sontag/sebald

ついでに。最近、文学こそが重要だと改めて思っていた矢先に出会い、熱狂しながら読んでいるＷ・Ｇ・ゼーバルトについてのソンタグの言葉。本物の文学を書けた現代では希な存在だったと思われるゼーバルトをはやばやと失ったことの大きさを嘆いている。

The loss feels unbearable. Premature death has brutally imposed a retroactive shape on Max Sebald's life and work, turning early or middle things into last things. Perhaps in the future it may come to seem inevitable that the elegiac intensities inscribed by Sebald in literature do not result in a large body of work. That, instead, we have the imperishable gift of just a few books written once he found the voice in which to deliver his commanding, exquisite prose arias. But, for the moment, the loss simply feels...devastating. Unacceptable. Difficult to take in. He had an exemplary sense of vocation, full of scruples and self-doubts. The work is recklessly literary and inspired by a thrilling variety of models. These writers--from Adalbert Stifter and Jean Henri Fabre to Virginia Woolf and Thomas Bernhard--illustrate Sebald's connection to several kinds of moral seriousness, luminousness of description, and purity of motive. He was one who demonstrates that literature can be, literally, indispensable. He was one by whom literature continues to live.