Wandering with Robert Walser

An excerpt from The Tanners, now online at the Brooklyn Rail:

I was liking my dream at the beginning, but now I see it’s starting to degenerate, and this doesn’t suit Hedwig at all; for Hedwig is gentle, and when she suffers, she suffers in a more beautiful, silent way. She’d no doubt just laugh at my man there in his shaggy beard if he attempted such insolence. The landscape I sketched out was quite nice all the same, but only because it was mostly borrowed from the countryside that surrounds me. One should never lose the natural ground beneath one’s feet while dreaming, especially about people, for otherwise one soon arrives at the point of making one’s characters utter words like: ‘Go, kill yourself.’

Sam :: May.07.2009 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

Assorted items of interest, some of which I gleaned from my shoulder-rubbing with the in-crowd last week in New York:

The Tanners, scheduled for a June 23 release, has been delayed until August. The Sebald introduction apparently isn’t ready yet.

The parallel edition (microscripts + English translations) of Walser prose pieces being produced by the Christine Burgin Gallery is scheduled for Spring 2010. If I remember correctly, the publication will coincide with an exhibition at the gallery.

The Brothers Quay mentioned Walser in a Boston Globe interview last week: “It was a much more sophisticated language which had to be really read,” he says. “It made us feel that you could really multi-layer a realm, and it’s not comedy, it’s not science fiction: It shifts. You read Walser or you read Schulz, and you realize it’s a deep language, and you just try to approximate it [in film] with the same depth and density that you see in their work.”

Class is in session at the Market Snodsbury Grammar School, and the subject is Robert Walser. Among other things, headmaster Thomas shares some enticing images from Robert Walser: Sein Leben in Bildern und Texten (Robert Walser: His Life in Pictures and Texts), recently published in German. Thomas is certainly a FOW extraordinaire, previously unknown to me. I’ll add him to the list.

Sam :: May.05.2009 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

Question: What’s in this truck, hurrying through Bern, Switzerland, in the early morning hours of Monday, April 27?

You got it in one guess: it’s the contents of the Robert Walser Archive, being relocated from Zurich to Bern in preparation for the September opening of the new Robert Walser Center. Why in secrecy? Because of the precious cargo, of course.

According to this article in yesterday’s Bieler Tagblatt, the center will permit “Walser lovers and researchers to consult all the manuscripts of Robert Walser and Carl Seelig in digital form.”

Go to the article and click on the arrows beneath the truck photo — you will see several more photos, including the containers holding the “famous Walser ‘Mikgrogramme’.”

I first mentioned this move back in 2007.

I have fond memories of the Zurich archive from my visit there back in 1996. Bernhard Echte was there and he was very gracious. He gave me a few photocopied pages of microscript. Don’t think I’ve ever written about that visit; I should do that. I did write about visiting the nearby Joyce Archive in the same trip to Zurich.

ADDITION 5/5: English-language version of the article is here.

Sam :: Apr.28.2009 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

Unlike last year, there are no Walser-themed events at the upcoming PEN World Voices Festival in New York. But happily, several “friends of Walser” (FOW) will be in attendance, including Walser translators Susan Bernofsky and Mark Harman, and Walser admirers and critics Enrique Vila-Matas and Jonathan Taylor.

An event at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 30, is a two-fer, featuring both Harman and Taylor, and throwing in Louis Begley, Norbert Gstrein, Lynne Tillman, and Colm Tóibín to boot. That’s quite the throw-in. Taylor moderates. Here’s the description:

Kafka in Amerika
“Of Franz Kafka’s three uncompleted novels, Amerika—or, as he envisioned the title, The Missing Person—is likely the least read, and often thought of as the least characteristic. Mark Harman’s new English translation, Amerika: The Missing Person, is an opportunity to revisit this book and discover how it can deepen our understanding of Kafka. For the book’s main character, Karl Rossmann, the ultramodern America was a place of banishment as well as of possible refuge. Karl’s troubled journey through a land of “restless motion, and unrest borne from the restless element to helpless men and their works,” emerges as a supreme example of Kafka’s reimagination of the world.” With Louis Begley, Norbert Gstrein, Mark Harman, Lynne Tillman, and Colm Tóibín; moderated by Jonathan Taylor.

Looks like I’ll be in New York on Wed-Thu of that week, so I’m hoping to catch this and a few other sessions.

Sam :: Apr.07.2009 :: Uncategorized :: 4 Comments »

A tip of the Alpine Hat in Velour Fur Felt (discontinued) to @NewDirections for letting us know about this segment on PRI this morning:

Award-winning translator Susan Bernofsky talks to World Books Editor Bill Marx about “The Tanners,” an early work of fiction by the mysterious Swiss writer Robert Walser, who was admired by J. M. Coetzee, Franz Kafka, and W. G. Sebald. She also reads an excerpt from her translation, the first in English, of the 1907 novel. Download the latest podcast

Starts with a nice nod to Middleton.

Sam :: Mar.03.2009 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

Imagine my surprise to discover there was a Robert Walser event in New York tonight. I just happened to visit the archive site tonight and saw this announcement. Fortunately, the same program’s on tap in Boston on Friday, with the addition of a reading by novelist Hansjörg Schertenleib. Here are the details:

In BOSTON at
Consulate of Switzerland, swissnex Boston
420 Broadway (corner Ellery St./Broadway)
Cambridge, MA 02138
(617) 876 30 76
RSVP to emil@swissnexboston.org
Friday, February 27, 6:00pm

An evening combining the Visual Book program by Walo Deuber with the Reading of author Hansjörg Schertenleib from his own works; Q&A, followed by a reception offered by the Swiss consulate and the swissnex-team. A special program of the NEMLA 2009 conference.

Er, der Hut, sitzt auf ihm, dem Kopf. Robert Walser-Geschichten
Ein Sehbuch
gelesen von Bruno Ganz
dargestellt von Anja Margoni und Florian Rummel
Idee und Regie Walo Deuber
Bildegstaltung Stefan Runge
mit Musik von Daniel Fueter
Animationen Jochen Ehmann
Produktion Rose-Marie Schneider Doc Productions GmbH
Check out the trailer at www.walser-sehbuch.ch

(Always liked old Bruno in Wings of Desire.)

You’ll also may recall that Susan Bernofsky has a public lecture in on the same day in the same city. It takes place at 1 p.m. at Boston University. Here are the details on that.

More updates some day soon. I now possess a copy of The Tanners, which comes out in June, but I haven’t read it yet.

Sam :: Feb.25.2009 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

A nice discovery tonight on my journey around the web — the cover art for the first-ever English language edition of Walser’s novel The Tanners, translated by Susan Bernofsky:

As Chad Post recently noted, the book comes with an introduction by W. G. Sebald, which fact you can faintly make out if you look carefully enough. The book is scheduled for a Spring 2009 release.

The image comes from translator Bernofsky’s website. I knew of her blog, but prior to today I didn’t know of this website, which is admirably complete. From it I also learned that her biography-in-progress of Walser is entitled: And No One Ever Knew: A Biography of Robert Walser.

There you go: a cover and a title. Two things we didn’t know before.

Sam :: Nov.28.2008 :: Uncategorized :: 4 Comments »

Credit: dese

Sam :: Oct.25.2008 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

As noted in this piece by Mathieu Lindon in the October 8 issue of Libération, there are two new Walser-related titles in French.

The most recent (August 25) is Poèmes, a bilingual French-German edition of Walser’s verse translated by Marion Graf. Doubtless many poems in this volume are unavailable in English. I was especially interested to see Lindon mention “Hamsun,” a poem Walser wrote “en hommage à l’écrivain norvégien.” You may recall that I mentioned Hamsun in my review of The Assistant last year. I was sure Walser had read Hamsun — he seems to have read everything — but this is the first time I’ve seen him mention the Norwegian Nobelist.

(I really should get a copy of everything in German. I’ll have to add this to my Wunschzettel.)

The second, Robert Walser : le rien et le provisoire, is a volume of essays by Walser scholars de Nicole Pelletier and Michel Dentan.

By the way, not to switch countries on you, but it just occurred to me that the annual meeting of the Walser Society takes place today and tomorrow in Vienna. Here’s the program. Tonight’s events feature a live performance of this Walser-inspired musical selection.

ADDITION 10/12: Just noticed that Le Monde chimed in on these same volumes a few days earlier.

Sam :: Oct.11.2008 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

Sam :: Sep.13.2008 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »