Robert Walser Roundup 19 October 2009

Following on from April's roundup of recent publishing events surrounding the œuvre of Robert Walser, six months later there's even more to report!

Firstly, the English translation of the The Tanners finally did come out, although a few months late (reaching the Canadian market on 25 August). After reading Jean Launay's 1985 French translation, reissued in 1992, I very much look forward to reading it in my mother tongue.

But Susan Bernofsky hasn't stopped there. Currently on the horizon, in addition to her forthcoming biography of Robert Walser, is a volume of Walser microgrammes, or Microscripts as they are being called, in English translation. These will be published by New Directions in the spring of 2010, coinciding with an exhibition of the microscripts at the Christine Burgin Gallery in New York. As told by Susan:

This project came about as a co-production with Christine Burgin Gallery after Burgin fell in love with Walser’s miniature manuscripts (both the sheets of paper and the handwriting that covers them are unbelievably small) and decided to put together an exhibition of them in New York, due to open in the spring of 2010. The volume Microscripts will serve as a catalogue for the exhibition—it will contain a number of high-resolution facsimiles of Walser’s beautiful manuscripts—and at the same time is a collection of stories from his late work.

As told by the gallery:

In Spring 2010 the Christine Burgin Gallery and New Directions will publish a facsimile edition of Robert Walser's microscripts with new translations by Susan Bernofsky. This will be the first publication in English illustrated by and devoted to Robert Walser's microscripts.

Details:

The Microscripts
Robert Walser
New Directions
Hardback, 160 pages
ISBN 9780811218801
25 May 2010
$24.95 US (Canadian market information unavailable at this time)

It seems to me that this book will be a cross between two books previously published by Geneva-based Éditions Zoe:

1. Le territoire du crayon (2003), 400 pages of microgramme prose in French translation.


2. Robert Walser, l'écriture miniature (2004), a 91-page album explaining what the microgrammes are, and featuring numerous reproductions of actual microgrammes, along with their French translations.
   

Despite its 400 pages, the former is in reality but a small subset of the microgrammes published in the monumental six-volume Aus dem Bleistiftgebiet. Mikrogramme aus den Jahren 1924–1933 (2003). Every time I see this beautiful boxed set sitting on the shelves of Das Buch on Sherbrooke Street East, I have to hold myself back from buying it, reminding myself that my German is nowhere near good enough to be able to read the Walser Microgrammes in their original language. But I digress...

Getting back on topic, believe it or not, there's even more on the way from Susan Bernofsky! On her website, she mentions a forthcoming English translation of Robert Walser's "Berlin Stories", to be published by the New York Review of Books in their Classics series. This has also been confirmed by NYRB Classics themselves. I had never even heard of the "Berlin Stories" before today. If anyone knows what these are, and what texts they correspond to in the complete works of Robert Walser in German, I'd love to hear from you...

Moving on to the French side of things, on 9 September 2009 Gallimard reissued La Rose, Bernard Lortholoary's 1987 translation of Die Rose. It's due out later this month in Canada. This book features one of my favourite Walser quotations: "Personne n'a le droit de se comporter à mon endroit comme s'il me connaissait".

Éditions Zoe have lots of Walser stuff coming out in the next few months:

• Proses brèves, vol. 2 : Nouvelles du jour is being reissued on 27 November 2009 (11 January 2010 in Canada).


• Marion Graf has translated Kleine Prosa (1917) into French for the very first time; Petite prose is to be published in Europe on 28 January 2010, and in Canada shortly thereafter.


• She's also translated a collection of Walser's 1909 poems under the title Au bureau : poèmes de 1909, which is also due out on 28 January. This volume is to include illustrations by his brother Karl Walser.
  


• Finally, Vie de poète (Marion Graf's 2006 translation of Poetenleben for Éditions Zoe) is being reissued by Le Seuil's papberback imprint Points on 28 February 2010, with a new foreword by Philippe Delerm.

Ouf! Quelle aventure... While all of this is going on, Suhrkamp too seem to have constant stream of Walser publications coming out in the original German, including Robert Walser for Idlers, a book of bons mots and aphorisms, and Der Schnee fällt nicht hinauf - 33 Gedichte, a collection of 33 (winter?) poems.

Exciting times indeed!

Robert Walser: The Tanners and other new releases

In honour of the imminent publication of Susan Bernofsky's translation of Robert Walser's Geschwister Tanner (The Tanners), which until now had been inédit in the English-speaking world (although it has been available in French here in Canada since 1985), I've put together a roundup of some recent events in the world of Walser.

Firstly, Robert Walser's 1907 novel The Tanners is finally coming out in English translation for the first time, published by New Directions (distributed in Canada by Penguin and in the US by W.W. Norton) and scheduled for release on 28 April 2009. From the publisher:

The Tanners is the last major novel by the great Robert Walser to finally make it into English.

The Tanners, Robert Walser’s amazing 1907 novel, is now presented in English for the very first time, by the award-winning translator Susan Bernofsky. Four brothers and a sister comprise the Tanner family: their wanderings, meetings, separations, quarrels, romances, employment and lack of employment over the course of a year or two are the threads with which Walser weaves his airy, strange and brightly gorgeous fabric.

Translated from the German, with an Afterword, by Susan Bernofsky
Introduction by W. G. Sebald (translated by Jo Catling)

“A clairvoyant of the small,” W. G. Sebald calls Walser, one of his favorite writers, in his acutely beautiful, and personal long introduction, studded with his signature use of photographs.

CLOTH

5X7

368 PAGES

Exciting stuff, indeed. British readers should note that the last major Bernofsky/Walser event — New Directions' June 2007 North American publication of the first ever English edition of The Assistant — was followed by a gorgeous Penguin Modern Classics edition of the same, published in March 2008 and exclusive to the British market. Something tells me that there will be a similar transatlantic arrangement between New Directions and Penguin UK for the publication of The Tanners...

In other news, although nothing is ever likely to equal the monumental Robert Walser Week that aired on France Culture in January 2007, there have nonetheless recently been a few noteworthy radio programmes about Walser:

• Public Radio International's World Books on The Assistant and The Tanners, with Susan Bernofsky [mp3] - 3 March 2009
  
• France Culture's Ça rime à quoi on Walser's poetry, with translator Marion Graf [real audio] - 25 January 2009
• RSR Espace 2's Entre les lignes on the new French translations of Prosastücke (Morceaux de prose) and selected poetry, with translator Marion Graf [audio file no longer available] - September 2008
  

Speaking of momumental undertakings, this past fall Suhrkamp published the massive, 511 page Robert Walser: Sein Leben in Bildern und Texten (Robert Walser: His Life in Pictures and Texts), edited by noted Walser scholar Bernhard Echte. My German isn't strong enough to be able to grasp the exact nature of the project, but it looks amazing. With any luck, one of Walser's French-language publishers (I'm talking to you Zoe and Gallimard!) will decide to translate it one day (I don't think there's any hope of this ever coming out in English). I've managed to glean a few sample pages to whet your appetite:


Granted, I already have the Walser biographies written by Catherine Sauvat, Peter Utz and Marie-Louise Audiberti, but can you ever really have enough? Thankfully, Susan Bernofsky is working on And No One Ever Knew: A Biography of Robert Walser, which to my knowledge will be the first ever English language biography of Walser.

To wrap up this extended post devoted to what is clearly an obsession of mine, this past fall Geneva-based publisher Zoe issued two new volumes of Walser's works, plus a brief study of his work:

• Morceaux de prose
  
• Poèmes
• Robert Walser : le rien et le provisoire
  

With translations of lesser-known texts, as well as studies and biographies, including two splendid volumes on the famous Walser microgrammes, Zoe really is doing more to get Walser's work out there than any other French-language publisher. Kudos to them.

Germans and the French language

A hundred years after it was written, Robert Walser's »Der Gehülfe« (The Assistant) is finally available in English. Susan Bernofsky's translation was first published by New Directions in July 2007, but I held off because I already had a copy of Bernard Lortholary's masterly French translation first published in 1985. But then this month Penguin UK had to go and release a gorgeous edition of Bernofsky's translation in the newly redesigned Penguin Modern Classics series, and so I was forced to import the book from the UK, at great personal expense I might add. Les salauds!

Here's an amusing passage, pertaining to the prestige enjoyed by the French language in foreign lands:

"Une jolie petite française", the conductor's wife said, evidently overjoyed at having an occasion to recite a few French words she knew by heart. This is always the case in Germanic lands, people love to be able to show that they understand French.

"Frau Tobler," Joseph thought, "knows no French at all, the poor thing!"

Robert Walser, »Der Gehülfe« (The Assistant), 1907, translation Susan Bernofsky (2007)

« Une jolie petite française », dit en français la femme du contrôleur, manifestement ravie d'avoir l'occasion de débiter de mémoire quelques mots en français. C'est toujours ainsi dans les pays de langue allemande : les gens sont contents de pouvoir montrer qu'ils comprennent le français.

« Ma patronne, pensa Joseph, ne comprend pas un mot de français. La pauvre! »

Robert Walser, »Der Gehülfe« (Le commis), 1907, traduction Bernard Lortholary (1985)