From 'After Nature'
by WG Sebald
When morning sets in,
the coolness of the 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 region of
camouflaged ornithologists.
Come, my daughter, come on, give
me your hand, we’re leaving
the town, I’ll show you the mill
twice each day set in motion by current,
a groaning miraculous construct
of wheels and belts
that carries water’s power
right into stone,
right into 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 here Edward Fitzgerald,
the translator of Omar Khayyam,
vanished. At an advanced age
one day he boarded his boat,
sailed off with his top hat
tied on, into the North Sea
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 long gone
with forty oars, the grave of
Raedwald of Sutton Hoo.
Merovingian coins, Swedish
weaponry, 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 now and then,
a capacious old people’s home,
a prison or mental hospital,
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 the place called 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 radio’s earphones
clipped on. No, here we can
write no postcards, can’t even get out
of the car. Tell me, child,
is your heart 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 low
as no sky I have seen
anywhere else.
Along the horizon
freighters cross over
into another age
measured by the ticking
of geigers in the power station
at Sizewell, where slowly
they destroy the nucleus
of the metal. Whispering
madness on the heathland
of Suffolk. Is this
the promis’d end? Oh,
you are men of stones.
What’s dead remains
dead. From loving
comes life. I don’t know
who’s telling me what, how,
where or when? Is love
nothing, then, now, or all?
Water? Fire? Good?
Evil? Life? Death?
Previously Published by Modern Poetry in Translation. Translated by Michael Hamburger.
This piece feels like walking through a landscape where everything — history, memory, even the air — carries a quiet sadness.
There’s something deeply touching in the way the father tries to show his daughter a world already fading at the edges.
I felt the weight of those abandoned places, the mills, the graves, the institutions — all of them holding their own ghosts.
The story of Fitzgerald drifting into the sea feels like the whole region: slowly disappearing into its own silence.
Sebald has this way of making you feel time pressing down on every detail, like the past is still breathing beside you.
The line about not being able to write postcards hits hard — as if the place refuses to be reduced to anything simple.
The sky he describes feels almost emotional, like it’s mourning something we can’t quite name.
By the end, the questions about love, life, good, evil feel like someone talking to themselves because no one else can answer.
It’s a landscape full of doubt and tenderness, a father trying to make sense of the world for his child.
You finish it feeling quiet, unsettled, and strangely moved by things you don’t fully understand.
Aha! How wonderful to see some Max Sebald!
Not a bad translation either. I approve.
Well done indeed, OPD, for this one. Danke.