Archive for December, 2007

The surrealists had a thing

National Book Critics Circle president John Freeman picks The Assistant as one of the top 10 books of 2007:

For every hour that you worked as a temp, for every minute you’ve slaved at that job so far beneath your intelligence level, for every slight you’ve taken from a maniacal, perhaps sadistic boss, the late Swiss writer’s Robert Walser’s finally published The Assistant will be a balm and a salve. Occasionally bitchy, often brilliant, full of anecdotes that make you realize the surrealists had a thing or two in common with bloggers of today.

Okay.

Sam :: Dec.28.2007 :: Uncategorized :: 5 Comments »

Walser in Harper’s

Smyth writes in, on this warmish winter afternoon, to alert me to the January 2008 issue of Harper’s Magazine, wherein I find a Walser prose piece appearing in English for the first time. The piece is called “The Great Talent” (in German, “Das Talent”), and it was first published in August 1915 in Neue Zurcher Zeitung and later collected in the volume A Poet’s Life (Poetenleben). Full text is subs only, but here’s a paragraph to tempt you further:

To take money, when you are a great talent, and on top of that to be rude: that is truly the highest pinnacle of rudeness. Dear reader, I tell you: a great talent like that is a monster; and I beg of you: never contribute to his advancement.

The translator is Damion Searls, who, as you may recall, translated a Walser piece called “The New Novel” for n+1 not so long ago. Always nice to see more Walser pieces arriving in English!

Sam :: Dec.22.2007 :: Uncategorized :: 2 Comments »

Motorists and farm dogs

Two more chapters of our little translation are completed, this time out of chronological order just to keep you guessing. They are: April 15, 1938, and, courtesy of my colleagues Rosi and Smyth, August 30, 1953. In the latter, we find Robert “cursing the inconsiderate motorists, from whom he flees frightened every time we cross a road, and circumnavigating barking farm dogs.”

Sam :: Dec.10.2007 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

Little help?

Here’s a sentence in the Seelig (p 23) that puzzles me:

“Jeremias Gotthelf: es geht mir bei ihm genau so wie der Frau, die Heinrich Pestalozzi in seinem Roman ‘Leinhard und Gertrude’ sagen lat: Di Pfarrer het mi us dr Chile tribe!”

I can figure out the first part. Walser says, “Jeremias Gotthelf: with him I’m just like the woman in Heinrich Pestalozzi’s novel Leinhard and Gertrud, who says …” But I can’t figure what the heck that woman is saying about her pastor.

The remarkable Kreiss, who typically bails me out in such situations, renders it into French this-a-way: “Le sermon du pasteur m’a fait froid dans le dos.”

This fellow explains that “m’a fait froid dans le dos” means “freaks me out.” In other places I’ve seen it interpreted as meaning “scares me.” Literally, it means “makes my back cold.” Maybe “sends a chill down my spine” would be the closest English expression?

But forget that. Can someone explain how you get there from “het mi us dr Chile tribe”?

Sam :: Dec.09.2007 :: Uncategorized :: 4 Comments »

Keeping up

A couple tips for you if you’d like to keep up with this blog but don’t want to check back regularly just to learn that I haven’t posted anything new. If you use RSS, grab the RSS feed. If you don’t use RSS, create a Google alert for the search term “Robert Walser” (in quotes) and “Comprehensive” for type. This is a very low-traffic alert – mostly it’s just my stuff. It doesn’t alert every time I update a chapter in the translation, but from now on I’ll create a blog post whenever I finish a chapter, just so an alert goes out. (I”ll be done with another chapter in the next couple of days.)

Finally, I’ve set up a Furl bookmark list to share Walser items I’ve found but haven’t posted about yet. Latest addition is a set of stills from the film adaptation of Seelig’s book.

Sam :: Dec.05.2007 :: Uncategorized :: 6 Comments »

If I weren’t real, I couldn’t cry

Scott Esposito told us yesterday that The Assistant was on the NBCC longlist this year, according to Chad Post. It didn’t make the final cut, but nice to see it made it so far.

But the real benefit of Scott’s post was the reminder to pick up Enrique Vila-Matas’s Montano’s Malady, which I did today, and was delighted to find (p 183) this mention of Walser:

It is the evening of September 25th. In a break from writing this diary, I flicked through a book I bought yesterday by Robert Walser, The Walk and Other Stories, and was surprised to find some lines that inform me that the Swiss writer also wandered in the mist, along some byroad: “Often I wandered of course perplexed in a the mist and in a thousand vacillations and dilemmas, and often I felt myself woefully forsaken. [...] Proud and gay in the roots of his soul a man becomes only through trial bravely undergone, and through suffering patiently endured.” I told my self that now was a good time to identify with Walser. After all, my grandfather, my mother’s father, was very like Walser, and also his sons, the Girondos, my mother’s three brothers, bore a certain spiritual resemblance to Walser.

Earlier in the book (p 127), another reference to RW:

I closed the book and went to bed, thinking about all these things, admiring Pavese, but without being in tune with him, and I soon fell asleep. On a foggy road, I saw Robert Walser in conversation with Musil: “Out of here, that is my goal,” Walser was saying. “However much you cry, you won’t manage to be as real as I am,” replied Musil. “If I weren’t real, I couldn’t cry,” replied Walser. “I hope you don’t think those tears are real,” replied Musil.

And then they left, or rather–making me feel incredibly jealous–they disappeared.

Lovely stuff. But I shouldn’t be rifling the book for Walser mentions–I should be reading it. I love Vila-Matas as you know, and the author has mentioned Walser here and there before. And this book looks absolutely wonderful.

Scott also has an essay on Vila-Matas in the latest issue of The Quarterly Conversation. Check it out.

Also, see Steve’s comments on Montano and Walser.

Sam :: Dec.05.2007 :: Uncategorized :: 4 Comments »