Never told

Sebald's posthumous works
33 miniature poems + 33 eye prints👀
"A brief farewell that leaves one wanting more"
【Content Introduction】
This unique book, co-created by Sebald and his longtime friend, the German artist Jan Peter Tripp, includes 33 prints of eyes (by Rembrandt, Bacon, Borges, Beckett, Proust, Sebald, and others; perhaps most poignantly, the eyes of Sebald's daughter, who later shared the car accident with her father) and 33 accompanying miniature poems. It also concludes with a research essay by Andrea Köhler.
Sebald and Tripp have similar pasts. They grew up in post-war Bavaria, are very familiar with destruction and forgetting, and have a common sense of loss and dislocation. This book is the result of their exploration of their overlapping visions.
【Media Recommendation】
In this unexpected collaboration, Sebald's dazzling work continues to cast its spell.
—Susan Sontag A very discrete testament, as elusive as Sebald’s untimely death a year earlier, as much like the homeless and devastated lives of those in Germany he wrote about in his beautifully melancholic stories, as much like himself.
——Le Monde
It proves the singularity and enduringness of Sebald’s vision, making it impossible to forget.
This is an introduction to Sebald's other works, which have always been concerned with the past and present lives of photographs, and how writing can revive the frozen life of still images.
—The Observer
distills Sebald's complex visual imagery to its poetic core.
——Scotland on Sunday
Anyone with a serious interest in fiction should read Sebald.
—The Daily Telegraph
The final brief curtain call left one wanting more.
——Village Voice Literary Supplement
Elegical, enhanced… Sebald will not be forgotten.
—Pause Magazine A completely original collection of poetry…unforgettable, profound, absurd, surreal—and sometimes even painful.
—The Jewish Representative
These paintings and Sebald's texts experiment with serious subject matter within a nearly vanished European tradition.
——New York Art Magazine [Editor’s Recommendation]
This book was published over a year after Sebald's death. This unfinished work was finally edited and completed by Sebald's longtime friend Jan Peter Tripp. The miniature poems in this book are part haiku, part elegy, part testament, part epitaph. At the book's conclusion, when the reader meets Sebald's eyes, a ghostly dialogue between observer and observed unfolds through a gaze that transcends time and death. As Sebald's own stories often suggest, "These dead, they come back again" (The Immigrants).
These anti-narrative micro-poems resemble sentences extracted from Sebald's novels, lacking the accumulating effect of typical Sebaldian long sentences, yet offering readers a moment of enlightenment. The eye prints and the micro-poems in the book do not explain each other, but rather, with a distanced gesture, explore each other, forming a dialogue. In this experiment between image and text, Sebald and Tripp employ a bolder narrative montage. In the intersection of image and text, the reader's gaze and the eye prints, they attempt to rescue things that are about to disappear into time and memory.
Tripp's prints are unsettlingly realistic. These eyes, with their real owners, are fictions grounded in reality, specimens of sight, a central motif in Sebald's writing. Whereas Sebald freezes memory into a sudden flash of text, Tripp condenses life into a single glance. These fragments and details are cleverly combined to extend and expand, ultimately revealing to the reader a vision of the destroyed, the obscured, and the forgotten.

2023-09-01

广西师范大学出版社

Xinmin said

144

9787559861726