Sebald Winfried Georg

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W. G. Sebald

18 May 1944, Wertach im Allgäu – 14 December 2001, Norfolk, England



W. G. (Winfried Georg) Maximilian Sebald
was a German writer and academic, highly regarded by literary critics as one of the greatest authors since the Second World War and frequently being nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. In his 2007 interview, Horace Engdahl, former secretary of the Swedish Academy, mentioned that Sebald would have been a worthy laureate.
Generally speaking, his novels deal mainly with the issues regarding memory, both personal and collective.
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Reference

. W. G. Sebald


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Haiku and Senryu


Chen-ou Liu
Canada



reading Sebald at dusk
am I real or fiction
in his eyes?


Note:
My haiku alludes to the key ideas explored in the following two passages from Sebald’s final novel entitled Austerlitz, known for
“the lack of paragraphing, a digressive style, the blending of fact and fiction, and the inclusion of a set of mysterious and evocative photographs, scattered throughout the book:”

"How happily, said Austerlitz, have I sat over a book in the deepening twilight until I could no longer make out the words and my mind began to wander, and how secure have I felt seated at the desk in my house in the dark night, just watching the tip of my pencil in the lamplight following its shadow, as if of its own accord and with perfect fidelity, while that shadow moved regularly from left to right, line by line, over the ruled paper."

"It does not seem to me, Austerlitz added, that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision."

For further information, please read the Wikipedia entry entitled Austerlitz.


twilight deepens ...
all those black-and-white photos
in Austerlitz

Note:
Austerlitz, the last novel by W. G. Sebald, is often regarded as “one of the most significant German language works of fiction for the period since the Second World War.” It’s known for its “curious and wide-ranging mixture of fact (or apparent fact), recollection and fiction, often punctuated by indistinct black-and-white photographs set in evocative counterpoint to the narrative rather than illustrating it directly.”

These black-and-white photos inserted in the text read like those on newspaper pages, and artistically speaking, they are an integral part of the novel, mainly used to produce unsettling effects, especially when viewed in the context and themes of the surrounding passages.





Austerlitz is the final novel of W. G. Sebald, published in 2001.
It is one of the most significant German language works of fiction for the period since the Second World War.
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reading For Years Now...
the whistling sound from afar
breaks this moonless night


Unrecounted...
page after page I see those
peering eyes in words


Note:
Although best known as one of the exemplary novelists of the late 20th century, W. G. Sebald also wrote poetry. For Years Now is a book of 23 poems with images provided by visual artist, Tess Jaray. Unrecounted is a book of 33 poems juxtaposed with Jan Peter Tripp's thirty-three lithographs, which could pass for black-and-white photographs of the human eyes. The whole book is viewed by literary critic Andrea Köhler as a poem of gazes.

The poems in both book are extremely short, haiku-like -- as few as five words (including the title that is constantly utilized as the first line of the poem), rarely more than fifteen words -- micropoems, Sebald called them, writes translator Michael Hamburger.

In a letter to Hamburger, Tess Jaray mentioned that
" [Sebald] carried a book of Japanese haiku when he brought her the first of these texts – one possible clue to the model that Sebald may have had in mind for [his poems], only to play variations on the model in his own fashion"
(Unrecounted, p. 8)



In my first haiku, I allude to Sebald's title poem,

For years now
I've had this
whistling
sound in
my ears



It was as if

I was lying
under a low
sky breathing
through the eye
of a needle

W. G. Sebald, For years now


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Related
words

***** Personal Names used in Haiku
Introduction　



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