Author | W. G. Sebald |
---|---|
Original title | Die Ringe des Saturn |
Translator | Michael Hulse |
Language | German |
Publisher | Eichborn |
Publication date | 1995 |
Publication place | Germany |
Published in English | 1998 |
Media type | |
Pages | 371 |
ISBN | 3-8218-4448-5 |
OCLC | 34139506 |
LC Class | PT2681.E18 |
The Rings of Saturn (German : Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine englische Wallfahrt - An English Pilgrimage) is a 1995 novel by the German writer W. G. Sebald. Its first-person narrative arc is the account by a nameless narrator (who resembles the author in typical Sebaldian fashion [1] ) on a walking tour of Suffolk. In addition to describing the places he sees and people he encounters, including translator Michael Hamburger, Sebald discusses various episodes of history and literature, including the introduction of silkworm cultivation to Europe, and the writings of Thomas Browne, which attach in some way to the larger text. The book was published in English in 1998.
Combining the details of a walking tour with meditations prompted by places and people encountered on that tour, The Rings of Saturn was called "a hybrid of a book –fiction, travel, biography, myth, and memoir". [2]
Themes in the book are those treated in Sebald's other books: time, memory, and identity. According to Patrick Lennon's "In the Weaver's Web" (and Mark McCulloh's Understanding W. G. Sebald), The Rings of Saturn merges the identities of the Sebaldian narrator with that of Michael Hamburger –Sebald and Hamburger both being German writers who moved to England and shared other important experiences. What's more, Hamburger's identity becomes fused with that of Friedrich Hölderlin, and the merging is emphasized by Sebald's (typical) omission of quotation marks for quotations, further eroding the separation of speakers in Sebald's account of the narrator's recollection of Hamburger's recollection. [3] The significance of time's passage, and the distances between the past, present and future, are also eroded. Sebald flattens the temporal hierarchy of meaning, by giving equal significance to historical and modern events. According to Anne-Laure Fortin-Tournès, "Sebald's intermedial narrative is ruination at work, but ruination as a preliminary to the experience of kairos, i.e. to the experience of an epiphanic sense of presence to the nature of our time-being, during which it is time itself that becomes an event." [4] As in all his novels, Sebald writes in very long, complex sentences. The German original is written in a curiously quaint and somewhat precious and old-fashioned language that often disregards the common placement of German verbs at the end of sentences and instead puts them in unusual places.
The title of the book may be associated with thematic content contained in the two passages –one appearing as part of the book's epigraph, the other in the fourth chapter, which mentions Saturn –hinting at both astronomical and mythological associations for Sebald's use of the word:
The rings of Saturn consist of ice crystals and probably meteorite particles describing circular orbits around the planet's 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. [5]
As I sat there in Southwold overlooking the German Ocean, I sensed quite clearly the earth's slow turning into the dark. The huntsmen are up in America, wrote Thomas Browne in the Garden of Cyrus and they are already past their first sleep in Persia. The shadow of the night is drawn like a black veil across the earth, and since almost all creatures, from one meridian to the next, lie down after the sun has set, so, he continues, one might, in following the setting sun, see on our globe nothing but prone bodies, row upon row, as if leveled by the scythe of Saturn –an endless graveyard for a humanity struck by falling sickness. [6]
Upon release, The Rings of Saturn was generally well-received among the British press. The Daily Telegraph reported on reviews from several publications with a rating scale for the novel out of "Love It", "Pretty Good", "Ok", and "Rubbish": Guardian , Times , Independent , Sunday Telegraph , Observer , Sunday Times , and Mail On Sunday reviews under "Love It" and Independent On Sunday and Literary Review reviews under "Pretty Good". [7] [8]
The 2012 film, Patience (After Sebald), directed by Grant Gee is based on the book.
Kessingland is a village and civil parish in the East Suffolk district of the English county of Suffolk. It is located around 4 miles (6 km) south of Lowestoft on the east coast of the United Kingdom. It is of interest to archaeologists as Palaeolithic and Neolithic implements have been found here; the remains of an ancient forest lie buried on the seabed.
The Suffolk Coast Path is a long-distance footpath along the Suffolk Heritage Coast in England. It is 50 miles (80 km) long.
Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or, a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk is a work by Sir Thomas Browne, published in 1658 as the first part of a two-part work that concludes with The Garden of Cyrus.
A quincunx is a geometric pattern consisting of five points arranged in a cross, with four of them forming a square or rectangle and a fifth at its center. The same pattern has other names, including "in saltire" or "in cross" in heraldry, the five-point stencil in numerical analysis, and the five dots tattoo. It forms the arrangement of five units in the pattern corresponding to the five-spot on six-sided dice, playing cards, and dominoes. It is represented in Unicode as U+2059⁙FIVE DOT PUNCTUATION or U+2684⚄DIE FACE-5.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1995.
Michael Peter Leopold Hamburger was a noted German-British translator, poet, critic, memoirist and academic. He was known in particular for his translations of Friedrich Hölderlin, Paul Celan, Gottfried Benn and W. G. Sebald from German, and his work in literary criticism. The publisher Paul Hamlyn (1926–2001) was his younger brother.
Winfried Georg Sebald, known as W. G. Sebald or Max Sebald, was a German writer and academic. At the time of his death at the age of 57, he was according to The New Yorker ”widely recognized for his extraordinary contribution to world literature.”
Ficciones is a collection of short stories by Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges, originally written and published in Spanish between 1941 and 1956. Thirteen stories from Ficciones were first published by New Directions in the English-language anthology Labyrinths (1962). In the same year, Grove Press published the entirety of the book in English using the same title as in the original language. "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" originally appeared published in A History of Eternity (1936). Ficciones became Borges's most famous book and made him known worldwide.
Austerlitz is a 2001 novel by the German writer W. G. Sebald. It was Sebald's final novel. The book received the National Book Critics Circle Award.
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp is a 1632 oil painting on canvas by Rembrandt housed in the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, the Netherlands. It was originally created to be displayed by the Surgeons Guild in their meeting room. The painting is regarded as one of Rembrandt's early masterpieces.
The Emigrants is a 1992 collection of narratives by the German writer W. G. Sebald. It won the Berlin Literature Prize, the Literatur Nord Prize, and the Johannes Bobrowski Medal. The English translation by Michael Hulse was first published in 1996.
Saturn has made appearances in fiction since the 1752 novel Micromégas by Voltaire. In the earliest depictions, it was portrayed as having a solid surface rather than its actual gaseous composition. In many of these works, the planet is inhabited by aliens that are usually portrayed as being more advanced than humans. In modern science fiction, the Saturnian atmosphere sometimes hosts floating settlements. The planet is occasionally visited by humans and its rings are sometimes mined for resources.
Christoph Heemann is a German musician.
Anthea Bell was an English translator of literary works, including children's literature, from French, German and Danish. These include The Castle by Franz Kafka, Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald, the Inkworld trilogy by Cornelia Funke and the French Asterix comics with co-translator Derek Hockridge.
Michael Hulse is an English poet, translator and critic, notable especially for his translations of German novels by W. G. Sebald, Herta Müller, and Elfriede Jelinek.
Vertigo is a 1990 novel, the first by the German author W. G. Sebald. The first of its four sections, titled 'Beyle, or Love is a Madness Most Discreet', is a short but conventional biography of Stendhal, who is referred to not by his pen name but by his birth name of Beyle. The second, 'All'estero', is a travelogue of two journeys made to the Alpine region by an unnamed narrator whose biography resembles Sebald's; an episode from the life of Casanova is also featured. The third, 'Dr K Takes the Waters at Riva', describes a difficult period in the life of Franz Kafka, referred to only as "Dr. K." Kafka's short story The Hunter Gracchus is re-told in summary form and the meaning of the hunter's ceaseless voyage interpreted by the narrator as Kafka's penitence for a longing for love. And the fourth, 'Il ritorno in patria', is a nostalgic recounting of the narrator's visit to his German hometown of "W," a rural village which he has seen nothing of for decades. The narrator recalls one of the town's residents, Hans Schlag the huntsman, who, falling to his death, suffers the same fate as the huntsman in Kafka's short story. Sebald makes notable use of leitmotif, such as sensations of dizziness as suggested in the title, and deceased persons lying covered on platforms. The novel functions along with Sebald's subsequent works The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn as a trilogy. All three works were translated into English by Michael Hulse in partnership with Sebald.
Baldanders or Soon-Different is a creature of Germanic literary myth that features protean properties.
Andaz London Liverpool Street is a 5 star hotel in the Bishopsgate Without area of the City of London; situated immediately south of Liverpool Street station, originally built as the Great Eastern Hotel in 1884. The building underwent extensive renovation and expansion between 1899 and 1901 and again in 2000, when it was co-owned by Terence Conran. Hyatt has owned the hotel since 2006, operating it under the Andaz brand.
The rings of Saturn are an extensive set of planetary rings in orbit about the planet Saturn.
War and Turpentine is a 2013 novel by Belgian author Stefan Hertmans, originally published by De Bezige Bij. It is a novel about his grandfather, the artist Urbain Martien, during World War I. Hertmans says he based it on the notebooks his grandfather gave him in 1981. It was translated into English by David McKay and published by Pantheon Books in the US and by Harvill Secker in the UK. It has been translated in twenty languages so far. By 2015, the Dutch version had sold over 200,000 copies. It was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2017.