ABSTRACT
Before there was any thought of my translating Max Sebald's writings into English, I knew him slightly, because in the academic year 1990—91 I had been one of a number of translators invited to give a talk in the inaugural series of guest lectures at the University of East Anglia's British Centre for Literary Translation, then a young institution. I no longer remember whether I talked on Schiller or Rilke in English on that occasion (in 1992, invited back to conduct a workshop, I took the other of the two as my subject); nor do I remember, if I ever knew, whether it was Max himself or Adam Czerniawski or George Hyde or some other colleague from whom the original idea to invite me came. On that first occasion, and on the second in 1992, I recall having only a very few minutes of conversation with Max, in some dismal space lined with office doors, and it is the warmth of our rapport, and his doleful humour, and the sense of being in the presence of someone who knew and savoured and valued his words, that stay in my mind, rather than any particulars of what was said. Although the house published very little poetry (and that mainly eastern European writing in translation), the publisher of my poetry at that time was Harvill; and every now and then mine was one opinion editor Bill Swainson would solicit of a foreign title Harvill was thinking of acquiring. The last book I'd read for him before Max's, if memory serves, was by an Estonian writer, Viivi Luik, whose book The Seventh Spring of Peace I had warmed to but with a nagging misgiving; its strength I had described to Bill as 'beauty, but pedestrian beauty'. Max's Die Ausgewanderten was sent to me by Bill on 17 March 1993, and at that date, though naturally aware that the book had been acclaimed throughout the serious German press, I had read neither that nor any other publication by him. To the hindsight of today, gifted with the understanding that Max was a significant writer, this may seem extraordinary; to me too, once I settled to Die Ausgewanderten, it seemed that I was reading something I had known all my life, and that it could not really be possible that I had ever been unacquainted with a text so self-evidently of the highest order.
