SEBALD, W.G.; Michael HULSE (translator). The Rings of Saturn.

Sebald Between Past and Present

SEBALD, W.G.; Michael HULSE (translator). The Rings of Saturn. London: The Harvill Press. 1998.

8vo. Original green card wrappers lettered in black; pp. [8], 296; tail-edge of textblock a little dusty, wrappers with a few shallow creases; a very good copy.

Scarce uncorrected proof copy of the first UK edition of Sebald’s most celebrated work.

The Rings of Saturn, originally published in German as Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine englische Wallfahrt in 1995, was the third of Sebald’s four novels, and second to appear in English. Structured around a semi-autobiographical account of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia (Sebald lived and taught in the region for three decades), it is the most ‘English’ of the author’s works. An uncanny pastoral, its capacious digressions encompass the imperial and colonial exploitations witnessed and recorded by Joseph Conrad and Roger Casement, silkworm cultivation, nimble accounts of Swinburne and Edward FitzGerald, and an exquisite meditation on Thomas Browne’s quincunxes.

Sebald’s labyrinthine periods, translated by Michael Hulse (in close consultation with the author), move seamlessly between past and present, human and natural worlds, local and global, living and dead, to form something at once strange, beautiful, and more than the sum of its parts. As with all the author’s prose narratives, the text is interspersed with numerous black-and-white images, illuminating and unsettling the work’s progress.

SKU: 2121763