Smyth writes: 

It’s been five years since W.G. Sebald died. Many things to many people, he is to Smyth the most moving reader of Walser, even more so than Smyth’s Patron’s Patron Saint’s Saint, Seelig, whose book Sebald also read with wonder (In English, see the prescient preface to A Natural History of Destruction). In a masterful assessment of Sebald’s literal forefathers in the present Bookforum, Mark M. Anderson reminds us that Sebald’s masterpiece, “Le promeneur solitaire”, awaits its homemade remaker (Translator Jones, are you any taker?):

In Sebald’s last book of highly personal essays, the still untranslated Logis in einem Landhaus (Lodging in a Country House, 1998), where his life-into-literature tendency is in full swing, Sebald describes his grandfather as a kind of literary guide, the person who in language and sensibility opened the door to nineteenth-century regional writers from the “deep South” like Johann Peter Hebel, Gottfried Keller, and Adalbert Stifter. And in his essay about the Swiss writer Robert Walser, he dwells at length on the similarities between him and his own grandfather in physical appearance, dress, and daily habits; they both died in 1956, Egelhofer following a late snowfall in April, Walser during an evening walk on Christmas Day. “Perhaps for this reason, when I think back to my grandfather’s death (which I have never gotten over), I still see him lying on the horned sled on which they put Walser’s body . . . and brought him back to the asylum.”

And now, the first (annual?) Robert Walser commemerative (dead?) giveaway: the fiftieth (or first, whichever comes) reader who can tell us all whence Sebald takes the title for his Walser essay (”Le promeneur solitaire”) and the book where it’s buried (Logis in einem Landhaus), will take home a souvenir from the city which ties the two together. If fifty readers can name the city, wäre die Welt besser.

With great equanimity, Jones replies to Smyth. 

What late?  Mach nichts, as the Old Man used to say.  The calendar isn’t our master.  This blog is a duty-free zone.  No work performed under obligation is welcome here.

Speaking of the Old Man, I painted the walls of my office this weekend, and in the process of moving the bookshelves I discovered something I must have hidden away: a portfolio of color photographs by Kurt Peter Karfeld, Aus den Deutschen Alpen, published by Bruckmann Verlag in the 1940s.  Capt. P. A. Jones, aka the Old Man, received these as a gift while he was working in the military government after the war. 

Funnily enough, these photographs (I uploaded a few more at Flickr) were taken only a couple hundred miles from where Walser and Seelig’s walks took place, and probably show a landscape not too different from what Robert and Carl saw, albeit in the foothills of the German Alps rather than the Swiss.

Smyth berates Jones

Twas seven days by my count, Samuel “Ne’er-do-well” Milton, but nevertheless well writ. More like writ small, if Robert Otto will. (Allow it.) But who am I to allow, and whom, and am I allowed to let my own rate escape unbelated? For as six is aught and I am two days late, December 8 is the day of The (the) Great and yesterday was the day of a namesake’s name’s sake, and today will be for the sake of the best Emily (December 1) of Amherst of them all. All this is to say, Chapter II is on the way (December 25).

Jones responds to Smyth:

Done with chapter one. At this rate — one chapter every 6 days — I think I was perhaps a little optimistic when I targeted Christmas as a completion date for translating Seelig’s book. Next Christmas, maybe. This Christmas, mmm — not so much.

The good news is that I am speeding up a bit as I get into my routine. When I started I could spend a whole evening on a single sentence. Now I’m up to a paragraph or two.

Here’s the drill: I laboriously translate word-by-word using Cassell’s. (Thinking all the while of Nabokov’s Pnin: “The 1954 Fall term had begun… Again in the margins of library books earnest freshmen inscribed such helpful glosses as ‘Description of nature’, or ‘Irony’; and in a pretty edition of Mallarmé’s poems an especially able scholiast had already underlined in violet ink the difficult word oiseaux and scrawled above it ‘birds’.”) Then I put that down and translate the same paragraph, with marginally less difficulty, from Kriess’s French version. Then I use the translation from the French to test the sense of my translation from the German. Then I do about a thousand searches here and here to refine my German translation. As my brother Pat often says after we conclude some particularly fraught endeavor: nothin’ to it.

So you discovered Walser via the annual International Books of the Year issue, huh? That’s my favorite issue of the TLS, along with the one that includes the winners of the TLS’s annual poetry competition. I love that rag, as you know. I’ve long considered writing a post called “How to Read the TLS,” which would reveal secrets I’ve discovered over the course of my 24-year acquaintance with that newspaper. (By the way, editor Stothard stopped by the other day to remind us that Caesar never called his civil war a Civil War either. Excellent point.)I don’t remember the citation by Ashbery that led you to Walser. I do recall seeing an Ashbery poem around that time that included some oblique Walser references. I should really track that down. Only a Walserian would have noticed. It was a secret-handshake kind of poem.

Silver Rule Smyth thanks Golden Rule Jones:

For some years now I had given up on my conviction that I first learned of Walser from John Ashbery in the TLS Int’l Books of the Year. My dad, professor of Classics turned Kindergarten teacher, has been collecting the annual issue since (well, it turns out, with the exception of) its inception. In 2003, as Suhrkamp celebrated Walser’s 125th birthday and I began reading him in earnest, having acquired (at a library sale and a quarter apiece) their 20 volume edition of his Collected Works, I searched without avail in dad’s archive. Until yesterday I thought I’d made the whole thing up. Thanks to GRJ and the Flow Chart Foundation (see the poetry link in the last post) a little piece of my mind was restored.

Here, thanks to my dad’s archive (since restored), is a part of the piece:

Those familiar with the work of the Swiss-German writer Robert Walser (1878-1956), who led a life of obscurity but whose admirers included Kafka, Hesse, Musil and Walter Benjamin, won’t need to be prompted to procure his 1925 novel, The Robber, translated by Susan Bernofsky (University of Nebraska Press). It is one of his many posthumously discovered ‘microtexts’, written, we are told, ‘in a script that varied in height from one to two millimeters, executed with an often none-too-sharp pencil’…

John Ashbery, TLS “International Books of the Year” (December 1, 2000).