3
THE TEMPLE
[Πόλις] Sola Constantinopolis a Graecis hodie appellatur per excellentiam, cum urbes caeteras omnes κάστρα vocare soleant. Unde accidit ut ex στὴν πόλιν quomodo vulgus dicere amabat, cum Byzantium proficiscebantur, aut de hac urbe loquebantur, Turci fecerunt . . . Στάμβουλ
Today only Constantinople is called Polis [the City] by the Greeks, due to its preëminence; they refer to all other cities as kastra. Whence it came about that, from stin polin [to the City], which is how ordinary people liked to refer to the city whenever they would set out for Byzantium or speak about it, the Turks made the name Stamboul . . .
—Du Cange, Glossarium ad scriptores mediae et infimae Graecitatis (1687), on the derivation of the name Stamboul [Istanbul]
Der oriental. (-türk.) name Stambul ist eine verstümmelung von islam = rechtglaübig und bul = menge oder vielheit.
The Oriental (-Turkish) name Stamboul is a corruption of Islam = “true belief” and bul = “a mass or abundance.”
—Johann Jacob Egli, Nomina geographica (1872)
A STRANGER REACHES an unknown city after a long voyage. The journey has been winding and full of complications; the stranger is tired. He approaches at last the building that will be his home from now on and, perhaps with a little sigh, begins walking toward it, the final short length of the improbably meandering way that has led him here. Perhaps there are stairs. If so, he mounts them wearily. Or maybe there is an arch through which he vanishes, a small smudge against the gaping darkness, like some character in a myth disappearing into the jaws of a monster. His shoulders are likely hunched by the weight of the bags he is carrying, the two bags which now are everything he has, apart from the wife and the child. When are they coming? The bags were packed in haste: what to take, what is most precious? One of them likely contains books.
Who is he? He is the Greek scholar fleeing Istanbul for Italy in 1453, the Muslim fled from Spain to Istanbul in 1492, the Huguenot running from France to Germany in 1685, the Jew fleeing Germany early in the last century, as so many did, as Erich Auerbach did, for instance, in 1936, when he ran from Marburg to, of all places, Istanbul, whose university offered him a refuge, that ornate house with its ravishing views of the sea where he wrote Mimesis, his hymn to the greatness of European civilization. Or he is a writer seventy years later who for a while was plunged into helpless despair, aporia, after he spent years researching a book that describes the effects of the cataclysm that swept up Auerbach and, among millions of others, a handful of people living in a small Polish town, some of whom, like the German scholar, tried to escape, although their escape was not successful; a writer who now warily contemplates a new book, a book about a marvelous and charming poem, the Odyssey (which for a brief period he studied with his father, an illuminating experience), a poem which, as we know, once interested Auerbach, too; warily contemplates a book about this great masterpiece which, the despairing writer hopes, will spare him having to tell any more of the terrible stories he once had to tell.
Or maybe he is another kind of writer, one who wants to get away not from the tales of horrors suffered by the victims but from the inherited guilt for those horrors—from a past for which he is not responsible but by which he feels tainted. Maybe he is Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald, born in the Gau, the Nazi administrative district of Schwaben, in Bavaria, in 1944 and therefore, as it were, a guiltless babe when the atrocities that had pushed Auerbach to Istanbul were still taking place; a German who nonetheless felt compelled to leave his country in the 1960s, indeed to leave behind his own father, a man who throughout the Second World War had fought in the Wehrmacht, a division whose motto was Gott mit uns, God with Us. Compelled, then, to leave his native land not by a royal edict but by his own sense of claustrophobic shame, this German writer comes to the country of those who defeated his own and finds himself, in time, standing before the door of the Department of European Literature of the University of East Anglia, where he will spend the rest of his too-short life writing books about exiles, émigrés. About Ausgewanderten, to use the German word, which will indeed be the title of one of his books: emigrants, people who have been forced to “wander outward” into the world just as, all those centuries ago, Odysseus was sent reeling through space and time, mala pollà plangthê, cast off, set adrift, baffled, balked. In photographs taken of Sebald in his middle age, self-exile seems to have smoothed him out: the plump oval face, with its shock of white hair receding from the expansive brow, strikes you as both intelligent and quizzical, even comic, the straight graying eyebrows shooting up at a forty-five-degree angle as if in amusement at some joke you have arrived too late to hear, the dark eyes hooded by the skin of the lids, which droop like curtains across the outer corners, obscuring most of the whites and leaving only the large dark irises visible. These are, you cannot help feeling, the eyes of someone prone to melancholy.
Let us leave them there for now, the two Germans, Auerbach in Istanbul safely ensconced with his chair in Western Languages and Literatures and his tortured dream of die gemeinsame Verbindung der Kulturen, Sebald standing before the door of the Department of European Literature in East Anglia, wondering what awaits him, as so many millions of others through the millennia have stood and wondered before strange gateways and buildings and doors, flung across the globe to these once unimaginable locations, these unlikely places of refuge from the people, or merely the memories, that are hunting them.
IT IS NOT DIFFICULT to understand Erich Auerbach’s distrust of ring composition and the sense it can give you that there is a profound, almost supernatural connectedness between events. If the refugee German Jew found Homer’s all-illuminating device to be inconsistent with the inscrutable mechanics of real life, if he preferred the inexplicable omissions and gaps that characterize the narrative style of the Hebrew Bible, a style that refuses to reveal, as ring composition insists on doing, connections between things, inside and outside, motivations and actions, past and present, well, who could blame him? Who could question his attraction to the opaque, pessimistic narrative mode, given the awful circumstances in which he wrote Mimesis, the harrowing flight to his improbable Asian refuge from a Europe in which the only remaining connectedness among cultures was a negative one: the common experience of annihilation?
Auerbach’s distrust of the Greek technique raises a larger question about the problems of representation in literature, about the means by which writers make their subjects seem “realistic.” Naturally this question has plagued all kinds of artists as they have struggled with difficult subjects, one of the greatest and most difficult of these being, in our own time, the event that landed Auerbach in Istanbul: the German plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe during World War II. The difficulty of representation posed by this unimaginably destructive event was most famously, if controversially, expressed in the oft-quoted dictum of Auerbach’s fellow German refugee Theodor Adorno: nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch, “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.” But the problem has plagued all kinds of writers with regard to all kinds of subjects. Sometimes when this subject comes up, for instance, I find myself thinking of the curious story of the failure, when it was first presented in 1691, of Racine’s final tragedy, Athalie. As we know, Athalie together with its immediate predecessor, Esther, represented a startling departure in the work of Racine, whose earlier plays had been inspired by Greek or Roman themes. For this abandonment of pagan in favor of biblical subjects there was a compelling and, perhaps, not wholly artistic reason. These two final plays were written to please Mme. de Maintenon, the fiercely pious morganatic wife of Louis XIV; both were first performed at Saint-Cyr, the girls’ school of which she was the patron—the education of young Catholic girls being, as we know, a subject of urgent importance in the final decades of the seventeenth century in France, as witness the career of François Fénelon, head of the Institut des Nouvelles Catholiques. And indeed we are told that Racine, in being commissioned to write something for the girls of Saint-Cyr, was urged to turn away from classical literature and find inspiration in a Hebrew text in part because Mme. de Maintenon had become alarmed by the unseemly passions evident in the girls’ earlier performance of Racine’s Andromaque: a work based on Euripides’s play about the widow of the Trojan hero Hector, a woman who, according to the Greek myth, had been unable to hide her small son successfully from the Greeks who were hunting him as they sacked Troy and who, when they found the child, tossed him from the top of the city’s wall. Mme. de Maintenon had been alarmed, too, by the excessive vanity and preening to which Andromaque’s success had moved some of the girls, those qualities being inimical to the Catholic values Louis’s secret wife sought to instill in her students. I find myself enjoying this latter anecdote, which carries over the centuries such an unexpectedly distinct flavor of those lost schoolgirls and their ways: the vanity and silliness, the seriousness and yearnings, all of which can be so hard to imagine, to re-create.
So you might say that, as his career moved toward its end, Racine’s oeuvre came to exemplify the dual inheritance of European culture, the Greco-Roman and the Judeo-Christian, that has twined its way through the work of European thinkers as different as Johann Reuchlin in the fifteenth century, that Renaissance humanist who insisted that knowledge of Hebrew be paired with that of Greek and Latin in German education, and who happened to be a student of Jan Lascaris, one of the hundreds of Byzantine scholars displaced by the Fall of Constantinople in 1453; and Erich Auerbach in the twentieth, who begins his masterpiece Mimesis by contrasting the Homeric and the biblical styles of narration.
Racine’s Esther was a great success, but as the schoolgirls in Proust’s novel knew, the premiere of Athalie was a failure. The play depicts the downfall of the murderous ninth-century BC Jewish queen Athaliah, a daughter of Ahab and Jezebel who, in her lust for power, ordered the murders of all potential claimants to the throne, including the children of her own line, unaware that one child had been safely hidden away—the one who, in time, would finally supplant her. To those who find this harrowing play, the climax of which is set inside the Great Temple of Solomon itself, to be Racine’s finest, the story of its failure seems inexplicable. But fail it did. As I have mentioned, Gustave Merlet, the nineteenth-century critic, attributed the débacle to the drab simplicity of the production values, which, no doubt in keeping with Mme. de Maintenon’s renewed desire to instill modesty in her students, were required to be as simple as possible, in stark contrast to the lavish sets and costumes that were to be seen in Esther two years earlier. Those who disdained the production complained in particular of the failure of Racine’s mise-en-scène to reproduce the magnificence of the Temple, which, in the Saint-Cyr production, was merely suggested by some lavish swags that in any case were hard to see. Son temple n’a que des festons magnifiques, et encore on ne les voit pas . . . All this concern over the accuracy of the representation of the Temple, it should be said, will strike some people as ironic. Its magnificence, after all, is something we can only imagine. For the Temple was destroyed not once but twice. Solomon’s grandiose building was leveled to the ground by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in 587 BC during his conquest of the Jewish state of Judah, the defeat that resulted in the exile of the Jews to Babylon, the Babylonian Captivity; and, in a nightmarish repetition, the replacement for that Temple which the Jews subsequently built, the so-called Second Temple, was sacked, looted, and razed in AD 70 by the Romans during the First Jewish War. Of that second structure, only part of a wall remains, that one fragment occupying a site that has since become an object of sometimes violent controversy, it being sacred at once to Jews and Muslims.
The difficulty of representing the past accurately—even if that past is itself a dream, a reconstruction of a reconstruction, a palimpsest of a palimpsest—is one known to people other than writers, of course. I have mentioned that I was a fervent model-maker in my early teenage years, often devoting all of my after-school time to making intricate reproductions of buildings from antiquity. Of these, the Parthenon was the object of an almost obsessive interest. After making my first model of it for a class project when I was about twelve, using cardboard toilet paper rolls to stand in for the original’s elegantly fluted Doric columns, I embarked on creating a proper scale model, three feet wide by six feet long, the ambitiousness of which now strikes me as almost absurd and the construction of which was never completed although it absorbed the next five years of my life. During that period my skills improved. I studied dozens of books and, eventually, created elaborate rubber molds from which I could cast the forty-six columns of the peristyle and other architectural elements. I reproduced as meticulously as I was able the bas-reliefs of the frieze, which I worked in Plasticine on one-inch-high strips of cardboard, and the great chryselephantine statue of Athena, which in my three-feet-to-an-inch scale rendering was thirteen inches high, cast in plaster, and adorned with real gold leaf. Given how intense my focus on this project was, it’s odd that I now neither know nor care what became of the elements that I had finished. Or perhaps not odd, since later in my adolescence the desire to build my model suddenly evaporated. All at once, it seemed, the effort required to finish casting the columns was impossibly daunting, although the casting process, which was quite simple compared to the research and the artisanal processes required to create the molds, was by then the only thing that stood between me and completion. After years of fervent daily activity, the entire project was beginning to seem pointless; now, as I entered my high school years, it was enough for me to descend every few days into the cellar and survey the disassembled pieces that were neatly lined up or stacked on the large worktable, the columns, the architrave, the pediments with their heavy ornamentation, the gaudy cult statue gleaming even in the darkness of the slightly damp underground space. It was as if, having imagined the model for so long, having so minutely researched the structure and pored over all the books and plans, the vision of it that I had for so long had in my head was sufficient; I knew what it should look like, I knew where each piece, down to the tiniest gutta, needed to be positioned. And so the model itself now struck me as an afterthought. By this point I was seventeen or eighteen and the interests that had sustained me through a solitary puberty, particularly classical archaeology, with its exciting promise of great riches lurking just below the surface, had yielded to a keen interest in literature. I began to keep a diary; I started to write stories and poems. Now, too, I wanted to learn Greek; the books that I took out of the library each week were volumes of Sophocles and Plato’s Phaedrus, works that left me with inchoate and exalted yearnings that no model could ever depict. And indeed not long after this period of my life I went off to university to study Greek literature, which, however much it has suffered at the hands of time, has only rarely been the object of the kind of intentional ruination that has left such scant traces of so many ancient structures.
One of the best examples of such deliberate destruction is the Parthenon itself. In a curious coincidence, the building to which I once had devoted so much thought and energy was—like the Second Temple of Jerusalem—built to replace an earlier temple that had been destroyed. That earlier temple to Athena, goddess of wisdom and patroness of Athens (and, too, of Odysseus) had been set afire and razed to the ground by the Persian King Darius when he invaded Athens in 490 BC, fresh from his conquests in Babylon. The building we know today, constructed between 447 and 432 BC as a replacement for that earlier ruin, eventually became one of the most iconic works of architecture in the world. Or, I should say, one of the most iconic ruins. For the Parthenon had remained more or less intact, had looked more or less as it had looked when it was completed in 432, until the 26th of September 1687, when, as part of an action during the so-called Great Turkish War between the Venetians and the Ottomans—the war in which Fénelon’s brother had distinguished himself—a Venetian commander named Morosoni, having been informed that the Turks were using the former Greek temple as a powder magazine (information given to him on the—as it turned out—naïve assumption that it would stop him targeting the structure), fired on the building. The resultant explosion destroyed almost all of its interior structures, much of its peristyle, and many of its lavish sculptures. The human cost included the horrible deaths of more than three hundred Muslims who had taken shelter in this onetime temple to Athena—a troubling irony, given that we owe a good deal of what we know about the Parthenon’s appearance before the explosion to the descriptions in the travel writings of a Muslim, the celebrated Turkish diarist Evliya Çelebi.
One result of the physical devastation suffered by the building in 1687 was that, almost from the moment Greece won its independence from its Ottoman overlords at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Parthenon has been the object of almost continual attempts at restoration—although the word “restoration” raises perplexing questions about memory and history, since the building that began as a temple to a pagan goddess had many subsequent religious and architectural incarnations in its long history, for instance as a mosque, complete with a minaret, although those subsequent incarnations were not the object of any restorative energies, it having been decided that the single moment in this building’s past that ought to be preserved was the earliest, Periclean one, the one that corresponded to the cultural identity that the newly independent Greek state of the 1820s wanted to cling to: that of a free and powerful Hellenic people cleansed, as it were, of the encrustations of later history, just as the Acropolis and the Parthenon itself would be cleansed of the traces of that later history. Although it is tempting to decry the Greeks’ decision to restore only those bits of their monuments that corresponded to their present ideological needs, I for one have a certain sympathy for it. Were someone to raise enough money to restore the Great Synagogue of Bolechów, after all, would we not want it to appear as it did in, say, 1908, the year my great-uncle had his bar mitzvah there—would we not want it to look as it looked when the culture that produced that particular structure was at its height, just as the Athens that produced the Parthenon was a culture at its height? 1908, which is to say three decades before that same great-uncle was hunted to his death in that same small town after hiding for some time in a dark and secret place, like a small animal: one among many people who failed to hide successfully and who, on being found, were shot on the spot or transported to camps or, in the cases of certain children I have heard about, tossed to their deaths from the upper stories of the Town Hall. These were the people whose disappearance would lead, in time, to the decay of the Great Synagogue, that once-impressive structure, to the loss of memory of what the building was and how it was supposed to function and look, with the inevitable result that it would, in time, be encrusted with additions (those Ukrainian folk-art murals of rural landscapes, for instance) that our restorative efforts would be meant to purge. Such is the hold that these buildings, or rather the identities that they represent, have on the imagination—of entire nations as well as of individual enthusiasts.
Anyway, that odd youthful pastime of mine is no doubt why I was so strongly affected by a certain passage toward the end of a novel called The Rings of Saturn, originally published in 1995 as Die Ringe des Saturn, by the late W. G. Sebald, the German writer who had emigrated in the 1960s to the United Kingdom, where he spent the rest of his life and which is the setting for much of his writing. It was in England, oddly enough, that Sebald wrote his dissertation on the German writer Alfred Döblin, author of the masterwork Berlin Alexanderplatz and himself a Jewish refugee from Hitler, just as Auerbach was. (Döblin and Auerbach, in fact, died within weeks of each other, in 1957: the kind of near-coincidence beloved of Sebald, as we shall see.) Small wonder that, as has been observed by many critics by now, emigration, wandering, flight, and exile are the hallmarks of Sebald’s strange novels. Vertigo (1990) features dream-like Alpine travelogues narrated by a neurotically unhappy figure who could or could not be the author himself (“what else could I do . . . but wander aimlessly around until well into the night?”), as well as vignettes from the lives of those great travelers Casanova and Stendhal, the latter of whom is plagued, in Sebald’s narration of the Frenchman’s trip to the site of the Battle of Marengo, by anxieties about how we represent the past, anxieties that in fact explain the title of the novel. “The difference between the images of the battle which he had in his head,” Sebald writes of Stendhal, “and what he now saw before him . . . occasioned in him a vertiginous sense of confusion such as he had never previously experienced.” The Emigrants (1992) consists of four long narratives about men, some German, some Jewish, and finally including the author himself, whose worldwide wanderings are all ultimately revealed to be deeply connected to the tragic history of Germany in the twentieth century. The Rings of Saturn, which was published in 1995, I shall describe presently. As for Sebald’s final novel—the author died in a car accident in 2001, at the age of fifty-seven—it is called Austerlitz: a reference of course to another great Napoleonic battle, but here the name of the title character, yet another Ausgewanderter, who, we learn, had come to England as a child in a Kindertransport and whose adult journeys in search of information about the fate of his mother structure the novel’s action—if we may refer to the movement of a narrative that is so diffuse, so meandering, so ruminative, as “action.”
Given my own history with such journeys in search of the Holocaust past, it would seem natural for Austerlitz to be my favorite of Sebald’s novels. And indeed, toward the climax of that fictional tale it is revealed that, during the wandering that he undertakes in search of his origins, Austerlitz has been carrying with him a copy of a book called Heshel’s Kingdom, a real work by the South African writer Dan Jacobson which has much in common with the one that I would later write. Heshel’s Kingdom traces its author’s travels through Lithuania during the 1990s, where he had set out in search of traces of his grandfather Heshel’s lost world, a world very much like the one my relatives in Bolechów inhabited. This real-life memoir, which Sebald’s fictional character carries everywhere with him, is, like my own book, an example of a now-flourishing genre of narratives about emotionally fraught Jewish returns to the irretrievably lost “old country” (as Jewish émigrés of my own grandfather’s generation called Eastern Europe); still, I could not have predicted that I would end up writing such a book back in the early 1990s, when I was in graduate school writing a dissertation about Greek tragedy and one of my closest friends was Dan Jacobson’s nephew, David, who spoke often of his uncle and his work . . . Austerlitz is to some extent anomalous among Sebald’s novels precisely because of its explicit mention of the German extermination of the Jews of Europe, which haunts his other narratives without ever quite being made explicit. To my knowledge there is only one time in Sebald’s work that the word “Holocaust” occurs, and there it refers not to what Germany did to the Jews but to what, in the Book of Genesis, Abraham intends to do to Isaac. In a typically digressive passage in The Rings of Saturn, which indeed consists of nothing but digressions, a series of tales that both describe and mirror its narrator’s meandering walks around the East Coast of England during a period of inexplicable depression, the narrator muses on the 1658 work by Thomas Browne called Hydriotaphia, or Urn-Burial, whose discussion of how easy it is to burn human bodies is paraphrased at one point:
it is not difficult to burn a human body: a piece of an old boat burnt Pompey, and the King of Castile burnt large numbers of Saracens with next to no fuel, the fire being visible far and wide. Indeed . . . if the burthen of Isaac were sufficient for an holocaust, a man may carry his own pyre.
The scene to which Thomas Browne here refers is the one which, in Mimesis, Erich Auerbach uses as an exemplum of the opaque Hebraic style.
As I have implied, The Rings of Saturn is the most emblematic of this author’s strange style, which is why it is in fact my favorite of his novels; that style being characterized by frequent recourse to the technique hinted at by his title’s reference to rings. Like Homer, Sebald uses ring composition to great effect. But unlike the narrative rings, circles, digressions, and wandering that we find in Homer, which seem designed both to illuminate and to enact a hidden unity in things, the ones we find in Sebald seem designed to confuse, entangling his characters in meanderings from which they cannot extricate themselves and which have no clear destination. In The Rings of Saturn, the meticulously traced trajectories of both history and nature lead only to dissolution and defeat. In the opening pages of the novel we are told that the narrator’s penchant for those long wandering walks around the countryside bring him repeatedly in contact with what he calls “traces of destruction”—whether of the people of the Congo, whose oppression at the hands of Belgian capitalists is the subject of one of the book’s most harrowing excurses, obliquely inspired by one such walk; or of the Dutch elm tree, the devastation of which by a virus in England in the 1980s is described in another lengthy digression. These “traces of destruction” produce in the book’s narrator what he calls “a paralyzing horror”—a feeling with which I myself became acquainted after finishing my Holocaust book. The narrator’s subsequent encounters, unlike the surprise meetings and reunions in Homer, are never happy ones. A pleasant walk on the grounds of a deserted country estate leads to a conversation with an old caretaker who begins recalling the British bombings of Germany, the sixty-seven airfields in East Anglia, the billion gallons of fuel that propelled the planes that dropped seven hundred and thirty-two thousand tons of bombs on Germany, the nine thousand aircraft lost with their fifty thousand men. A friendly visit to the country home of Sebald’s real-life friend Michael Hamburger is also inexorably overshadowed by this awful theme, since much of that visit is taken up first by the German Sebald’s guilty thoughts about Hamburger’s escape from Berlin as a child—for he was yet another Jewish refugee from Hitler—and, later, by Hamburger’s own melancholy reflections on his lost past.
As you make your way through his twisting narratives, it becomes ever more difficult to escape the impression that the circling merely exhausts us while never bringing us any closer to the subject. Whereas Homer’s rings whirl us toward revelation and illumination, spinning ever further into Odysseus’s past and bringing us to the very moments of his birth and naming, the keys to his and his epic’s identity, the circles in Sebald’s restless narration lead us to a series of locked doors to which there is no key. The individual stories are often introduced by disquieting near-coincidences—the fact, for instance, that the birthday of Hölderlin’s translator should fall a few days after that of the poet himself—such noncoincidence reflecting the aura of missed opportunities and failed connections that haunts Sebald’s work. Like Proust’s digressions and “ways,” Sebald’s meanderings ultimately form a giant ring that ties together many disparate tales and experiences; but if Proust’s ring appears to us as a container, filled with all of human experience, Sebald’s embraces a void: a destination to which, as in some narrative version of Zeno’s paradox, no amount of writing can deliver us.
The theme of the failure of narrative in fact shadows The Rings of Saturn from its opening pages, where a typically odd chain of connections allows the author to introduce this motif. In those pages the narrator describes his walking tours in Suffolk during the dog days of 1992, these tours putting him in mind of a great friend of his who also enjoyed walking tours; but the friend who enjoyed walking, the narrator tells us, died suddenly, a death that particularly affected a certain colleague of the dead man—a woman professor whose work focused on the nineteenth-century novel. This academic specialty inevitably recalls to the narrator’s mind the novelist Flaubert, in whom, he observes (paraphrasing the woman professor), “Fear of the false sometimes kept him [Flaubert] confined to his couch for weeks or months on end in the dread that he would never be able to write another word without compromising himself in the most grievous of ways.” And yet even this statement of failure is subject to failure, since after all how can we claim to know about Flaubert’s crises when (as the narrator also says, this time quoting Diderot), “Who can say how things were in the past?”
The irretrievability of the past turns out to be the main subject of the long conversation that takes place during the narrator’s visit to his friend Michael Hamburger. Hamburger describes to him how, many years after the war, he had returned to Berlin and gone to the building where his parents had had their apartment, a building where the plasterwork garlands, the familiar railing, the names on the mailboxes—many of which, Hamburger notes, have not changed—now appear to him
like pictures in a rebus that I simply had to puzzle out correctly in order to cancel the monstrous events that had happened since we emigrated. It was as if it were now up to me alone, as if by some trifling mental exertion I could reverse the entire course of history, as if—if I desired it only—Grandmother Antonina, who had refused to go with us to England, would still be living in Kantstraße as before. . . . All that was required was a moment of concentration, piecing together the syllables of the word concealed in the riddle, and everything would again be as it once was. But I could neither make out the word nor bring myself to mount the stairs and ring the bell of our old flat. Instead I left the building with a sick feeling . . .
His inability either to read or to move seems to sum up Sebald’s project, in which language fails and motion is pointless. Everything is left in obscurity.
THE FUTILITY OF HAMBURGER’S attempts to reach back to the past, let alone reconstruct it, let alone restore what has been destroyed by time or other forces—of attempts even by this master of language, a distinguished poet and literary figure—is the subject of another tale that Sebald tells in The Rings of Saturn, forming one of the final narrative rings that make up the novel. This tale is in fact the very one that, as I mentioned earlier, evokes such powerful emotions in me, one of those emotions being a feeling of nostalgic recognition, since the story in question is about an obsessive model-maker.
The narrator’s encounter with this figure takes place immediately after a rather allusive episode: his brief visit to a dilapidated estate belonging to some Anglo-Irish aristocrats who had fled Ireland during the Troubles and who are now, like so many of this book’s characters, stranded by history. The inertia of their lives is symbolized by the fruitless work done day after day by the daughters of the family, who make marvelous pillowcases and counterpanes by sewing together bits of fabulous old fabrics that they find around the house, only to undo the stitches later, disintegrating their own creations. This story bears an unmistakable resemblance to a tale from Book 2 of the Odyssey about Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, who promises the Suitors that she will marry one of them as soon as she finishes weaving a shroud for her aged father-in-law but, in order to prolong her capitulation for as long as possible, secretly undoes each day’s weaving by night. Because weaving often figures in Greek literature as a symbol for storytelling, for “plotting” (in both senses of that word), it is possible to take the story of Penelope’s tactic as a dark parable about a kind of narrative barely imaginable in the epic: about the disquieting possibility that there are stories that can have no ending, that merely spin on pointlessly, as indeed the lives of those Anglo-Irish girls go on with no hope of closure, of narrative satisfaction. It is as if there, at the beginning of the Odyssey, Homer were dreaming of Sebald . . .
From this house of mythic stasis the narrator of The Rings of Saturn moves on, traveling next to see an old acquaintance of his called Thomas Abrams, a farmer, a pastor, and, we learn, an avid amateur modeler. Abrams, the narrator recalls, had begun his hobbying career by making replicas of ships and other vessels. But by the time Sebald’s novel takes place he has spent the past twenty years working obsessively on one model, a model of a single building that, when you consider its maker’s résumé, is a most likely subject.
What Abrams is working on is a reproduction of the Temple of Jerusalem. The vast model, which covers ten square yards, seeks to re-create everything, the “antechambers and the living quarters of the priesthood, the Roman garrison, the bath-houses, the market stalls, the sacrificial altars, covered walkways and the booths of the money-lenders, the great gateways and the staircases, the forecourts and outer provinces and the mountains in the background . . .” And yet Abrams, we are told, is haunted by a sense of futility. The more he studies, he tells the narrator, the more new information there is derived from the discoveries of archaeologists, the more difficult it is to make progress—a remark that not only recalls Penelope’s weaving but reminds me, at least, of Erich Auerbach’s statement describing his own attempt to reconstruct part of a lost culture: his observation, in the epilogue to his great book, that “if it had been possible for me to acquaint myself with all the work that has been done on so many subjects, I might have never reached the point of writing.” Perhaps Auerbach was right after all about the virtues of blanks and opacity; perhaps too much knowing can lead to total inertia. And indeed, the narrator of The Rings of Saturn observes apropos of Abrams’s model of the Temple that “it is difficult to see any change from one year to the next.”
Abrams mournfully concludes his conversation by sharing with the narrator his realization that that no amount of reproduction can hope to capture the original:
After all, if the Temple is to create the impression of being true to life, I have to make every one of the tiny coffers on the ceilings, every one of the hundreds of columns, and every single one of the many thousands of diminutive stone blocks by hand, and paint them as well. Now, as the edges of my field of vision are beginning to darken, I sometimes wonder if I will ever finish the Temple and whether all I have done so far has not been a wretched waste of time.
Sebald’s model-maker is in fact based on a real person, just as Proust’s Saint-Loup was; in this case, the author’s friend Alec Garrard, who spent thirty years working on a 1:100 scale model of the Temple. But it is hard not to think that if Garrard hadn’t existed, Sebald would have had to make him up. The unfinishable model of the Temple—a structure that, as by now we know, has resisted accurate representation throughout literary history—is the perfect symbol of Sebald’s manner as well as of his subject, both of which are aligned with the pessimistic model of narrative, Erich Auerbach’s “Hebrew” style, which derives its uncanny power and devastating realism precisely from that which cannot be represented. And why not? As we know, sometimes it is safer to keep things in obscurity. It may well be that the twisting history of the world is written by the hiders—at least, the ones who hide successfully.
There is something else for which Sebald’s story about the doomed model-maker—the story that, for reasons that will be obvious by now, has a special hold over me—may be the ideal symbol. In The Rings of Saturn, Sebald describes Michael Hamburger as being simply “a writer,” and yet the fact is that he was a distinguished poet and memoirist, too; and perhaps best known as a translator of German into English. Sebald’s omission paradoxically draws attention to what he would elide. If the story about the model of the Temple may be taken as a metaphor for our tragic relationship to the past, for the inevitable failure of our attempts to preserve or rescue or re-create what is no longer present, the fraught elision of Hamburger’s career as a translator gestures starkly to the “Hebrew” way with respect to literature in particular: to the futility of translation, indeed of any kind of writing that seeks to “carry across” (which is what the word “translate” means) an original into a new material, a new mode, a new time.
THE SUBJECT OF the difficulties of translation (to say nothing of a corollary subject, which is the heroism of anyone who attempts to translate) puts me in mind of a curious story that is set in Istanbul. Only there, as we know, could Auerbach write his paean to European literature, since Europe was destroying itself in precisely the manner that W. G. Sebald’s novels can merely suggest without being able to describe. But there, too, another writer once labored, a Turk whose dream was to produce a perfect translation of a famous French text: François Fénelon’s Les aventures de Télémaque.
By now we know about the enormous impact that Fénelon’s novel had on the mind of Europe, from the Enlightenment philosophers to Proust. But the appeal of the French archbishop’s ingenious expansion of Homer was not limited to Europe or, indeed, to the West. Like Odysseus himself, you might say, Les aventures de Télémaque “wandered greatly and knew the minds of many men.” By the first half of the nineteenth century there were translations into Turkish, Tatar, Bulgarian, Romanian, Armenian, Albanian, Georgian, Kurdish, and Arabic, among many other languages. In his 1855 memoir La Turquie actuelle, “Present-Day Turkey,” the French writer and traveler Jean-Henri-Abdolonyme Ubicini recalls that an attaché to the Russian embassy once showed him a page from an album on which the book’s “famous opening lines”—Calypso ne pouvait se consoler du départ d’Ulysse—had been translated into “seventeen or eighteen languages.” The novel was one of the first Western works to achieve significant popularity east of the Hellespont, in the Middle East, and even beyond. The name Tilîmâk, or Tilimak, was known throughout the Levant; dramatizations of Fénelon’s novel for the theatrical and operatic stages were performed in Beirut, Alexandria, and Istanbul.
It was particularly in the realm of the Ottoman sultan that Fénelon’s masterpiece found favor. No other work of Western literature was as popular there during the nineteenth century. In his account of everyday life in the Istanbul neighborhood known as Pera (the Greek word for “across,” since this district lay across the Golden Horn from the Old City), Ubicini observed that Fénelon was one of only two French authors ordinary Turkish people were likely to know, the other being Dumas. “They know Fénelon as the author of Télémaque and they know Télémaque as the first French book they ever held in their hands.” He goes on to remark that his elderly landlady in Pera, an ordinary Ottoman citizen, had “learned by heart the most beautiful passages in the book.” Most Turkish intellectuals owned a copy, sometimes the first edition; a course called Télémaque was even taught in the medical school. This is not as surprising as it may at first appear. Although the popular imagination has long cast the Ottoman Empire as impossibly mysterious and strange, an Eastern “other” as exotic in its way as Priam’s Troy had been to the Greeks—opulent, decadent, corrupt, languid, and luxurious, the adjectives have remained the same for a hundred generations—a pro-Western turn was detectable as early as the early eighteenth century, during the so-called Tulip Era, when the Ottoman champions of modernizing reforms looked to Europe for new ideas as well as for the bulbs of the flowers with which they adorned their palaces. This eagerness to adapt to European tastes and import European goods led, in turn, to further reforms in the nineteenth century, and even more in the next, the twentieth, after Ataturk’s revolution, when the secularized Turkish Republic provided such a warm welcome to European intellectuals fleeing oppression in the 1930s, giving rise to that joke by the Minister of Education. A certain literary tradition long established in the Ottoman Empire, to say nothing of much farther east, even as far as China, also helped to create the conditions for such a warm reception for Les aventures: the genre known as “Mirrors of Princes,” educational treatises or tales intended for the political instruction or ethical edification of rulers.
And so Fénelon’s adaptation of the Odyssey was able to flourish in the very land where, as Homer recounts, the wealthy and exotic Eastern city of Troy once flourished and where today the ruined remains of that lavish capital, finally reduced to rubble after ten years of siege as the result of the ruse of the Trojan Horse, that clever stratagem devised by Odysseus, are to be found near the modern town of Çanakkale, which was the first stop on the cruise my father and I took, the one that ultimately led to my moment of claustrophobic panic in Calypso’s cave.
The best-known and most refined translation of Les aventures de Télémaque into Turkish was made in the late 1850s by no less a personage than the Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire: Yûsuf Kâmil Pasha, a distinguished statesman who served under the Sultan Abdülaziz. Kâmil Pasha’s life had a Dickensian arc that seems like something out of a novel—one of those instances in which, as in the ring composition of which Erich Auerbach was so distrustful, the symmetries are so perfect that they strike us as artificial, even fictional. Born in Anatolia in 1808, Kâmil Pasha lost his father while still a small child, and therefore lacked the support enjoyed by so many provincial youths as they sought advancement through the elaborate maze of Ottoman politics. Nonetheless, after being taken under the wing of a well-connected uncle, he rose swiftly, first in Istanbul and then during a long posting to Egypt, by then a province of the Empire, where he married the daughter of the governor, Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha. It was there, more to the point, that he began to study French, as did so many leading figures of the Ottoman intelligentsia throughout the nineteenth century, when a pervasive Francophilia coursed through the Empire like a fever. It was this love of all things French that led him to Fénelon. In a black-and-white photograph taken of Kâmil Pasha in old age, he wears a long tunic severely buttoned all the way to the throat, a garment that, to the Western eye, gives him an ecclesiastical air. The face is oval, the dark fez above it nicely balanced by the meticulously groomed white beard below; the nose at the center is large, hooked, confident. The eyes, beneath their dark angled brows, stare back at yours as if assessing you, at once inquisitive and patient: the eyes of someone who has managed to keep something back for himself at the table of the powerful.
Kâmil Pasha completed his translation in 1859 and published it in 1862. Himself a poet (sadly, many of his manuscripts were later destroyed in a devastating fire), he gave to his rendering of Fénelon’s elegant French a remarkable literary polish: elaborate rhymes hidden in the prose, meticulous parallel constructions, a deft handling of the references to pagan gods and goddesses, which had to be adapted to suit the sensibilities of Muslim readers. This pressing need for sensitive adaptation of European texts to local tastes was, as it happens, one with which Erich Auerbach would become acquainted years later. Lecturing on Dante one day to his Turkish students, he felt compelled to omit a reference to the horrible punishment to which the Florentine poet condemns the prophet Mohammed, who, in the Inferno, appears in the ninth ditch of the Malebolge, cleaved in half with his insides pouring out, such punishment, as barbaric as it seems to us now, being consonant with medieval European attitudes toward the Muslim peoples of the East, which no doubt contributed to the long history of discord between them.
Kâmil Pasha’s translation immediately won the admiration of his peers. The Minister of Education appended a foreword in which he alerted readers to the fact that although the text they were about to read seemed to be a “story,” it was in fact a book of wisdom. A second edition featured a laudatory preface by another minister who opined with a touching optimism that, although literature consists of a Babel of different tongues, meaning is universal, and a unity exists beyond any cultural diversity—a principle that seems to be demonstrated, if anything, by the fact that this mid-nineteenth-century Muslim official’s words so closely echo Erich Auerbach’s belief in die gemeinsame Verbindung der Kulturen, the communal connectedness of cultures. Or at least that was Auerbach’s belief until he fled to Turkey, at which point, in the words of one expert on his work, the exiled scholar “drew a ring around his European self” and retreated into it, having apparently soured on the idea of connectedness, of there being hidden unities—a souring that, I have no doubt, led to his endorsement, in the work he would write during his Turkish exile, of the pessimistic narrative style.
Kâmil Pasha died in 1876, at the age of sixty-eight. A rich man by that time, thanks in part to the proceeds of his translation of Fénelon, he had spent his final years engaged in making admirable gestures of quiet generosity that adhered to the high principles endorsed by Minerve in Les aventures de Télémaque. One of the beneficiaries of the philanthropies for which Yûsuf Kâmil Pasha became renowned was Istanbul University, into whose possession the large house he had shared with his wife eventually passed, following (since buildings as well as epic heroes can have multiple identities, as we know) stints first as a school and then as an orphanage—the latter being an incarnation that, we cannot help feeling, would have pleased Kâmil Pasha, given his early years as a fatherless boy: a nice circularity. In 1909, the great house, now part of the university, became a science building and then, after a devastating fire in which many of the original owner’s books and papers were destroyed, was repurposed as the home of the literature faculty . . . This is as much as I was able to learn about the house of Fénelon’s Turkish translator, struggling as I did over the course of some weeks to decipher Google translations of documents I’d found online, or relying on acquaintances in Istanbul to summarize articles or excerpts from books. But given that I am an optimist—or, as the last of the Holocaust survivors I interviewed put it, “sentimental” in my thinking about the past and the stories we tell about it—I cannot help believing that, despite the loss of so many books in the fire, the Grand Vizier’s mansion was an ideal place for scholars to work, what with its fabulous views of the Sea of Marmara, shimmering like a mirage below, seeming to defy description: a difficulty that could well inspire someone to start wondering just how description works in the first place, how reality is mimicked in writing, how die Wirklichkeit becomes dargestellte.
This is where we will leave our stranger: staring out to sea, thinking no doubt of home—or at least, the home that he remembers. Let him sit there, at rest after his many peregrinations, exactly where chance or Fate (depending on how pessimistic or optimistic you are) left him in real life. He does not know, as we do, the history of the place he has come to; but then, he has ended up here after a long voyage, not only through space but, it is probably fair to say, through time: beginning with the sack of a great Anatolian city thirty-two centuries ago, then to the moment four hundred years later when the stories of the aftermath of that cataclysm begin to coalesce into a great poem, a poem so great that it is still being copied out many centuries in the future when, after another great Anatolian city is sacked, the copiers are scattered westward and the poem they keep copying so assiduously begins a new life in a new country; so great that two hundred years after that, after the sack of the city and the dispersal of the copiers, it inspires a wise and gentle priest of a religion Homer could not have conceived of to adapt and enhance this poem for the sake of a small child, a prince whose best potential self this new book is intended to mirror, although the prince’s book will be read, over time, by many, many hundreds of thousands of ordinary people in distant places unimaginable to the gentle priest as he labored on his book, one of those places being Istanbul, the City, which is home to a sensitive and subtle Turk who, two centuries after the priest dies in exile, takes the book about the poem about the sack that took place a hundred generations earlier and from that book builds a house that, during yet another great cataclysm, becomes a sanctuary for literature and, finally, a home for our stranger.
No wonder he is tired.
So we will leave our wanderer there and not bother him with all this history, the vast chain of events that has brought him back to the coastline where all the myths began, because, as we know, obscurity has its uses, too: can be as solid and productive, as concrete and real, as illumination is. We do not want to distract him. Now it is time for this exile to set upon his great work, a book that will begin with an account of a technique that is as old as Homer, known as ring composition; a wandering technique that yet always finds its way home, a technique which, with its sunny Mediterranean assumption that there is indeed a connection between all things, the German Jew Erich Auerbach—no doubt forgivably just now, given the awful and twisted route that has brought him here, the dark road which yet, as he will one day finally admit, made his book possible—considers a little too good to be true.