs

of science in his head,

directed towards a diminution

of disorder in our world,

ran counter to that need.

Later, in a shelter made

out of joined fir-logs, he experienced

the effect of forsaken things

in a foreign space. A circular

drinking vessel of peeled-off bark,

a whetstone dotted with copper ore,

a fish-head paddle and

a child’s rattle of fired clay

he carefully selects, and in their place

leaves behind an iron kettle, a string

of many-coloured beads,

a little strip of Bokhara silk,

half a pound of tobacco and

a Chinese clay pipe.

After half a century this mute

exchange is still remembered,

as can be seen in a report by Commander Billings,

by an inhabitant of this remote region

with a laugh that’s a rustling

turned inwards.


XIV


The advice of the officers was

to make for Avatsha, keeping the course

as close as practicable to the fifty-third parallel

after the unanimous decision

to forgo any further exploration,

a simple calculation that rested

on nothing but unknown factors.

For almost a quarter of a year

the ship was tossed hither and thither

by hurricanes of a force

none in the team could recall

ever having experienced, on the Bering Sea

where there was nothing and no one but them.

All was a greyness, without direction,

with no above or below, nature

in a process of dissolution, in a state

of pure dementia. For days, in between

lulls, the ship motionless and

ever more and more damaged,

more tattered, the rigging more threadbare,

the sailcloth eaten away by salt.

The crew, stricken with

the delirium that comes of diseases

that entered their bodies, with eyes

drowning in exhaustion,

gums swollen like sponges,

joints suffused with blood,

liver puffed up, spleen puffed up

and with ulcers festering

just under the skin, day after day in God’s name

flung overboard sailors rotted away, till at last

there was scarcely a difference between

the living and the dead.

In dying the astra in human bodies

lose their quality, kind, substance

and essence, Steller, the physician, thinks,

what is dead has ceased to be living.

What does it mean, this physica, he asks,

what this iusiurandum Hippocratis,

what does surgery mean, what is our

skill and use when life

breaks apart and the physician

has neither might nor means? There—

in the night — with the moon

in its first November quarter,

a great wall of water drives

the ship onto the rocks.

Jammed there it lies, groans

for a while amid boulders

as though in its last extremity

it might yet reach dry land,

until a heavy wave

pushes it down into the stillness

of the lagoon behind the reef.

A white sickle the strand

curves in the dark, inland

the dunes overgrown with grasses

up to a plateau of shadows

under mountains in snowlight,

phosphorescent.


XV


Four men carried Bering, when inch by inch

water had risen right into him,

on to land on a seat of ropes tied together,

leaned him against a rock that broke the wind’s

fury and made a roof out of the sails

of the St. Peter. Wrapped in greatcoats, furs

and cloaks, his face yellow-wrinkled, his mouth

toothless, a black ruin, plagued with boils and

lice all over his body, the captain observed,

full of contentment in the face of death,

the first labours towards the erection

of winter quarters in the lairs

of foxes dug in the dunes.

Steller brings Bering a soup

concocted of blubber and nasturtium roots

which, however, turning his head aside,

Bering refuses

with a blink of his eyes.

Let them now, he says,

just leave him to sink

into the sand. The wrens

are already hopping about on him.

Blessed are the dead, Steller

remembers. On December 8th

they tie the captain on to a plank

and push him down into the hole.

It is not Thy will, Lord, to abandon

to the wild beasts the souls

of them that profess Thee.

Rather for the faithful a meal shall

be prepared from Leviathan’s heart.

Steller, looking up, sees

the greenish-grey reflex from the ocean,

the Arctic water-sky,

under the clouds. A sign of

how far they still are

from land.


XVI


On August 13th

the ship built from the wreck

sails round the island’s outermost

promontory which with gentle hills and calm

outlines descends to the sea.

Glistening in lovely greenness

like the pasture slopes of the Alps

it lies in late summer’s light,

untouched, it seems, by man.

Seen from on board,

the land moves.

Time past

grows no more real

through sufferings endured.

Incomprehensible, too, on the horizon

above the blue

vapour spread over the land,

after four days at sea

the smoke trails from Asia’s volcanoes.

To get close to this vista

they tack beneath the coast,

at one-quarter of a knot per hour

southward a good week long,

by night pull at the oars, too,

until, on the twenty-fifth of the month,

they reach the harbour of Petropavlovsk,

its plundered blockhouses and stores.

In thanksgiving for the miracle of their release

and in accordance with Bering’s wish

they make a silver frame,

beaten out of the coins, left unspent

to the last, for St. Peter’s icon.


XVII


Six years went by

before the survivors of the expedition

received the order

to return to the capital.

But Steller a few days after their landfall

in the Bay of Avatsha

had detached himself from the corps

and with the Cossack Lepekhin

had set out on foot for the peninsula’s interior.

If it please Thee that we travel,

so in his mind he said, be Thou

our strength as we go,

our comfort on the way, shade

in the heat of noon,

light in darkness,

shelter from frost and rain,

conveyance at the hour of weariness,

help in extremity, so that

under Thy guidance

safely we may attain that place

to which we are drawn;

Thine be the care, Lord,

so that the stars propitiously

conjoin above us.


XVIII


During what remained of the summer

Steller collects botanical specimens,

fills little bags with dried seed,

describes, classifies, draws,

sits in his black travelling tent,

happy for the first time in his life.

Thoma Lepekhin catches salmon,

brings mushrooms, berries and leaves,

makes fire and tea.

Throughout the winter

the German doctor teaches

Koryak children in a tiny

wooden school, writes

when the ice breaks

memoranda in defence

of the indigenous people maltreated

and deprived of their rights by

the Naval Command at Bolsheretsk—

with the consequence that a letter against him

is despatched, that interrogations take place,

that misunderstandings arise,

that arrests follow and that Steller

now wholly grasps the difference

between nature and society.

Westward, stage after stage he covers

fleeing back, and it seems as though

everything now were going downhill.

Only in Tara does the message reach him

that by any route possible

he may now set out for his home.

Steller hires three horses,

drives to Tobolsk,

and there he,

who never drank, drinks

for three whole days.

Then comes the fever,

he creeps into the sledge,

tells the Tatar to drive on southward,

the hundred and seventy miles to Tyumen.

This is infirmitas, the breaking

of time from day to day

and from hour to hour,

it is rust and fire

and the salt of the planets

darkness even at noon and

luminaries absent from heaven.


XIX


Manuscripts written at the end of his life,

on an island in the glacial sea,

with scratching goose-quill in bilious ink,

lists of two hundred and eleven

different plants, tales of white ravens,

unknown cormorants and sea-cows,

gathered into the dust

of an endless inventory,

his zoological masterpiece

De Bestiis Marinis,

travel chart for hunters,

blueprint for the counting of pelts-

no, not steep enough

was the north.


XX


At Tyumen they carry him out of the sledge,

drag his half-petrified body

out of the ice into the fire,

into a furnace house.

Now begins alchimia,

Steller recognises the mortem improvisam,

the stroke and all its appendage,

sees his death, how it is mirrored

in the field-surgeon’s monocle.

Such are you, doctores,

spilt lamps,

thus nature has her way

with a godless

Lutheran from Germany.


XXI


Pallas tells how Steller, whom he revered,

the next day,

wrapped in his red cloak,

a good distance outside the place of rest

of the believers was laid in a narrow ditch

high up above the Tura’s banks,

how they heaped up a mound

of frozen sods. Pallas

writes too that the dead man

was dreaming still of the grazing

mammoth across the river

until in the night someone came

and took his cloak

and left him to lie in the snow

like a fox beaten to death.


DARK NIGHT SALLIES FORTH


et iam summa procul villarum culmina fumant

maioresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae

and now far-off smoke pearls from homestead rooftops

and from high mountains the greater shadows fall

    
Virgil, Eclogues I


I


For it is hard to discover

the winged vertebrates of prehistory

embedded in tablets of slate.

But if I see before me

the nervature of past life

in one image, I always think

that this has something to do

with truth. Our brains, after all,

are always at work on some quivers

of self-organisation, however faint,

and it is from this that an order

arises, in places beautiful

and comforting, though more cruel, too,

than the previous state of ignorance.

How far, in any case, must one go back

to find the beginning? Perhaps

to that morning of January 9th, 1905,

on which Grandfather and Grandmother

in ringing cold drove in an open

landau from Kloster Lechfeld

to Obermeitingen, to be married.

Grandmother in a black taffeta dress

with a bunch of paper flowers, Grandfather

in his uniform, the brass-embellished

helmet on his head. What was in their minds

when, the horse blanket over their knees,

they sat side by side in the carriage and

heard the hoofbeats echo

in the bare avenue?

What was in the minds

of their children later, one of whom

stares out fearfully from

a class photograph taken

in the war year 1917

at Allarzried? Forty-eight

pitiable coevals,

the schoolmistress on the right,

on the left the myopic

chaplain and as a caption

on the reverse of the

spotted grey cardboard mount

the words “in the future

death lies at our feet,”

one of those obscure oracular sayings

one never again forgets. On another

photograph of which I possess an enlarged

copy, a swan and its reflection

on the water’s black surface,

a perfect emblem of peace.

The botanical garden around the pond,

to my knowledge, is situated

on the bank of the Regnitz at Bamberg

and I believe that a road

runs through it today.

The whole leaves an impression

that is somehow un-German,

the elms, the hornbeams and densely green

conifers in the background, the small

pagoda-like building, the finely raked

gravel, the hortensias, flag-iris,

aloes, ostrich-plume ferns and

the giant-leaved ornamental rhubarb.

Astonishing, to me, the persons

also to be seen in the picture:

Mother in her open coat,

with a lightness she was

later to lose; Father,

a little aside, hands in his pockets,

he too, it seems, with no cares.

The date is August 26th, 1943.

On the 27th Father’s departure for Dresden,

of whose beauty his memory, as he

remarks when I question him,

retains no trace.

During the night of the 28th

582 aircraft flew in

to attack Nürnberg. Mother,

who on the next day planned

to return to her parents’

home in the Alps,

got no further than

Fürth. From there she

saw Nürnberg in flames,

but cannot recall now

what the burning town looked like

or what her feelings were

at this sight.

On the same day, she told me recently,

from Fürth she had travelled on

to Windsheim and an acquaintance

at whose house she waited until

the worst was over, and realized

that she was with child.

As for the burning city,

in the Vienna Art-Historical Museum

there hangs a painting

by Altdorfer depicting Lot

with his daughters. On the horizon

a terrible conflagration blazes

devouring a large city.

Smoke ascends from the site,

the flames rise to the sky and

in the blood-red reflection

one sees the blackened

façades of houses.

In the middle ground there is a strip

of idyllic green landscape,

and closest to the beholder’s eye

the new generation of

Moabites is conceived.

When for the first time I saw

this picture the year before last,

I had the strange feeling

of having seen all of it

before, and a little later,

crossing to Floridsdorf

on the Bridge of Peace,

I nearly went out of my mind.


II


At the moment on Ascension Day

of the year ’forty-four when I was born,

the procession for the blessing of the fields

was just passing our house to the sounds

of the fire brigade band, on its way out

to the flowering May meadows. Mother

at first took this as a happy sign, unaware

that the cold planet Saturn ruled this hour’s

constellation and that above the mountains

already the storm was hanging which soon thereafter

dispersed the supplicants and killed

one of the four canopy bearers.

Apart from the grievous impression this

occurrence, unprecedented in the village’s history,

may have made upon me, and apart from

the raging fire which one night — shortly

before my first day at school it was—

consumed a sawmill not far from our house

and lit up the whole valley, I grew up,

despite the dreadful course

of events elsewhere, on the northern

edge of the Alps, so it seems

to me now, without any

idea of destruction. But the habit

of often falling down in the street and

often sitting with bandaged hands

by the open window between the potted

fuchsias, waiting for the

pain to subside and for hours

doing nothing but looking out,

early on induced me to imagine

a silent catastrophe that occurs

almost unperceived.

What I thought up at the time,

while gazing down into the herb garden

in which the nuns under their white

starched hoods moved so slowly

between the beds as though a moment ago

they had still been caterpillars, this

I have never got over.

The emblem for me of the

scarcely identifiable disaster

since that time has been a stunted

Tatar with a red headcloth

and a white slightly curved

feather. In anthropology

this figure is often associated

with certain forms of self-mutilation

and described as that of the adept who

ascends a snow-covered mountain and long

tarries there, as they say, in tears.

In a sheltered corner

of his heart, so lately

I have read, he carries

a little horse made

of clay. Magical

crosswords he mumbles,

talks of scissor blades,

a thimble, a needle’s

eye, a stone in the memory,

a place of pilgrimage, and

of a small die, ice-coloured,

with a dash of Berlin blue.

A long series of tiny shocks,

from the first and the second pasts,

not translated into the spoken

language of the present, they

remain a broken corpus guarded

by Fungisi and the wolf’s shadow.

After that come the children grown

a little bigger who believe that

parts of their parents ride ahead

on the removal van’s horse

to make ready the living quarters,

while in the dark box

on the way to Gmunden

they eat their supper,

drink two pots of coffee,

spread butter on the bread

and say not a word about

either herring or radish. For months

Grandmother’s dying has now dragged on,

more and more water rising into her body

while in the village shop a poster

outlaws the yellowing

terror of Colorado beetles.

At the forest’s edge often a blackamoor

peered out of an American tank

and in the dark we saw

St. Elizabeth, lifting her skirts,

cautiously stepping over

red-hot ploughshares.

At school the beadle counted

his keys, Palm Sunday catkins

behind the crucifix chanted

their credo, and in the pencil case

on a scrap of paper already

the catchword of our dusty

future could be made out.

So one of us turned

into an innkeeper, the second

into a cook, the third into a waiter and

the fourth into nothing at all.

And from the hills we can see

the wispy shadows drifting

in Jehoshaphat’s Valley.

The magnetic needle, trembling,

points to the north, and I sense

a galvanic taste on my tongue,

a chemical miracle plated inside

with the finest horn silver.

The dreaded blackening

on certain parts

of the body confirms

the whole thing

most satisfactorily.


III


In a Chinese cricket cage

for a time we kept good fortune

imprisoned. The Paradise apples

grew splendidly, a good mass of gold

lay on the barn floor and you said,

one must watch over the

bridegroom as over a

scholar by night. Often

it was carnival time

for the children. Pink

cloudlets hung in the

sky. Friends came

disguised as Ormuzd

and Ahriman. But then unexpectedly

there was this thing with the elegant

gentleman at the opera and I found

a slowworm in the henhouse.

A crow on the wing lost a white

feather. The vicar, a limping

messenger in a black coat,

appeared on New Year’s morning

alone on the wide snow-covered field.

Ever since we’ve been arming ourselves

with patience, ever since sand

has been trickling through the letter box,

the potted plants have had a way of

keeping things to themselves.

A Nordic tragedy, chess

pieces moved hither and

thither, inevitably always

the end occurs.Why

do we embark on such

an arduous enterprise?

For comfort there remains

nothing but other people’s

misfortune: a feather

venomously yellow

on the beloved’s hat.

Prose from the last century,

a dress entangled in

thistles, a bit of blood,

an exaltation, a torn-up letter,

a star on the uniform and prolonged

stays at the window. Unhealthy

fantasies in a darkening

room, resented sins,

yes, even tears and in the memory

of fishes a dying fire, Emma,

how she burns the wedding bouquet.

What’s a poor country doctor

to make of all that? At the funeral

he dreams of a shining pair of

patent-leather boots and a posthumous

seduction. But now comes

a colourless age. You, in the midst

of this dazzling obscenity

I shall remember your

timorous gaze, how I

saw it first, that time

when in Haarlem we swam

through a gap in the dike.

Anniversaries and numbers,

how long ago it all is,

a chart of signs barely

to be deciphered through

these glass lenses. I still

can hear the Chinese lady

optician say, You ought

now to be able to read this

without straining your eyes,

and for a moment I feel

her fingertips on my temples,

feel how a wave crosses

my heart and in the test picture’s

bright square I see

the letter sequence

YAMOUSSOUKRO,

the name, I am

certain of this,

of a large rusty ship

from Abidjan which years ago

I saw putting out from

Hamburg harbour.

Black sailors stood

leaning on the rails,

they waved to us as they

passed by, the sun was just

going down and already

the shadows were quivering

at the edges.


IV


In his excitement about the truly

boundless growth

of industry, the statesman

Disraeli called Manchester

the most wonderful city of modern times,

a celestial Jerusalem

whose significance only philosophy

could gauge. Half a life ago now

it is that, after leaving my remote home,

I arrived there and took lodging

among the previous century’s

ruins. Often at that time

I rambled over the fallow

Elysian Fields, wondering

at the work of destruction, the black

mills and shipping canals,

the disused viaducts and

warehouses, the many millions

of bricks, the traces of smoke,

of tar and sulphuric acid,

long have I stood on the banks

of the Irk and the Irwell, those

mythical rivers now dead,

which in better times

shone azure-blue,

carmine-red and glaucous green,

in their glow reflecting

the cotton clouds, those white ones

into which without a word the breath

of legions of human beings had been absorbed.

And the water carried them downstream

together with salt and ashes

through the marshland out

to the sea. Those silent mutations

clear the way to the future.

In the course of three generations

the working classes of Manchester

had become a race of pygmies.

Volunteers who in war-time attempted

to escape into military service

were rejected by the selection boards

as unfit, unless they could be accommodated

in one of the so-called bantam battalions

which recruited diminutive soldiers from the city

and throughout the surrounding area.

In either case they were

part of the obscure crowds

who fuelled the progress of history.

From my workplace I thought

I could see the will-o’-the-wisps

of their souls, as with tiny lanterns

they haunted the rubbish dumps

of the City Corporation, a smouldering

alpine range which, it seemed to me,

extended into the beyond.

In the dusk I often saw

searchlight beams from

bulldozers creeping about there

that pierced the void, and aeroplanes,

our grey primeval brothers,

rose with infinite slowness

from the lagoon and the bogs.

I recall that these images

often plunged me into a quasi

sublunary state of deep

melancholia and that then

I heard the incessant monotonous

vibrations of a Jew’s harp

and repeatedly had to step out

of doors in my oppression.

Whole days long in the basement

of the university library I read

the works of Paracelsus, in which

it is written that from septentrion

nothing good emanates and

that the body is dyed

by illness like a piece of cloth

by an extraneous colour.

Often on my wanderings

through the streets I resorted

to one of the many infernally

glittering hostelries, for preference

to Liston’s Music Hall

where a radiantly blue-eyed,

down-and-out heroic tenor,

who always wore a winter coat

too long for him and a Homburg hat,

sang Tannhäuser arias accompanied

by a Wurlitzer organ. And to

the Gospel Chapels I went

from time to time, witnessing

how row after row of the sick

amid the congregation’s shrieking

were healed and even the blind

had their sight restored.

Once, while searching

for the star-shaped Strangeways

Prison, an overwhelming

panoptic structure whose walls

are as high as Jericho’s, I found

myself in a sort of no-man’s-land

behind the railway buildings, in a terrace

of low houses apparently due

for demolition, with shops left vacant,

on whose boards the names

Goldblatt, Grünspan and Gottgetreu,

Spiegelhalter, Solomon,Waislfish

and Robinsohn could be made out.

In the wind a door moved

as if as a sign. Stuck to it

was an old placard

for the musical Oklahoma!

The entrance to nature’s theatre

stood open. I still strained

to hear the ethereal waves

when with martial brass music,

bugle horns and drums,

a procession of olive-green

child soldiers marched

down the street, passed

by me and suddenly vanished

as though swallowed by the earth.

If I told Mr. Deutsch

about these things

he shook his head

and said: “Strange, very

strange.” Mr. Deutsch,

born in Kufstein, had come

to England as a child

in nineteen thirty-eight.

There were many things he could not

remember; some others he could not erase

from his mind. He had never

mastered the English language

although for years, day in

and day out, he followed

on TV with an expression of

the utmost attention the entire

evening schedule, as if

at any moment he expected

a message that would

change his whole life.


V


When, in the summer of last year,

I visited the engineer D. in Zürich

he was sitting by an open window

and kept turning a piece of feldspar

around in his hands. You see,

he said, outside, the garden grows rank,

my place now is in the midst of the foliage.

That reminds me of the migration

through the desert. How many machines

I’d built, how many works designed,

before I lost my belief

in the science I’d always served.

I had arrived at one of the dead

bays of time, like that Tatar

with the red headcloth and the white

curved feather, had climbed the mountain

and surveyed the city, as it lay

before me, a faded picture

of the great diluvium.

I sensed the trembling

of the aerials on the roofs

of houses as a frizzle

in my brain, could hear from far away

outside me

the Gaussian roar, an unremitting

sound extending over the whole scale

from the earth up to the heavens

where the stars drift

in the aether. Many

terrible midnights

of doubt have I passed

since that time, but now peace

returns to the dust and I read

in the descriptions of nature

of the eighteenth century how a

verdant land is submerged

in the blue shadows of the Jurassus

and in the end only the age-old

ice on the Alps retains a faint

afterglow. A strange light pervades

the lines of Haller and Hölderlin

and yet even here there is vagary

as far as the heart reaches. For

the revolutions of great

systems cannot be

righted, too diffuse are

the workings of power

the one thing always

the other’s beginning

and vice versa. Taurus

draconem genuit et draco

taurum, and nowhere

a stop. So you’d better be off,

said the engineer D., this very day.

The country’s on fire already and everywhere

the forests are ablaze, there’s a crackling

of fire in the fanned leaves

and the drought-stricken African

plains are expanding. Still

perhaps on your travels

you’ll see a golden coast

a land veneered with rain or

a schoolboy on his way home

over a beautiful meadow. Then

another joy will have been lived,

thinks one who recovers a little.

The shady shore of a lake

emerges, the water’s surface,

the ribbons of rocks and

on the highest summit the dragon’s

many-coloured plumage, Icarus,

sailing in the midst of

the currents of light. Beneath him

time divides the Rhine glacier

into two mighty branches,

the Churfirsten peaks emerge,

the Säntis range rises,

chalk islets, glowing

bright in drifting ice.

If his eyes are now

lowered, if he falls

down into the lake,

will then, as in Brueghel’s

picture, the beautiful ship,

the ploughing peasant, the whole

of nature somehow turn away

from the son’s misfortune?

These questions carry me

over the border. On the Arlberg

a thunderstorm gathers.

I gaze down into the valley

and my soul is sent reeling.

Another summer gone by and

as ivy hangs down, Hölderlin wrote,

so does branchless the rain. Moss roses

grow on the Alps. Avignon sylvan.

Across the Gotthard a horse gropes its way.


VI


When morning sets in,

the coolness of night

moves out into the plumage

of fishes, when once more

the air’s circumference

grows visible, then at times

I trust the quiet, resolve

to make a new start, an excursion

perhaps to a reserve of

camouflaged ornithologists.

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?


VII


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.


PUBLISHER’S NOTE

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


ABOUT THE AUTHOR


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.


ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR


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).


ABOUT THE TYPE


This book was set in Perpetua, a typeface designed by the English artist Eric Gill, and cut by the Monotype Corporation between 1928 and 1930. Perpetua is a contemporary face of original design, without any direct historical antecedents. The shapes of the roman letters are derived from the techniques of stonecutting. The larger display sizes are extremely elegant and form a most distinguished series of inscriptional letters.