Author(s): W.G. Sebald & Jan Peter Tripp (tr Michael Hamburger)

Poetry

For a number of years until his death in 2001, W. G. Sebald and the German artist Jan Peter Tripp exchanged poems and lithographs. Unrecounted is the result of this long artistic friendship - a creative dialogue inspired by shared concerns. Sebald's words and Tripp's images speak of moments salvaged from time passing, of our eyes bearing witness, and of memory and remembrance. And to quote the critic Andrea Kohler: 'this poem of gazes has become a memorial, a bequeathal. If Sebald never tired of tracing the destinations of his soul-mates among writers, outsiders and emigrants in his sentences endlessly meandering through space and time, this legacy of his has the density of epitaphs.' W.G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgau, Germany in 1944. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland and Manchester. In 1966 he took up a position as an assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester, and settled permanently in England in 1970. He was Professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia, and the author of Austerlitz; The Emmigrants, which won a series of major awards, including the Berlin Literature Prize, the Heinrich Boll Prize, the Heinrich Heine Prize and the Joseph Breitbach Prize; The Rings of Saturn; and Vertigo. W.G. Sebald wrote in his native tongue, German, and worked closely with his translator, Anthea Bell, to translate his work into English. He died in December 2001.