Such a Façade, Madame, Is Odd: Late Poems and a Lost Novella (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781969010071)

Vendor: Robert Walser
Product type: Books
Format: Paperback
$20.00
$20.00
$20.00
Subtotal: $20.00
WR Book House

Such a Façade, Madame, Is Odd: Late Poems and a Lost Novella

$20.00

Such a Façade, Madame, Is Odd: Late Poems and a Lost Novella

$20.00
Format: Paperback
Description
Description
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Such a Façade, Madame, Is Odd: Late Poems and a Lost Novella is the first English translation of a "lost" work by the major Swiss modernist author Robert Walser, along with a selection of his late poems, most in English for the first time. The novella did appear in Walser's Collected Works under the title "Diary Fragment, 1926," but it has never been published on its own (except in Spanish); translator Damion Searls notes the problem with this title, in that the work is not a diary, not a fragment, and not about 1926. What it is is a pendant to his beloved novella The Walk, though it easily stands on its own: written in Walser's famous miniscule "microscript," it was recopied and reworked into a finished story. Like The Walk, "A Journal of My Experiences" provides a selective and very literary chronicle of Walser's daily life in Switzerland: city strolls, country outings, and encounters with various people, including his obsession with one special lady, along with various philosophical and self-reflexive flights of thought and fancy. The poems range in tone from the whimsical to the despairing and reveal the innermost concerns and workings of this singular writer's mind. Presented alongside their German-language originals, Damion Searls's translations of these late poems capture Walser's loopy rhyme schemes and manic melancholy energy in a way that has not been seen in English before. As the TLS asks of Walser's work, "Are we dealing with pure literature, the vagaries of the everyday, jokes, or empty fancies? The writing is radical and elegant enough to encompass all these possibilities and many more."




Author: Robert Walser
ISBN-10: 196901007X
ISBN-13: 9781969010071
Publisher: Turtle Point Press
Language: English
Published: 08/17/2027
Pages: 168
Format: Paperback
By Robert Walser
By Robert Walser
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Robert Walser (1878-1956) was a prodigious Swiss author of poetry and prose, increasingly beloved in recent decades. He published his first three novels--The Tanners, The Assistant, and Jakob von Gunten--while living in Berlin between 1905 and 1913, and continued to write at a furious pace upon returning to Switzerland. His mental health landed him in asylums from 1929 until his death on Christmas of 1956.

Damion Searls is an award-winning translator from the German, French, Norwegian, and Dutch, including of works by Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse, as well as Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, Proust, Rilke, Wittgenstein, and many others; he has translated Walser's A Schoolboy's Diary and Other Stories and Elfriede Jelinek's play Her Not All Her: On/With Robert Walser. His own books include Analog Days (fiction), The Mariner's Mirror (poetry), The Inkblots (a history of the Rorschach test and biography of its creator), and The Philosophy of Translation.


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