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Campo Santo

A master shrouded by mist

W. G. Sebald, translated by Anthea Bell
Hamish Hamilton, 228pp, £16.99,

Ferdinand Mount

Saturday, 26th February 2005

This is not, as some critics have said, because his writing is hard to categorise. On the contrary, Sebald’s style of atmospheric rumination — part autobiographical, part anecdotal and historical — has long been a well-loved genre in European writing. Indeed he quite often glances back to his predecessors: Rousseau’s reveries, Sterne’s ramblings, Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. Sebald’s half-dozen prose works, all published in the last ten years of his life, are not essays exactly and they are certainly not novels, although Sebald’s Austerlitz is couched in that form. Sebald himself said ‘My medium is prose, not the novel.’

For quite a few writers today, he is now acknowledged as ‘probably the greatest intellect and voice of the late 20th century’, to quote Antony Beevor, or ‘the most significant European writer to have emerged in the last decade’, in the view of one TLS reviewer. ‘Is literary greatness still possible?’ Susan Sontag asks and immediately replies that ‘one of the few answers available to English- language readers is the work of W. G. Sebald’.

Yet among German-language readers (and despite living in England for over 30 years, Sebald almost always wrote in his native German) there is a dissenting minority. I recall a professor of Literature at Frankfurt becoming almost apoplectic at the mention of ‘that charlatan’. Certainly Sebald’s prose seems to me to have rather less impact in the original, its atmospherics somehow less seductive. At a public reading in the Queen Elizabeth Hall not three months before he was killed in a car crash in December 2001, Sebald read from Austerlitz, which was published that autumn, while his translator, Anthea Bell, read her English version. It was not, I think, just Sebald’s rather drowsy delivery that made the German sound a little flat, even laboured, while the English did have an alluring strangeness, perhaps just because it was, so to speak, double distilled through translation from the German of a German who had lived almost all his adult life in England without becoming in the least English.

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