Hulse Michael - The Rings of Saturn

By W. G. Sebald

Available from New Directions

T HE E MIGRANTS

T HE R INGS OF S ATURN

U NRECOUNTED

V ERTIGO

W. G. S e b a l d

T h e R i n g s o f S a t u r n

Translated by

MICHAEL HULSE

A NEW DIRECTIONS BOOK

Copyright Vito von Eichborn GmbH & Co Verlag KG, Frankfurt am Main, 1995

English translation copyright 1998 The Harvill Press

Originally published as Die Ringe des Saturn, Eine englische Wallfahrt , by Vito von Eichborn GmbH & Co Verlag KG, Frankfurt am Main, 1995

Published by arrangement with Eichborn Verlag, Frankfurt, and The Harvill Press, London

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, or television review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

Manufactured in the United States of America

First published clothbound in 1998

First published as New Directions Paperbook 881 in 1999

Published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Books Canada Limited

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sebald, Winfried Georg, 1944

[Ringe des Saturn. English]

The rings of Saturn : an English pilgrimage / W.G. Sebald;

translated by Michael Hulse.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-811-22130-6 (e-book)

1. Sebald, Winfried Georg, 1944 - Journeys England.

2. Authors, German20th centuryBiography. 3. EnglandDescription and travel. I. Hulse, Michael, 1955- . II. Title.

PT2681.E18R56 1998

833.914dc2197-47578

TWELFTH PRINTING CIP

New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

by New Directions Publishing Corporation,

80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011

Il faut surtout pardonner ces mes malheureuses qui ont lu de faire le plerinage pied, qui ctoient le rivage et regardent sans comprendre lhorreur de la lutte, la joie de vaincre ni le profond dsespoir des vaincus.

JOSEPH CONRAD,

letter to Marguerite Poradowska,

23rd25th March 1890

The rings of Saturn consist of ice crystals and probably meteorite particles describing circular orbits around the planets equator. In all likelihood these are fragments of a former moon that was too close to the planet and was destroyed by its tidal effect ( Roche limit).

Brockhaus Encyclopaedia

CONTENTS

I

I n August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work. And in fact my hope was realized, up to a point; for I have seldom felt so carefree as I did then, walking for hours in the day through the thinly populated countryside, which stretches inland from the coast. I wonder now, however, whether there might be something in the old superstition that certain ailments of the spirit and of the body are particularly likely to beset us under the sign of the Dog Star. At all events, in retrospect I became preoccupied not only with the unaccustomed sense of freedom but also with the paralysing horror that had come over me at various times when confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place. Perhaps it was because of this that, a year to the day after I began my tour, I was taken into hospital in Norwich in a state of almost total immobility. It was then that I began in my thoughts to write these pages. I can remember precisely how, upon being admitted to that room on the eighth floor, I became overwhelmed by the feeling that the Suffolk expanses I had walked the previous summer had now shrunk once and for all to a single, blind, insensate spot. Indeed, all that could be seen of the world from my bed was the colourless patch of sky framed in the window.

Several times during the day I felt a desire to assure myself of a reality I feared had vanished forever by looking out of that hospital window, which, for some strange reason, was draped with black netting, and as dusk fell the wish became so strong that, contriving to slip over the edge of the bed to the floor, half on my belly and half sideways, and then to reach the wall on all fours, I dragged myself, despite the pain, up to the window sill. In the tortured posture of a creature that has raised itself erect for the first time I stood leaning against the glass. I could not help thinking of the scene in which poor Gregor Samsa, his little legs trembling, climbs the armchair and looks out of his room, no longer remembering (so Kafkas narrative goes) the sense of liberation that gazing out of the window had formerly given him. And just as Gregors dimmed eyes failed to recognize the quiet street where he and his family had lived for years, taking Charlottenstrae for a grey wasteland, so I too found the familiar city, extending from the hospital courtyards to the far horizon, an utterly alien place. I could not believe that anything might still be alive in that maze of buildings down there; rather, it was as if I were looking down from a cliff upon a sea of stone or a field of rubble, from which the tenebrous masses of multi-storey carparks rose up like immense boulders. At that twilit hour there were no passers-by to be seen in the immediate vicinity, but for a nurse crossing the cheerless gardens outside the hospital entrance on the way to her night shift. An ambulance with its light flashing was negotiating a number of turns on its way from the city centre to Casualty. I could not hear its siren; at that height I was cocooned in an almost complete and, as it were, artificial silence. All I could hear was the wind sweeping in from the country and buffering the window; and in between, when the sound subsided, there was the never entirely ceasing murmur in my own ears.