Wandering with Robert Walser

The new year is shaping up quite nicely for all us English-speaking Walserites, particularly those in my own hometown of Chicago. Here’s a hint of what’s to come:

December 3 (through April 2012): In the Spirit of Robert Walser, Donald Young Gallery, Chicago. “The Donald Young Gallery is pleased to present a series of exhibitions inspired by the Swiss writer Robert Walser. On December 3rd, the gallery will open the first part of the exhibition with the archival material being shown together with 3 clay sculptures by Peter Fischli and David Weiss. This will be followed by Moyra Davey in January, Thomas Schütte in February, Rosemarie Trockel in March and Tacita Dean and Mark Wallinger in April.”

January 24: Berlin Stories, translated by Susan Bernofsky, New York Review Books Classics. “Berlin Stories collects [Walser's] alternately celebratory, droll, and satirical observations on every aspect of the bustling German capital, from its theaters, cabarets, painters’ galleries, and literary salons, to the metropolitan street, markets, the Tiergarten, rapid-service restaurants, and the electric tram. Originally appearing in literary magazines as well as the feuilleton sections of newspapers, the early stories are characterized by a joyous urgency and the generosity of an unconventional guide.”

February 14: Oppressive Light, Selected Poems by Robert Walser, translated by Daniele Pantano, Black Lawrence Press. “Oppressive Light: Selected Poems by Robert Walser represents the first collection of Robert Walser’s poetry in English translation and an opportunity to experience Walser as he saw himself at the beginning and at the end of his literary career––as a poet. The collection also includes notes on dates of composition, draft versions the printed poems represent, which volume of the Werkausgabe the poems were first published in, and brief biographical information on characters and locations that appear in the poems and may not be known to readers.”

February 26: Robert Walser Symposium, Goethe-Institut Chicago. Coinciding with the “In the Spirit of Walser” exhibition, Goethe-Institut Chicago is holding a symposium on the author at 3 p.m. on Sunday, February 26, featuring Thomas Schuette, Susan Bernofsky, Joerg Kreienbrock, and Michal Pawel Markowski, and (possibly) other guests. The final program will be announced in the coming weeks.

March 24: Robert Walser Festival, Institute Robert Walser, Newcastle, UK. Formed in 2011, the Institute Robert Walser holds public meetings for artists, writers, performers, musicians and others inspired by Walser’s writing. Scheduled to appear at the March festival are scholars Daniel Medin and Jo Catling, translator Daniele Pantano, artist Billy Childish, representatives from the Walser Zentrum in Berne, and many others.

April 24: Thirty Poems, translated by Christopher Middleton, New Directions. “A deluxe edition of the Swiss master’s best poems. In a small, exquisite clothbound format resembling the early Swiss and German editions of Walser’s work, Thirty Poems collects famed translator Christopher Middleton’s favorite poems from the more than five hundred Walser wrote. The illustrations range from an early poem in perfect copperplate handwriting, to one from a 1927 Czech-German newspaper, to a microscript.”

June 5: “The Walk,” translated by Susan Bernofsky, New Directions Paperback. “The Walk was the first piece of Walser’s work to appear in English, and the only one translated before his death. However, Walser heavily revised his most famous novella, altering nearly every sentence, rendering the baroque tone of his tale into something more spare. An introduction by translator Susan Bernofsky explains the history of The Walk, and the differences between its two versions.”

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Sam :: Dec.19.2011 :: Uncategorized :: 3 Comments »

Unless you click on the accompanying image, you may not understand why I gasped aloud as I lazily browsed the web in Chicago this weekend. Thanks to our friends at the archive, I knew this was coming. I just didn’t know it was coming so soon!

More details as they become available …

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Sam :: Oct.03.2011 :: Uncategorized :: 1 Comment »

Here’s something special to celebrate my return to Walser-blogging: I recorded a guest spot on Miette’s Bedtime Story Podcast.

In the guest spot, I read one of my favorite Walser stories, “Frau Wilke.”

If you know Sam Jones from various internet outlets, you will be neither surprised nor disappointed that he chose to read Walser for his guest stint here. However, if you know Sam Jones from various internet outlets alone, you might not know that his is not unlike the disembodied voice in your head that reads you to sleep … [more]

Ahem, it seems appropriate to stop quoting right there.

Thanks to Miette for prompting me to do something I’ve wanted to do for a very long time …

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Sam :: Sep.20.2011 :: Audio :: 3 Comments »

Featured in the July 2011 edition of Asymptote, from the forthcoming collection Berlin Stories, Robert Walser’s prose piece, “Full”:

So many times, as I rode through the streets of Berlin and Berlin life in the quaint, lumbering and yet buoyantly plodding horse-drawn omnibus, which never failed to invigorate and charm me anew, I would hear the aging, good-natured conductor humbly and humorously uttering a single insignificant and yet also at that moment quite significant word, which in addition, by the way, was written for the sake of correctness and order upon a panel that could be either concealed or displayed. [more]

And don’t miss, in the right-hand column, the link to the original German, and also the translator’s note, excerpted below:

“Full” is a story about life in Berlin, but Robert Walser wrote this story in 1916, three years after he had left the bustle of the metropolis behind to return to his native Biel in Switzerland, a quiet town on the shores of a lake where Rousseau once spent a winter in seclusion. While the Great War was raging just across the border, Walser began to meditate on the complexities of modern life in a new way.

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Sam :: Sep.19.2011 :: Berlin Stories :: No Comments »

Seems like forever ago, does it not, that I mentioned Berlin Stories, the coming collection of Walser stories translated by Susan Bernofsky and published by New York Review Books?

Hopefully you haven’t forgotten. I knew that you wouldn’t.

Well, I have three pieces of news on that title:

(1) It has a new, official, and final publication date of January 10, 2012. (This I read both on the NYRB site and on Amazon, which is also offering it as an e-book, don’t you know.)

(2) The translation has been completed and the manuscript was submitted on September 12, 2011. (This I learned from our trusty translator’s Facebook updates.)

(3) A story from the collection, entitled “Full,” was published in the July 2011 edition of Asymptote, an international journal devoted to literary translation. (I learned this from a friend and reader — thank you, Jim.)

Stay tuned: I have lots more Walser news which I’ve saved up over my long summer vacation …

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Sam :: Sep.19.2011 :: Berlin Stories :: 6 Comments »

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Sam :: Sep.19.2011 :: Uncategorized :: 2 Comments »

Read the small print on the poster above, and you’ll learn of the world premiere of a musical composition inspired by Walser’s microscripts.

Says the composer, Drew Baker:

The piece I wrote for Dal Niente is not intended to provide any sort of literal connectivity to Walser’s stories or his idiosyncratic script. I am not attempting to musically depict one of his plot lines, set his text or develop some sort of musical shorthand in order to fit an entire piece onto a scrap or two of paper.

Rather, I want to create a similar sense of focus and intensity. I want the listener to gain a heightened awareness of the sonic detailing and I seek to do this in part by limiting certain parameters in order to emphasize others. Microscript begins with nearly two minutes of a single pitch. This seemingly static handling of pitch serves to elevate one’s sense of articulation, which in this case — with constant changes in string assignments, bow contact points, articulations, etc. — is quite diverse. It is my hope that the physicality of the sound is as apparent as that of Walser’s writing and I furthermore wish to grant the listener the freedom to linger over and carefully examine various gestures and textures.

Nice! The performance is the season finale for the Ensemble Dal Niente, a Chicago-based group that focuses on contemporary music.

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Sam :: May.23.2011 :: Uncategorized :: 1 Comment »

From “At the Grave of Robert Walser,” in The Sense of the Visit: New Poems by James Kirkup (1984):

I spoke to you a while, sitting beside you, listening to
your answering silences, so far from silent –
the many words you wrote that bring me joy,
your self-mocking irony, your purity, your flow
as natural as native speech, your subtle mischief,
your quiet laughter, the last defence against stupidity.

And before I said goodbye, I repeated those words
from Das Kind — the eternal child you were: ‘Niemand
ist berechtigt, sich gegenüber mir zu benehmen, als kennte er mich.’
Words for my own life, too: ‘No one has the right
to treat me as if he knew me.’ (Though more than that . . .) I wish
these words had been engraved upon your stone — but you
would have found that too immodest, proud and tasteless:
and, in the end, what did you care
what anybody thought of you, or said of you?

Robert Walser, you sleep well there.
And as I left you, often looking back, I thought:
what bliss to be buried with you in a Friedhof, court of peace.

[Photo via Karpov.]

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Sam :: May.22.2011 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

From Kurt Wolff, a Portrait in Essays and Letters, translated by Deborah Lucas Schneider, edited by Michael Ermarth (Chicago, 1991):

From a Swiss by the name of Robert Walser there arrived, also in the spring of 1913, the first letters in a delicate hand straight out of the eighteenth century, letters whose contents could not have been simpler and whose tone was recognizably unique. The first letters have been lost, but listen to a few lines from a later one:

I have just completed a new book . . . in which I have bound together twenty-seven pieces . . . All the pieces have been given a new form, every single one, so as to make them as good as possible. Choosing them and deciding on their order has been done with thought and care, in a conscious effort. I believe I can say that the book makes a solid, round, and pleasing whole. There are shifts in it from landscapes to concrete humor, from comedy to complete seriousness, even now and then to tragic form . . . it contains some older pieces and some quite new ones as well, ones that have only just occurred to me . . . I see the work as a kind of modest but quite cozy and livable house . . .

That was the tone of the letters–who could have resisted it? And still there could be no doubt that the pieces of prose bound together would find fewer than a hundred readers. I published three volumes of Walser’s stories for these one hundred readers, with illustrations by his famous brother; in appearance, too, they were most attractive books. And yet the stories were not as simple as they might seem on first reading.

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Sam :: May.12.2011 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

A disappointed knowledge-seeker who found my blog today via the search terms “Middleton Bernofsky Wednesday April 6″ reminds me that I’ve been remiss in sharing some of my notes from the recent event in New York. Let me try to remedy that now.

Above is a picture I took while the crowd was gathering. Notice that I missed one of the principals. My notes are incomplete too, as you’ll see. Nor did I, because of my hasty departure for another appointment, receive the bratwurst I had reserved online ahead of time I trust that my friend Smyth, who was in attendance, took care of that detail for me.

As you may recall, the event featured readings by Walser translators Christopher Middleton and Susan Bernofsky, and was chaired by NYRB Classics editor Edwin Frank. The event was introduced by Bridge Series organizers Bill Martin and Sal Robinson, who co-sponsored the event along with the event host, the Swiss Institute.

The format consisted of Middleton and Bernofsky reading in turn from their Walser translations, then a discussion led by Frank, and finally a question and answer session with the audience.

In introducing Middleton, Martin noted that Walser’s “The Walk” was Middleton’s very first published translation. This was a interesting piece of trivia, given Middleton’s very distinguished career as a translator of authors as varied as Nietzsche, Hölderlin, Goethe and many contemporary writers, in addition to Walser.

Bernofsky began the session, reading her translation of Walser’s “Tiergarten” (1911), which will appear in the upcoming Berlin Stories (NYRB Classics 2011). She followed with “So here was a book again” (1930-33), from the recent Microscripts volume (New Directions, 2010). The latter was inspired by, and inscribed on the inside cover of, a “penny dreadful” called “Apres la tourment,” which fact tied in nicely with some of Middleton’s comments later in the session regarding Walser’s reading habits. You may remember Walser’s story, which the narrator observes, “I’ve acquired quite a few female acquaintance by reading …” Wonderful pieces, both.

Middleton then followed. He apologized in advance for any difficulties he would encounter, explaining that his eyesight was poor, and that he was obliged, these days, to “read with one eye.” There was some unintentional comedy with the microphone — isn’t there always? — which he handled gracefully before putting it aside and asking the back row to let him know if he needed to speak more loudly. He read from pages written in longhand, or so it seemed from my seat in row five.

He began by reading his unpublished translation of a 1927 Walser poem dedicated to Rilke, who, Middleton noted, had passed away in December of the previous year. It was a beautiful piece that reminded me of Walser’s poem “My Fiftieth Birthday”. I didn’t get the whole thing, of course, but it concluded with the lines: “I was content to make, beside your grave, this little speech.”

After reading the next piece (whose name escapes me, but which related to another poet, one who died in 1914 “in a foreign country”), a few members of the audience laughed quietly, and Middleton did too. “It’s not meant to be funny … and that’s why it is.” He remarked that Walser’s works were often marked by a unique combination of “the serious and the ludicrous.”

Another poem Middleton described as having an ending “like Appollonaire.”

Then Middleton read a unpublished translation of a Walser prose piece. He had some difficulty with this piece, whether from his eyesight problems or reading his own handwriting, I don’t know. I wish I could have taken some of it down. I complimented him on the piece afterwards and asked if he considered including it in Speaking to the Rose. “I should have!” he exclaimed.

Around 1927, Middleton noted, Walser began to experience auditory hallucinations. He often heard the voice of his mother scolding him: “Was it really so? Did you love me?” It was perhaps his mother’s mental illness, of course, that was passed on to Walser and one of his brothers.

At another pause, Middleton remarked that Walser’s work “is straight from the mouth; it’s not literary. He’s not bookish.” It was a theme he returned to later, saying that Walser “was not an intellectual,” something difficult for a contemporary reader to appreciate, because of the image we have of writers today as … well, as intellectuals.

Middleton then mentioned a poem he recently wrote that “alludes to Walser’s time as a servant.” It appeared in AGNI 71 (2010), and is entitled, “Like Heart’s Desire.” It reads, in part:

Hold the cold bars, hold, and watch,
Watch how splendor happens;
How tangled darkness is,
Now how trim when Robert passes;
How homely all the windows are
When, like heart’s desire, one by one,
Wicks do light up, every lamp glows
With a brave trembling flame.

Then followed the discussion, which I’ll summarize in the next post …

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Sam :: Apr.18.2011 :: Uncategorized :: 6 Comments »