Wandering with Robert Walser

A last word on the Walser event from Chad Post:

The Robert Walser event that afternoon though was honestly the best PEN World Voices event I’ve ever been to. It was simple, intelligent, work-based, and populated with the perfect participants and audience. Started with Michel Kruger talking a bit about Walser’s life and work, his influence on Kafka, his micrographs. Then the wonderful Susan Bernofsky talked a little about the Walser translations she’s done, and read from both The Assistant and the forthcoming The Tanners. Deborah Eisenberg then read a few sections from the remarkable Jakob Von Gunten (which would make an awesome Lost book), and was followed by Jeffrey Eugenides brilliant reading of “Trousers.” (Which I wish I could link to via Google Books. . . It’s part of the Selected Stories that NYRB did a few years back, and it worth every penny.) Wayne Kostenbaum also read a few of the really funny short pieces. (I’ve mainly read the novels, but based on this event, it seems to me that Walser really excels in this short form. Sharp, constructively-destructive, incredibly hilarious.)

Great account. As I (thought I) mentioned in the comment thread to Chad’s post, using the “Search Inside the Book” feature on Amazon you can read the full text of Walser’s prose piece, “Trousers,” which is every bit as delightful as Post suggests, right down to its single-word conclusion:

“This is the quintessence and consequence of trousers. Frightful!”

Sam :: May.06.2008 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

Garth Risk Hallberg of The Millions provides more details from the Walser event last night:

Edwin Frank, the editorial director of NYRB Classics, introduced the readers - plus the German novelist Michel Krüger - and then Krüger took over. The author, most recently, of The Executor, Krüger is to German publishing roughly what George Plimpton was to American letters (or would have been, if Plimpton had run Random House in addition to his other activities)…and it was easy to see why. Working entirely without notes, in limpid English, he delivered a rigorous yet accessible introduction to Walser’s life and work.

Then Bernofsky, who has translated Walser’s novels for New Directions, read excerpts from The Assistant and the forthcoming The Tanners. Her delivery was crisp, and I was impressed by the way her translations captured the delicacy (to borrow one of Walser’s favorite terms) of his prose. The second excerpt was a bit long for my taste, but toward the end, it opened out into a radiant vision of the urban everyday, in which I caught a glimpse of a familiar-feeling, yet completely original, sensibility.

Read more here.

Sam :: May.04.2008 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

I Am Dali kindly reports from the scene of tonight’s Tribute to Robert Walser in New York:

At 4:15 the event started off with the explanation by a Master of Ceremonies that the noticeably empty chair on the stage represented the writers of the world who have no voice, specifically a few dozen writers and journalists who have been railroaded into political prisons in China. Michael KRUGER gave a quick background about Walser and his obscurity relative to Mann, Brecht, and Gottfried Benn who all died around the same time as Walser but whom were memorialized differently, which is to say actually memorialized at all. Specifically he pointed out how each was rememberified as a particular monolithic figure: “Mann, ‘THE’ German writer, even though he never went back to live in Germany; Brecht, the artist as Activist; and Benn […] the pure artist, or something along those lines.” (I’m paraphrasing.) Kruger presided as the unofficial president of the panel because of his careful speaking style combined with his obvious wealth of insider’s information from the German literary sphere. He was given deferential glances when other panelists weren’t confident in their speculations. Susan BERNOFSKY read a few pages from near the start of The Assistant, then read a bunch of pages from her unedited “The Tanners” manuscript. Deborah EISENBERG gave a superb voice to a few passages from Jakob Von Gunten, including the death of the Fraulein. That one really had the crowd of course, not least of all me, I wish I had a handkerchief. As it was I had nothing and couldn’t even blow my personal nose. Jeffrey EUGENIDES read Trousers to the audience, a choice that certainly would have had my stamp of approval if anybody had given me any authority. He gave it a very slow but perfectly cheeky voice, with good comedic timing. Wayne Koestenbaum explained his 6 reasons for loving Robert Walser (all pretty accurate), and then he read “The Job Application” in a sly slippery voice, which may have been his own voice, but which came off perfectly. He also read the The (non?)Robber passage, from Speaking to the Rose, and [Walser’s] Dostoevsky’s Idiot.

I noticed that I say “all pretty accurate” as if I am the supreme allied commander of understanding Walser.

I suddenly can’t remember if Kruger might have read a selection of Walser, too.

The Q&A session:

The influence on Kafka was discussed with the usual citations, and a crowd member pointed out a perceived difference between Kafka’s “nightmarish” visions of society/bureaucracy and Walser’s “more..enchantment” with it. Walser’s striking shifts of tone were commented upon. An audience member asked if the hard-to-pin-down Walserian tone was “for show” or “…nutty”, and decided it was for show. Bernofsky mentioned that there’s several volumes worth of short pieces that aren’t in English yet. I think an American authoress was mentioned by name as someone who arguably does something akin to Walser but I didn’t catch the name. Thomas Bernhardt got mentioned in context of who the [excuses for] successors to Walser are. Emily Dickinson’s fluctuations between minutiae and grand epic themes got mentioned– especially the “Master’s letters.”

I was about to ask if any of the panelists knew of any explicit connection between Walser and Ulrich Braker, who is by a long-shot the only author I know of (except Kafka obviously) who has much of anything in common with Walser stylistically, but the session was over and the museum was closing. That was when I ran away.

Sam :: May.03.2008 :: Uncategorized :: 2 Comments »

Perhaps you missed this little item at the end of the May newsletter from Words Without Borders:

The 2008 Words Without Borders / Reading the World book club series launches this June with Susan Bernofsky’s much-heralded new translation of Robert Walser’s The Assistant. Sam “The Golden Rule” Jones is at the helm for our first installment and participants will include Tom Whalen, Mark Harman and Susan Bernofsky, as well as several other prominent authors, artists, translators and Walser scholars. Save the date—this June is Walser month at the WWB Book Club, and we hope you’ll all join in the discussion! Visit the WWB Book Club…

Gotta say the people at WWB have been fantastic to work with. I’m really looking forward to this event.

Sam :: May.02.2008 :: Uncategorized :: 3 Comments »

Somebody embroidered the doily. Somebody waters the plant, or oils it, maybe. Somebody arranges the rows of cans so that they softly say: ESSO–SO–SO–SO.

And Sara over at NYRB Classics loves us all.

Which is my roundabout way of saying that Sara informed us yesterday about secret discounted tickets to the Walser event in New York tomorrow. Get in for $10 rather than $15. Pick up the secret code here. Enter that code when you purchase tickets here.

Sam :: May.02.2008 :: Uncategorized :: 3 Comments »

From the Winter 2008 Issue of the Sewanee Review, Mark Harman, editor of the wonderful 1985 volume Robert Walser Rediscovered, reviews Speaking to the Rose: Writings 1912-1932:

Walser was a one-man avant garde, and in the late twenties the increasing rejection of his work forced him to articulate the aesthetics underpinning his high jinks. In a revealing piece entitled “My Endeavors” (1928-29), he describes his short pieces as experiments, which, though perhaps “a bit comical to deadly earnest people,” he conducts in the hopes of producing in the language an “unknown livingness, the arousal of which is a joy.” In creating this verbal music he relies on intuitive connections comparable to those that William James, who of course coined the term stream of consciousness, describes in “The World of Pure Experience”: “experience itself, taken at large, can grow by its edges.” Though Walser’s aesthetic is inimitably homespun, it does bring to mind that of English-language practitioners of stream of consciousness, writers such as Virginia Woolf or even Joyce.

I enjoyed seeing this 2005 volume of Walser prose, selected and translated by Christopher Middleton, get some of the attention it deserves. It certainly is mandatory reading for Walser admirers, not least for the wonderful introduction, microscript images, bibliography, footnotes, and other elements that mark this book a labor of great love and respect.

I’ve had this book for three years and intentionally never read it front to back, mostly for the delight of extending my “discovery” of individual items in this trove of previously untranslated works. In the paragraph above, Harman alerted me to “My Endeavors,” which had previously escaped my notice, and particularly to a line that I first saw in Robert Calasso’s essay collection The Forty Nine Steps, from the which the “unknown livingness” phrase is drawn. Here’s the complete sentence from Middleton’s translation:

If I sometimes wrote at a venture, on impulse, it looked a bit comical to deadly earnest people; but I was experimenting with language, hoping that it contains an unknown livingness, the arousal of which is a joy.

I’ve misplaced those pages from Calasso, but I recall that the translation there was something like this:

… I was experimenting with language in the hopes it contained a hidden liveliness which it would be a joy to awaken.

Anyhow, this struck me as the best brief account of Walser’s aesthetic, and the best way too to describe what it’s like to read him.

(Thanks to JT for the tip on this article and to Dave for text, which isn’t available online.)

Sam :: Apr.24.2008 :: Uncategorized :: 3 Comments »

From the February 2008 issue of Choice, a publication of the American Library Association, a review of The Assistant by Michael Kaspar of Amherst College:

It has taken a while, but the reputation of the quirky and reclusive Swiss author Robert Walser (1878-1956) as one of modern literature’s preeminent stylists is finally secure on this side of the Atlantic, as it has been on the other for decades. Of Walser’s four surviving novels, Jakob von Gunten (1909) was translated by Christopher Middleton in 1969; The Robber (unpublished in the author’s lifetime) came out in a translation (also by Bernofsky) in 2000. Now The Assistant (1908, and the second in order of writing) is available in English. The novel tells the story of a clerk (who bears Walser’s mother’s maiden name) and his several months’ employment in the office and household of a sleazy inventor. Walser’s usual stew of irony and extreme modesty is here seasoned with some explicit class-consciousness, which positions him in his time and place more directly than his other novels do. Though the writing may be less radical than in the other novels–and rarely as breathtaking as it regularly is in his short prose, his signature genre–it is still distinctively charming and alarming in equal measure. Bernofsky (Sarah Lawrence College) translates Walser beautifully and provides an informative afterword. Summing Up: Essential. All readers, all levels.

This is perceptive - “charming and alarming” is good - but “sleazy inventor” misses the essence of our flawed friend Tobler. Thanks for Smyth for passing this along.

Sam :: Apr.24.2008 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

Hey, check out this event happening May 3 in New York: “A Tribute to Robert Walser.”
I won’t be able to make it, but I authorize you to attend on my behalf.

(Thanks to Dave Lull for the tip.)

Sam :: Mar.25.2008 :: Uncategorized :: 3 Comments »

In Saturday’s Times, Melissa Katsoulis considers “three new literary homages to the wage slave,” among them our The Assistant:

Robert Walser’s semi-autobiographical The Assistant is not strictly new, having been first published in 1907, but Susan Bernofsky’s translation introduces English readers to this remarkable work of Swiss-German modernism. Walser was a troubled man who, after writing several gritty novels, spent decades in an asylum, writing nothing. “I’m not here to write, I’m here to be mad,” he told one visitor.

The Assistant tells of a year in the life of Marti, a frustrated office clerk who constantly battles with the desire to say insulting things to his boss, an irascible inventor in a small country town. Our hero’s working day, which includes frequent stops for coffee and pastries in the garden and glorious lake-side rambles to the post office, may seem idyllic to today’s deskbound reader, but his anxieties are universal. Will his boss be in a foul mood? When will he get paid? Eventually, after a year whose changing seasons are gloriously described, Marti quits, deciding that when you hate a job so much you start drinking at lunchtime, it’s better the devil you don’t know.

A troubled man and his gritty novels — sounds like Charles Bukowski.

For some reason I’m inordinately amused by the idea of Bukowski (think Factotum) as a (really) peculiar instance of the Walser type …

Sam :: Mar.25.2008 :: Uncategorized :: 4 Comments »

A bounty of Michael Hamburger’s work on Walser has come my way recently.

First was Dali’s kind research on Hamburger’s 1961 essay on Walser; certainly, as I’ve mentioned before, one of the best essays on Walser ever written.

Next was delivered to my door, courtesy of my friend and WWRW co-founder Smyth, an original hardcover copy of Hamburger’s 1965 essay collection, From Prophecy to Exorcism, which includes a longer version of the TLS essay.

Finally came a tip from long-time Walser reader James Tweedie, who alerted me to the most recent issue of Modern Poetry in Translation, which includes twelve Walser poems never before published in English, all translated by Hamburger not long before his passing last June.

Perhaps my favorite item is the following, also via Jim. The poem has been on my bibliography for a while, but I hadn’t seen a copy. Here it is, as it appeared in German Poetry, 1910-1975: An Anthology in 1981.

---

My Fiftieth Birthday
I was born in April in a small town
With charming surroundings, where I
Went to school; vicar and schoolmaster
Were partly satisfied with me. In due course
I nicely got into a bank to learn the trade,
After which I saw cities like Basel, Stuttgart
And Zurich. Here I made the acquaintance
Of a most kind and amiable woman
Who resided now in the town, now in the country,
According to which seemed expedient to her,
And who drew my attention to
Heinrich Heine, whom probably I did not
Fully appreciate until much later.
The woman’s name was one that only I
Could divulge: but why should I do so
When discretion makes me happy? Of positions
In businesses I held a good many.
With alacrity, out of an impulse entirely
My own, I left one of these to be able to afford
And fill a new one; on the side
I wrote poems in the industrial sector
That later appeared, perhaps too lavishly,
In the publishing firm Bruno Cassirer.
For about seven years I then lived
In Berlin as a hardworking prose writer
And, when those gentlemen the publishers were
No longer willing to grant an advance, returned
To Switzerland, which many people love
For its beautiful mountains, there
To persist unaggrieved in poetic efforts.
Now, to judge by a few gray hairs,
I have reached the age of fifty years.

(1928)

Sam :: Mar.22.2008 :: Uncategorized :: 2 Comments »