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 »
A possible addition to your Walser bibliography: I just picked up a copy of the anthology of Bernadette Mayer & Vito Acconci’s magazine 0 to 9 & the second issue (published in 1968 I think) includes a translation of a Walser story. I don’t have the book with me now, but I’ll get the details for you . . .
Just found your site tonight, while looking for info about Bernofsky’s progress on G.T.
YOUR WORK HERE IS INVALUABLE.
For example, I find the following passage to be ground-breaking:
“If I could turn back again to my thirtieth year, I wouldn’t write in the sky like a romantic airbus (Luftibus), aberrant and unencumbered. You can’t negate society. You must live in it and fight for it or against it. That is the defect of my novels. They’re too quirky and too reflexive, and in their composition often too slipshod. Wrapped up in artistic legitimacy, I simply improvised.”
His aged opinion on his own work.
Anyway I never knew anybody had or was putting Seelig’s recollections into English, now here I am.
Dan, that looks like a sweet volume. I see that my local university library has a the full set of 0 to 9 so maybe I’ll get over the this weekend to make a copy. Curious as to what that piece might be. There are still a few on my biblio that I haven’t tracked down full-text copies of yet. I should really try to do that. Anyhow, if you can share anything you know about the piece in the meantime, that would be great.
Dali, thanks much for the good words! That passage you cite is from the most interesting section so far, for exactly the reason you mention – it gives us an idea of whether Walser believed he had succeeded as a writer or not. I didn’t translate this piece (my partners in crime, Smyth and Rosi, did) and I’m glad I didn’t (or couldn’t).
Here it is: it’s in 0 to 9 issue 2, dated August 1967, pp. 1–12: “Kleist in Thun”, translated by Robert Scott. There’s a Christopher Middleton translation of the story in Selected Stories, but you don’t have any translation by Robert Scott in your database, nor is it in the bibliography at the end of Robert Walser Rediscovered. I wonder if there are more out there?
Heh. I found the volume today at my nearby graduate library. I made a copy of the Walser story for my files. And yes, it’s the first I’ve seen from Robert Scott. And there has to be more, don’t you think?
I love seeing different translations of the same pieces. Although, it’s interesting, one translator read the bibliography and asked me to delete one or two of his that were later available in translations by Middleton, which he considered to have “superseded” his own. A becoming modesty, that.
I got a huge kick out of flipping through 0 to 9 issues one through six, and brought back copies of the table of contents for each issue in case I want to go back and read more. Amazing names to find in a little (so it appears) mimeographed production like that. Volume five, with those essays by artists like Sol LeWitt and Robert Smithson, was particularly neat. The manually typed pages with their little off-kilter letters – this really brings art home to a person.:)
The sixties: sadly, I spent my time in that decade learning to count and to spell. I suppose it has come in handy.
Thanks for the tip!
Sam
Read the Scott translation – quite unsatisfactory! The variations from Middleton translation (which came out 10 years before) are hard to fathom as improvements. And you also have to wonder, when so little Walser was available in English in 1967, why someone would choose to retranslate something rather than to work on a piece not already translated.
(I’m avoiding the most puzzling aspect of this thing: who in the heck would look at a Middleton translation and says, “I could do better than that!”)