Reading Sebald in English, and English vs. German syntax

In response to a friend of mine who asked whether reading W.G. Sebald in German was very different from reading him in English, and whether I thought something important was lost in translation:

Sebald in English is magnificent because the writing is magnificent. Sebald is a very at-the-surface writer because he wants you to look at things you already see. So he used a style that sort of coaxes you into a sense of "I already mostly know what this is all about." Then he gives you clues that what is at the surface is misleading, that what you can see means something else and that you are missing what's essential. And so he gives you another version, and another angle, and another clue, and another and another (making it a good bet to read the book again). He does this in a way that is not showy; it is humble and disarming and then finally all the more forceful for it. So, yeah, you can get most of that in English without worrying too much about what's missing. 

It's kind of funny to think about what's lost in translation since the major themes (at least in Die Ausgewanderten, which I read in English; I haven't read any of his other books) all keep coming back to what's lost. I think Sebald himself would have been totally at peace with readers accessing his German in English; he lived in England, after all, and through that he won a painful wisdom towards Germany that he lamented insiders' (Germans') not having. So we're already disjointed and disconnected, even precisely in the arenas where we think there's continuity. Might as well add language to the list.

I found this blogger who shows a bit of German beside the English, to good effect. Having read the book in English I too wondered what the German is like. The blogger's choice quotes lead me to believe it's what I would call "high lucid" -- neither terse nor turgid, neither blunt nor baroque. German being German, though, the syntax is almost inevitably simpler in English than in the original: 

"Obgleich ich während meines mehrtägigen Aufenthalts in Kissingen und in dem von seinem einstmaligen Charakter nicht das geringste mehr verratenden Steinach zur Genüge beschäftigt gewesen bin mit meinen Nachforschungen und meiner wie immer nur mühevoll vorangehenden Schreibarbeit, spürte ich doch in zunehmendem Maß, daß die rings mich umgebende Geistesverarmung und Erinnerungslosigkeit der Deutschen, das Geschick, mit dem man alles bereinigt hatte, mir Kopf und Nerven anzugreifen begann." (pp.332/3)

If you want a quick German lesson, I'll translate that the same way Mark Twain would have in order to show you the wobbly Russian doll of in-itself-embedded German syntax:

"Although I during my multi-day stay in Kissingen and in the of-its-former-character-no-longer-in-the-slightest-way-revealing city of Steinach sufficiently was occupied with my research and my as always only painstakingly progressing writing, I still felt to an increasing degree that the on-all-sides-surrounding-me impoverishment of the mind and lack of memory of the German people, the talent with which they had cleansed it all, was beginning to grind on my mind and nerves."   

In real English, this would read more like:

"Although, during my stay of several days in Kissingen and in Steinach, which revealed not the slightest hint of its former character, I was satisfactorily engaged with my research and my writing, which, as always, was progressing only with great difficulty, I increasingly felt that the surrounding intellectual poverty and inability to remember of the German people, the skill with which everything had been whitewashed, was beginning to play on my nerves." (Tony Malone, I very much like your translation, think you got it right.)

  

I think it's pretty phenomenal no matter what language it's in, but as you can see -- and this is true even beyond the native-speaker ease that I have with English over German -- English has this strange but flexible parataxis that lets us build big sentences in which the bigness is offset, with the main points shining through. In German, it's more of a long string, and the traffic cones of commas and relative pronouns are secondary to the grammar, so it's even more of a logic puzzle. 

By the way, German hypotaxis is on its decline; the Germans are forgetting how to speak German, which is to say they are ceasing to use German in a way that the language has been used for centuries in high discourse. I've spoken to more than a few older Germans who see a simplification in today's German, with sentence structure more closely matching that of English than that of written German of earlier centuries. I'd even venture to say that Sebald's style -- readable and direct, but still quite intricate, elegant -- was an homage to the German writers of yore whom he admired. I haven't read A Place in the Country but it looks like he favored neglected, difficult solitary types like Morike and Robert Walser. He wasn't reactionary and he wouldn't write (merely) to confound. But he wanted a dwindling audience to connect their modern worlds with a neglected or shunned intellectual/spiritual inheritance, and his language fit that bill.