Sebaldia 1


It is always such a pleasure to open something by Sebald which I have not read. W.G.Sebald and Jan Peter Tripp, Unrecounted (2004) is a strange minimalist book. In an introduction ‘Max’ Sebald’s friend and translator, Michael Hamburger, draws attention to unusual features. Some of the pieces had already been published albeit in a few cases with slight changes. Why did Max, who was almost pathologically scholarly, allow this to happen and why does he appear to have translated some work in an unacknowledged way, so contrary to his norm? Hamburger suggests that Sebald was undergoing some crisis in his last years which we will have to wait for a biographer to explain what it was. Hamburger also explains the unusual title which is difficult to render from the original German.

Beautifully laid out and using landscape format, Sebald adds a few lines to a series of Tripp's pictures of eyes. But sometimes he does not and there are also blank pages. He agreed with Tripp how many pictures to write for (33) but produced alternative texts, all done at a distance. For myself, I found the eye pictures of little interest. They reminded me of physiological tests I have done to help doctoral psychology students at Sussex University. As for the haiku-like texts, some resonated, others did not but I expect any reader would have their own hits and misses. For me the best were;-

Pliny says that elephants are intelligent & righteous , revere the stars & worship the sun and moon (15)
On 8 May 1927 the pilots Nungesser and Coli took off from Le Bourget & after that were never seen again (27)
In deepest sleep a Polish mechanic came & for a thousand silver dollars made me a new perfectly functioning head. (35)
In the dining car of the Arlberg express sits a man with a mourning lapel & calmly, carefully consumes his Milanese cutlet (61)

and the best

They say that Napoleon was colour-blind & blood for him was green as grass (55)

In a concluding piece by Sebald on Tripp’s art, one gets a much better impression of his range and work but the lack of colour in the book undermines Sebald’s case. I was fascinated by the dog and clog who migrate from the Arnolfini Marriage to a version of Tripp’s La Déclaration de guerre. A tale piece by Andrea Kohler on Sebald himself is acute and well worth reading. She refers to his ‘great work of archivization” and how the book has ‘segments in the melody of a melancholic litany’. Sebald shares with Tripp an emphasis on ‘stupendous exactness’. His text seem like ‘inscriptions, memorials and quotations’.
I read this book on the train and was transfixed but I still worry that I did not respond to the ‘eye portraits’.