Unrecounted
San Francisco: New Directions, 2004.
First Edition. Hardcover.
33 poems by W. G. Sebald. 33 lithographs by Jan Peter Tripp. Essays by W. G. Sebald & Andrea Kohler & two additional poems by Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Translated, with a note, by Michael Hamburger.
Publisher’s description:
Unrecounted combines thirty-three of what W. G. Sebald called his "micropoems"--miniatures as unclassifiable as all of his works--with thirty-three by one of his oldest friends, the acclaimed artist Jan Peter Tripp.
The lithographs portray, with stunning precision, pairs of eyes--the eyes of Beckett, Borges, Proust Jasper Johns, Francis Bacon, Tripp, Sebald, Sebald's dog Maurice. The poems are anti-narrative, epiphanic, and brief as haiku. What the author calls "time lost, the pain of remembering, and the figure of death" here find a small home. The art and poems do not explain one another, but rather engage in a kind of dialogue. "The longer I look at the pictures of Jan Peter Tripp," Sebald comments in his essay, "the better I understand that behind the illusions of the surface, a dread-inspiring depth is concealed. It is the metaphysical lining of reality, so to speak."
Item #902649ISBN: 0811215962
6-3/8 x 10-1/4", dark gray cloth, black endpapers, 109pp, illustrated with 33 lithographs.
A bit of light bumping to upper corner front board, else fine in rubbed dust wrapper with a bit of light crimping to edges, in protective mylar.
Price: $30.00