Notes from NYRB Classics
This is tonight. We’ll be bringing our Middleton-translated Walser book, Jakob von Gunten; and Susan Bernofsky who translated the recently published Berlin Stories for us and The Walk for New Directions (along with Microscripts, The Tanners, and The Assistant) will be there as well. If you’re a Walser fan, this is an event for you.
Susan Bernofsky, who translated and wrote the introduction for the recently published Berlin Stories by Robert Walser, has won the biannual translation award The Calwer Hermann-Hesse-Preis (that’s German for Prize) for 2012. She is also curating the Festival Neue Literatur 2012, being held this weekend in New York City. Go check out some events if you can, they should be fun.
Riding the ‘electric’ is an inexpensive pleasure. When the car arrives, you climb aboard, possibly after first politely ceding the right of way to an imposing gentlewoman, and then the car continues on. At once you notice that you have a rather musical disposition. The most delicate melodies are parading through your head. In no time you’ve elevated yourself to the position of a leading conductor or even composer. Yes, it’s really true: the human brain involuntarily starts composing songs in the electric tram, songs that in their involuntary nature and their rhythmic regularity are so very striking that it’s hard to resist thinking oneself a second Mozart.
The New York Review blog published the second in a series of excerpts from the recently published Berlin Stories by Robert Walser, translated and with an introduction by Susan Bernofsky. Bernofsky, who is currently chair of the PEN Translation Committee and author of Foreign Words: Translator-Authors in the Age of Goethe, was interviewed for the blog Daily PEN America about the place of translation in America today.
via the Center for the Art of Translation
Susan Bernofsky will be discussing Robert Walser’s Berlin Stories tonight at 192 Books in New York City.
…These essayish ‘stories,’ most appearing in English for the first time, reveal the exuberance (and, in a heart-rending coda, the defeat) of a young artist initiating himself into the glorious bustle of his adopted city. Everything is observed in language that asserts his professed posture as ‘a perfumed and mincing know-it-all and write-it-all.’ To Walser, Berlin’s architecture ‘errs perhaps on the side of the drastic’ and theater should be ‘shameless,’ since ‘it must after all be reckoned among the secret pleasures of a theatergoer to be permitted to find sufficient grounds to blush.’ Having exalted the gifts of a critic friend, he mutters, ‘Did you catch the undercurrent of vindictive envy?’ Not to be outdone, Walser deploys his own criticism with panache. As he derides ‘the princely Homburgly nature’ of a pompous actor, you can almost hear the collection’s principal translator, Susan Bernofsky, laughing into her laptop.
— From the review of Robert Walser’s Berlin Stories, by Jan Stuart, from Sunday’s New York Times Book Review
Today is the publication date for Robert Walser’s Berlin Stories, a collection of his early stories, with some later ones as well, set in Berlin where he followed his elder brother in 1905, translated by Susan Bernofsky and others including Christopher Middleton. We thought we’d share the first story in the book, titled “Good Morning, Giantess!”:
It’s as if a giantess were shaking her curls and sticking one leg out
of bed when—early in the morning, before even the electric trams
are running, and driven by some duty or other—you venture out
into the metropolis. Cold and white the streets lie there, like outstretched human arms; you trot along, rubbing your hands, and
watch people coming out of the gates and doorways of their buildings,
as though some impatient monster were spewing out warm,
flaming saliva. You encounter eyes as you walk along like this: girls’
eyes and the eyes of men, mirthless and gay; legs are trotting behind
and before you, and you too are legging along as best you can, gazing
with your own eyes, glancing the same glances as everyone else. And
each breast bears some somnolent secret, each head is haunted by
some melancholy or inspiring thought. Splendid, splendid.
