Wandering with Robert Walser

Fake out! But wait, the first review is coming soon, because Booklist’s Keir Graff says he’s reading it, and because Booklist reviews everything before everybody else does.

Graff may be incorrect, however, in saying that Bernofsky’s translation is the first English rendering. I noted the other day an entry in the bibliography Christopher Middleton provided in his 1969 translation of Jakob von Gunten:

Michael Bullock: The Assistant (Der Gehulfe). London: Calder & Boyers, 1969.

In 2005, however, Middleton omitted the book from the bibliography he provided in Speaking to the Rose. So what happened to this translation? Was it never completed? From this bio of Bullock, it appears that 1968 was the tail end of his career as a “freelance and translator,” so maybe that’s it. The book was on Calder’s list when Middleton was finishing Jacob, Middleton therefore included it in his biblio, but the book probably never appeared.

Maybe the manuscript is among, or referred to within, the “8.32 m of textual records and other materials” listed here.

Sam :: Apr.25.2007 :: Uncategorized :: 1 Comment »

Metameat reads Jakob von Gunten. Waggish comments.

Sam :: Apr.04.2007 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

Another Walser sighting, this in the pages of the April/May 2007 issue of Bookforum, in an review by Wayne Koestenbaum of Barbara Johnson’s translation of Mallarme’s Divigations. I’d never come across a connection between Mallarme and Walser before.

Readers unfamiliar with Mallarme’s prose will find Divagations, certainly, strange, but its aftershocks appear else­where in Continental literature — in, for example, the short prose of Robert Walser, whose self-canceling sentences are, although profoundly autobiographical, as impersonally hiccuping, in rhythm, as Mallarme’s; and Fernando Pessoa’s raptly void-regarding The Book of Disquiet. But the major heirs of Mallarme’s prose have been those practitioners of the genre that he christened, at its birth, the “critical poem.” Readers of Ponge, Jabes, Blanchot, Lacan, Derrida, and even Heidegger will recognize traces of these men’s prose in Mallarme’s beguiling combination of abstraction and precision, of philosophical abstruseness and a style of presentation that relies more on ecstatic and broken attestation, on baffling interjections and ellipses, than on direct statement. And Mallarme is certainly an early and influential adept of a style of antirealist self-cartography that flowers in the works of Artaud, Genet, and Leiris.

Sam :: Apr.02.2007 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »