Le Projet RW
Sam :: Aug.31.2010 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »
The scenery was shifted
In its August issue, excellent online politics and arts magazine Guernica features a poem by Robert Walser, translated by Daniele Pantano. No composition date is provided for the poem, which is entitled “The Lucky One.” Go check it out.
I particularly appreciated the use of the Scandinavian word “Altan,” meaning terrace or balcony.
(You might also want to take a look at some of the fiction they’ve published over the past few years. In particular, I was pleased to discover that the June and July issues this year included excerpts from a novel by Mario Benedetti, an Uruguayan novelist and poet popular in the Spanish-speaking world who sadly passed away in May.)
Sam :: Aug.18.2010 :: Uncategorized :: 2 Comments »
RTW Conversation: Robert Walser
EVENT
Reading the World Conversation Series: Robert Walser and His “Microscripts”
Thursday, Sept. 23, 2010, 6:00 p.m.
Welles-Brown Room, Rush Rhees Library
University of Rochester
(free and open to the public)
Sam :: Aug.17.2010 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »
Answer to an Inquiry
Come this October, the cool kids over at Ugly Duckling Presse — I don’t know that they’re kids exactly; let’s call them, perhaps, a nice Walserian green — have a lovely object heading our way. It is, as shown above, an edition of Walser’s prose piece, “Answer to an Inquiry,” translated by Paul North and illustrated by the artist, Friese Undine. Here’s how it’s described on the UDP website:
The Swiss author Robert Walser’s Answer to an Inquiry is a short work written in the form of a letter. Walser assumes the voice of a great man of the theater responding to an aspiring actor’s request for advice. The young actor is given very simple, practical suggestions on how best to perform absolute anguish. This new edition, featuring a new translation accompanied by more than 40 drawings is a collaboration between translator Paul North and artist Friese Undine. Answer to an Inquiry should serve as a practical handbook for anyone wanting to convey deep suffering.
I love some of the illustrations, which you can see on Undine’s website. The text was previously translated into English by Christopher Middleton, and appeared under the title “Response to a Request” as the first piece in Selected Stories.
Will the text in the UDP book be interspersed, as it is on the Undine’s site, by quotations from the Book of Ezekial? We don’t know. To find out, order it here. While you’re at it, you might want to do as I do and add a copy of 0 to 9: the Complete Magazine to your cart as well.
Sam :: Aug.12.2010 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »
Walser
Walser
2009
Bronze, teak
5 x 24 x 12 cm
Artist: Lina Viste Grønli
(Thanks to Will for the tip on this.)
Sam :: Aug.10.2010 :: Visual Arts :: No Comments »
Boyers demurs
After all the praise, it’s sort of refreshing to read, in the July 22 edition of The New Republic, someone basically saying, “this Walser guy ain’t all he’s cracked up to be.” If you’ll pardon the pun.
Here are a few choice snippets:
“obtrusive awkwardness”
“modernist audacity of the mildest and least consequential sort”
“clumsy”
“he seems not to know what he is doing”
“flatulent poetic reveries”
“banalities”
“somber reflections [that] serve no apparent end”
“the works do not elaborate a coherent psychology”
“we cannot take seriously anything he says”
“satire [that] bears with it no conviction, no cleansing or corrective force”
“one can only wonder at the modest fascination the microscripts fitfully exert”
This isn’t exactly Hofmann-on-Zweig here — Robert Boyers’s review is not as bitter, or as well-written. Neither, frankly, is it as unfair. Late Walser can certainly be more puzzling and less satisfying than the early or mature work. The works written in microscript — not only those included in the Microscripts volume but also the The Robber — are typical, I think, of a “late style” like that theorized (via Adorno) by Edward Said. Such a style, according to Said, is characterized by “intransigence, difficulty and contradiction.” Reviewing Said’s book, John Updike remarks on Henry Green’s “late style” that it features “an air of corruption and defeat” the chimes with some of Boyer’s comments on Walser: “He seems not to know what he is doing in the modest excursion he has begun.”
Note that Boyers’s frustrated hunt for coherence, conviction, and motive in the Microscripts is paired with his conclusion that Walser’s art is a kind of “modest” and “inconsequential” modernism. I’m always puzzled when critics try to reconcile Walser’s works within the modernist movement. He has very little in common with modernist masters like Joyce. He has none of modernism’s cool distance. Likewise, despite his metafictional frame-breaking asides and self-cancelling sentences, he can’t really be thought of as a precursor to post-modernism either; he lacks the pervasive cynical irony. Perhaps, given his oddly resurgent popularity, he’s closer to today’s post-post-modernism. In this connection, I think of David Foster Wallace’s remarks in his essay, “E Unibus Pluram:Television and U.S. Fiction”:
The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness.
Anyhow, a dismissive piece like Boyers’s sometimes prompts more thought than one that’s positive.
One more thing that surprised me about Boyers’s piece: he doesn’t seem to be familiar with the prose pieces from Walser’s mature period. In addition to being arguably Walser’s best, most typical, and best-known works, stories like “The Walk” or “Kleist in Thun” seem to me to be the best point of comparison for the pieces in the Microscripts, rather than the novels.
Interested in your thoughts on this as well …
Sam :: Jul.31.2010 :: Microscripts, Review :: 7 Comments »
How small life is, how big nothingness
Number 18 of the UK poetry journal Erbacce featured three poems by Robert Walser, translated by Daniele Pantano. These poems will also appear in Oppressive Light: Selected Poems by Robert Walser, to be published by Black Lawrence Press in 2012.
A collection of Walser poems in English is certainly welcome. While 35 poems have been translated into English to date (see the bibliography), only one is easily accessible to readers in print. All but “Kennst Du sie?,” which was included in Christopher Middleton’s Speaking to the Rose, are in either out-of-print books or hard-to-find journals.
Here’s title piece from the upcoming collection:
*
Oppressive Light
Two trees stand in the snow,
the sky, tired of light,
moves home, and nothing else
but gloom close by.
And behind the trees
dark houses tower up.
Now you hear something said,
now dogs begin to bay.
And the dear, round lamp-
moon appears in the house.
And the light goes out again,
as a wound yawns open.
How small life is here
and how big nothingness.
The sky, tired of light,
has given everything to the snow.
The two trees bow
their heads to each other.
Clouds cross the world’s
silence in a circle dance.
*
This Erbacce volume is not available online, unfortunately. However, a few other Walser poems are available in English online: just today I discovered that some of Michael Hamburger’s translations are online at Exact Editions, which is a wonderful thing. (They include Hamburger’s translation of “Oppressive Light,” so you can contrast and compare.)
Another translation by Hamburger, “My Fiftieth Birthday,” fetched from oblivion by the artist James Tweedie, appeared on this blog in March 2008.
Sam :: Jul.25.2010 :: Poetry :: 6 Comments »
Branca de Neve
In the process of writing yesterday’s post I had the chance to further explore Branca de Neve, a film by the late Portuguese director João César Monteiro based on Robert Walser’s short play, Snow White. In the video above, Monteiro talks about the film.
Branca de neve, it turns out, is notable for consisting almost entirely of a black screen, accompanied by actors reading the text of Walser’s work. See an excerpt here.
Sam :: Jul.20.2010 :: Portuguese, Visual Arts :: 3 Comments »
The Many Deaths of Robert Walser
Jacob Silverman has followed his VQR essay on the Microscripts with a post on the VQR blog on the famous (or infamous) Walser death photographs.
You may recall J. M. Coetzee’s remarks on the photographs in his essay in the New York Review of Books back in 2000:
On Christmas Day, 1956, the police of the town of Herisau in eastern Switzerland were called out: children had stumbled upon the body of a man, frozen to death, in a snowy field. Arriving at the scene, the police took photographs and had the body removed.
The dead man was easily identified: Robert Walser, aged seventy-eight, missing from a local mental hospital. In his earlier years Walser had won something of a reputation, in Switzerland and even in Germany, as a writer. Some of his books were still in print; there had even been a biography of him published. During a quarter of a century in mental institutions, however, his own writing had dried up. Long country walks—like the one on which he had died—had been his main recreation.
The police photographs showed an old man in overcoat and boots lying sprawled in the snow, his eyes open, his jaw slack. These photographs have been widely (and shamelessly) reproduced in the critical literature on Walser that has burgeoned since the 1960s. Walser’s so-called madness, his lonely death, and the posthumously discovered cache of his secret writings were the pillars on which a legend of Walser as a scandalously neglected genius was erected.
I share Coetzee’s discomfort with the way these photographs have been circulated, but many artists have found in them a compelling subject. In his blog posts, Silverman shares a list of some of the works inspired by the photos. I added a few others in the comment thread to his post. The most respectful is probably the imaginative restaging in this little film.
The photographs have also been affectingly described “a strange realization of the ‘death of the author’ so central to postmodern literary criticism.”
Sam :: Jul.19.2010 :: Visual Arts :: No Comments »
Microscripts Exhibit
From the New Directions newsletter today, a little news about the microscripts exhibition in New York this fall.
Gearing up for the Microscripts Exhibit
Robert Walser’s Microscripts continues to be a huge hit with readers and reviewers as well as the darling of many independent bookstores. The Christine Burgin Gallery, which co-published the Microscripts with New Directions, will be exhibiting the actual scripts this autumn. There will also be some incredible surprises to accompany this fantastic show — more details to come in the near future.
I’ll let you know when I get the exact dates.
Sam :: Jul.13.2010 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »
