W.G.
Sebald.
From, “And If
I Remained
by the Outermost
sea.” In, After
Nature. New
York, 2002.
George
Wilhelm Steller published De Bestiis Marinis ("The Beasts of the Sea")
in St. Petersburg in 1751.
It was originally written in Latin. The first English
translation appeared in an appendix to The Fur Seals and Fur-Seal
Islands of the North Pacific Ocean. D.S. Jordan, Editor. Washington
D.C.,
1899.
"No
one who has studied various lands doubts
that the vast ocean contains many animals which today
are unknown, and that there are very many regions
in the ocean where the curious and venturesome inquiries
of Europeans have not yet penetrated; and so no one has been
able to examine their contents. Thus it stands with the animals
of the sea as compared with the animals of the land." Beginning of, De
Bestiis Marinis.
Manuscripts
written at the end of his life, / on an island in
the glacial sea, / with scratching goose-quill
in bilious ink, / lists of two hundred and eleven / different plants, tales
of white ravens, / as the animals
become extinct, Mount St. Helens fumes, remaking her face as she feels the
disruptions around her: Earth’s homeostasis addressing the self-destructive
human assault on unknown cormorants and sea-cows, /
gathered into the dust / of an endless
inventory, /
his zoological masterpiece, De
Bestiis Marinis, / travel chart for hunters, /
blueprint for the counting of pelts / no, not steep enough /was the
north.
