Known and Strange Things Page 4
Great in macrocosm, the novel is also flawless in microcosm. It contains many perfect set pieces, strewn like jewels through the book, in which the prose gleams with a kind of secret knowledge. Many are the moments of imaginative sympathy that continue to bloom in the mind long after the page is turned. One such account, of the burning of poui sticks for the rough village sport of stick fighting, captures the way the scent of the sticks opens up in Mr. Biswas a sudden seam of memory. Another, of Mr. Biswas working as a bus conductor in his youth, passing by a lone hut in the dusk, is a compressed little masterpiece of longing:
In the gloom, a boy was leaning against the hut, his hands behind him, staring at the road. He wore a vest and nothing more. The vest glowed white. In an instant the bus went by, noisy in the dark, through bush and level sugar-cane fields. Mr. Biswas could not remember where the hut stood, but the picture remained: a boy leaning against an earth house that had no reason for being there, under the dark falling sky, a boy who didn’t know where the road, and that bus, went.
Against that sad obscurity, against surrender, against darkness, A House for Mr. Biswas is a book for knowledge, for determination, for ragged unyielding life, a book that, over its great and complex length, shelters the one who reads it.
Tomas Tranströmer
Two truths approach each other. One comes from inside, the other from outside,
and where they meet we have a chance to catch sight of ourselves.
—from “Preludes”
TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER HAS for years now been one of my ports of refuge. The books of his poetry on my shelves never remain unopened for long. I turn to him when I wish to come as close as possible to what cannot be said. The new century has been full of dark years, and I have returned again and again to poets. They kept watch over me, and, to adopt a phrase of Tranströmer’s, I survived on milk stolen from their cosmos. I read Walcott, Bishop, Ondaatje, Szymborska, Bonta, and a dozen other marvelous writers, but above all I read Heaney and Tranströmer, who, in different ways, fused the biggest questions with personal experience.
To read Tranströmer—the best times are at night, in silence, and alone—is to surrender to the far-fetched. It is to climb out of bed and listen to what the house is saying, and to how the wind outside responds. Each of his readers reads him as a personal secret. For this reason it was strange, when he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011, to see this master of solitude being celebrated in the streets or showing up as a trending topic on Twitter and a bestseller on Amazon. He usually dwells in quieter precincts.
Tranströmer’s poems owe something to Japanese tradition, and early in his career he wrote haiku. Reading him, one is also reminded of American poets like Charles Simic (for his surrealism) and Jim Harrison, Gary Snyder, and W. S. Merwin (for their plain speech and koanlike wisdom). But Tranströmer casts a spell all his own, and in fact the strongest associations he brings to my mind are the music of Arvo Pärt and the photography of Saul Leiter.
I swim out in a trance
on the glittering dark water.
A steady note of a tuba comes in.
It’s a friend’s voice: “Take up your grave and walk.”
—from “Two Cities”
His poems contain a luminous simplicity that expands until it pushes your ego out of the nest, and there you are, alone with Truth. In a Tranströmer poem, you inhabit space differently; a body becomes a thing, a mind floats, things have lives, and even non-things, even concepts, are alive. There is much following in Tranströmer, much watching, from a distance and from close by, and the trees, pasts, houses, spaces, silences, and fields all take on invigilative personae. There are many dreams.
I dreamt that I had sketched piano keys out
on the kitchen table. I played on them, without a sound.
Neighbors came by to listen.
—from “Grief Gondola #2”
Tranströmer is well translated into English, and there are versions by May Swenson, Robin Fulton, Robin Robertson, and others. My favorite book of the poems is The Half-Finished Heaven, a selection translated by Robert Bly. Bly’s translation is so clean and direct it seems to bypass language itself. This was the volume I turned to the most during the horrors of the Bush and Cheney years. Even though around the same time my own belief in God had faded away, I found that I needed to somehow retain belief in a cloud of witnesses. I had strayed away from religious dogma, but my hunger for miracle speech had not abated. Tranströmer’s mysterious poems, hovering on the edge of the unsayable, met me right at this point of need.
I open the first door.
It is a large sunlit room.
A heavy car passes outside
and makes the china quiver.
I open door number two.
Friends! You drank some darkness
and became visible.
Door number three. A narrow hotel room.
View on an alley. One lamppost shines on the asphalt.
Experience, its beautiful slag.
—from “Elegy”
And, from “The Scattered Congregation,” which is in five short parts, these lines:
We got ready and showed our home.
The visitor thought: you live well.
The slum must be inside you.
…
Nicodemus the sleepwalker is on his way
to the Address. Who’s got the Address?
Don’t know. But that’s where we’re going.
There’s a kind of helplessness in many of the poems, the sense of being pulled along by something irresistible and invisible. There are moments of tart social commentary, a sense of justice wounded (“The slum must be inside you”—for many years, Tranströmer worked as a psychologist at an institution for juvenile offenders). There is also in the poems a kind of motionlessness that is indistinguishable from terrific speed, in the same way Arvo Pärt’s music can sound fast and slow at the same time. It’s a good thing I’m unembarrassable about influence, because I realize now how many of Tranströmer’s concepts I have hidden away in my own work. When I’m asked what my favorite thing about New York is, I often answer with a line lifted from “Schubertiana”: “Outside New York, a high place where with one glance you take in the houses where eight million human beings live.”
The images with which Tranströmer charges his poems bring to mind the concept of acheiropoieta, “making without hands”; in Byzantine art, acheiropoietic images were those believed to have come miraculously into being without a painter’s intervention. The Shroud of Turin and the Veil of Veronica are the most famous examples. These were images registered by direct contact, and they were usually images of the Holy Face of Christ. (Albrecht Dürer, in his immodest way, was alluding to such images when he painted his deliriously detailed full-frontal self-portrait of 1500.) I feel Tranströmer’s use of imagery is like this, and like contact printing, in which a photograph is made directly from a film negative or film positive. There is little elaborate construction evident; rather, the sense is of the sudden arrival of what was already there, as when a whale comes up for air: massive, exhilarating, and evanescent.
The satisfaction, the pleasure, the comfort one takes in these poems comes from the way they seem to have preexisted us. Or perhaps, to put it another way, the magic lies in their ability to present aspects of our selves long buried under manners, culture, and language. The poems remember us and, if we are perfectly still, give us a chance to catch sight of ourselves.
Poetry of the Disregarded
THROUGHOUT HIS CAREER, W. G. Sebald wrote poems that were strikingly similar to his prose. His tone, in both genres, was always understated but possessed of a mournful grandeur. To this he added a willful blurring of literary boundaries, and, in fact, almost all his writing, and not just the poetry and prose, comprised history, memoir, biography, autobiography, art criticism, scholarly arcana, and invention. This expert mixing of forms owed a great deal to his reading of the seventeenth-century melancholics Robert Burton and Thom
as Browne, and Sebald’s looping sentences were an intentional homage to nineteenth-century German-language writers like Adalbert Stifter and Gottfried Keller. But so strongly has the style come to be associated with Sebald’s own work that even books that preceded his, such as those by Robert Walser and Thomas Bernhard, can seem, from our perspective as readers of English translations, simply “Sebaldian.”
Sebald’s reputation rests on four novels—Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, and Austerlitz—all of them reflections on the history of violence in general, and on the legacy of the Holocaust in particular. Our sense of this achievement has been enriched by his other works: the ones published in his lifetime (the lectures On the Natural History of Destruction and the long poem After Nature), and those that were released posthumously (including the essay collection Campo Santo and the volumes of short poems Unrecounted and For Years Now). Sebald’s shade, like Roberto Bolaño’s, gives the illusion of being extraordinarily productive, and the publication now of Across the Land and the Water, billed as his Selected Poems 1964–2001, does not feel surprising. Ten years on, we are not quite prepared for him to put down his pen.
Across the Land and the Water is different from every other Sebald book in one important respect: it contains his early work. Because literary success came to him late (he was in his fifties when the first of his books was translated into English), the Sebald we know is the mature one. One of the pleasures of the present volume is the way it shows us the development of the author’s poetic voice over more than three decades, beginning in the 1960s, when he was a student. A section in one of those early poems reads:
Glass in hand
They come and go
Stop still and expect
The metamorphosis of hawthorn
In the garden outside
Time measures
Nothing but itself.
Another poem, about Manchester, contains the lines “Bleston knows an hour / Between summer and winter / Which never passes and that / Is my plan for a time / Without beginning or end.” Elsewhere, there are roses, garden paths, Victorian patterns. The guiding intelligence here, rather surprisingly, seems to be that of T. S. Eliot (an influence not so easily discernible in Sebald’s later work), in particular the vatic and circumambulatory Eliot of the Four Quartets.
These early poems of Sebald’s also contain the concerns that would later be seen as distinctively his. Trains feature prominently, as do borders, journeys, landscape, memories, and solitude. There is a debt to Hans Magnus Enzensberger, in the reportorial interrogation of vanished things, that would remain true of all of Sebald’s work. But what is most notable is how clotted the poems are with references, untranslated fragments from different languages, and classical allusions (Horace and Virgil seem to be particular favorites); the assemblage, unlike in his later work, can seem hectic. Nevertheless, they are a pleasure to read, thanks to the translator Iain Galbraith’s excellent endnotes, which guide the bewildered reader through the codes and secrets of the work. Without Galbraith’s notes, some of the poems are dense almost to the point of opacity:
…Strasbourg Cathedral
bien éclairée.—Between thresholds
lines from Gregorius, the guote sündaere,
from Au near Freiburg, rechtsrheinisch,
not visible from Colmar—Haut Rhin.
Early morning in Basel, printed on
hand-made Rhine-washed lumpy paper
under the supervision of Erasmus of Rotterdam
The later poems are cleaner, clearer. Many of these helped lay the groundwork for the long poem After Nature, Sebald’s first published book, either as sketches for ideas that would then be reworked or as pieces that were incorporated whole. Other poems were neglected once his prose-writing career took off; gathered here, they constitute a magnificent corpus. Some of these later poems are bracingly concise, a compression underscored by the way titles frequently also serve as first lines:
Somewhere
behind Türkenfeld
a spruce nursery
a pond in the
moor on which
the March ice
is slowly melting
It’s a fine little idyllic lyric. We are looking at a small German town, perhaps, possibly as seen from a passing train. But the meaning of the poem darkens irrevocably when we read in the notes what is “behind Türkenfeld”: it was the location of one of ninety-four subcamps linked to Dachau, and it was a station on the railway linking Dachau with the munitions towns of Kaufering and Landsberg. Sebald leaves all this out of the poem, leaves out the fact that this railway was called the Blutbahn (“the blood track”), and that many thousands were transported along this very route to their deaths. As ever, he draws us into history’s shadow in an indirect way.
But Across the Land and the Water is by no means a collection about the Holocaust. The material ranges widely, and among the most memorable poems it contains are those based on small incidents from the lives of historical personages. Some of these poems begin (as he began all four of his novels) with a precise date stamp. “On 9 June 1904” opens the one about Chekhov’s last days, in which a small circle of mourners, likened to a “black velvet caterpillar,” meet Chekhov’s coffin at a train station and are overshadowed by the band assembled there to meet the coffin of a now forgotten general. “In the summer of 1836” is the beginning of the poem about Chopin’s disappointed love for Maria Wodzinska, a great pain that he concealed for the rest of his life. A woman who did not respond to the aging Goethe’s love is the subject of another poem; Daniel Paul Schreber, a German judge who suffered from psychosis and whose Memoirs of My Nervous Illness was analyzed by Freud, features in yet another. As Sebald once explained in an interview, “I do like to listen to people who have been sidelined for one reason or another.” He is, among other things, a poet of the disregarded.
He had a feeling for the inanimate, too, for ruins and comminuted landscapes, places that have been reduced to their smallest units by the forces of nature and history. He is, in many of these poems, an adept of what Nabokov calls, in Transparent Things, “the iridescent dizziness of dream life.” And he understood especially well the private life of objects. As he wrote in an essay in Unrecounted: “Things outlast us, they know more about us than we know about them: they carry the experience they have had with us inside them and are—in fact—the book of our history opened before us.” Everywhere in Across the Land and the Water is a vigilance about the world of things. Greenhouses are “home-made crystal palaces,” a power station is “a sick elephant / still just breathing / through its trunk,” someone’s “pigskin suitcase gapes,” and the poem entitled “Room 645” describes, with deadpan humor, and with all the seriousness of an assistant janitor going through an inventory, the various objects in a garish hotel room in Hanover.
Sebald had a special love for paintings: they are half object, half window into another world. Recognizing that they served as self-contained Wunderkammers, he summoned their magic simply by close description of their contents. The Rings of Saturn ends with an evocation of Dutch landscape painting, and in Across the Land and the Water the last of the translated poems is “In the Paradise Landscape,” a gently ekphrastic reading of a painting by Jan Brueghel the Younger: “goat & a few sheep / two polecats or martens / a wolf a horse / a peacock a turkey / & in the foreground / at the bottom edge / two spectacled / monkeys one of which / is gingerly plucking / strawberries from a little / shrub.” A painting becomes, in Sebald’s hands, a world of enumerated wonders.
Often, in describing the actual world, he paints it similarly, detail by detail, attentive always to effects of the light. In “Calm November Weather,” he gives an account of a reading given by a Greenlandic poet that he’d attended:
…the
sounds of her feathery
language taavvi
jjuag she says the
great darkness &
lifting her arm
qaavmaaq the
> shimmering light.
What earns Sebald the gratitude and affection of readers, and makes this book a splendid addition to an already extraordinary oeuvre, is encapsulated in this fragment: the great darkness, the shimmering light. He was able to pin both down, time and again and with impeccable technique, onto the printed page. His are the books of our history opened before us.
Always Returning
ONE MORNING THIS past June, I played truant from a conference I was attending in Norwich, England, and called a taxi to take me out to the countryside. But the taxi was late, and I had to stand and wait awhile. When it finally arrived, shortly after nine, there was some confusion. Was this the taxi I had hired? Was I the person the driver had been sent to pick up? Had some other passenger, not yet waiting there at the circular drive at the heart of campus, called the dispatcher? We only had each other: I was going somewhere and he was prepared to take someone somewhere. I entered the car.
It was a gray morning, and visibility was poor. The high latitude and the date—it happened to be the summer solstice—meant the sun had been up since four-thirty, but fog persisted. I told the driver where I was going, and we drove in silence for a while through mild traffic and quiet streets, until the city began to thin out in the gray. And where exactly in Framingham Earl? the driver asked me. St. Andrew’s Church, I said, reciting what I had written down: near Poringland, just off the Yelverton Road. He knew it.
I looked out the window, watching the landscape slip by, the houses, the hedges, the fields and farms, the strange-looking bales of hay bound in black plastic, the road signs with their unfamiliar East Anglian names, the heavy, threatening trucks that barreled down the busier roads. The driver broke the silence and became talkative, flitting from one subject to another in a laconic but unceasing way, not really caring much whether I was listening or interested.