Robert Walser

ياكوب فون غونتن

The Walk (An Extraordinary Classic)

Tanner Kardesler

Susan Bernofsky

Christopher Middleton

A pseudo-biographical “stroll” through town and countryside rife with philosophic musings, The Walk has been hailed as the masterpiece of Walser’s short prose. Walking features heavily in his writing, but nowhere else is it as elegantly considered. Without walking, “I would be dead,” Walser explains, “and my profession, which I love passionately, would be destroyed. Because it is on walks that the lore of nature and the lore of the country are revealed, charming and graceful, to the sense and eyes of the observant walker.” The Walk was the first piece of Walser’s work to appear in English, and the only one translated before his death.

translated by Susan Bernofsky and Christopher Middleton

The Walk

A collection of previously unpublished short prose by one of the most influential figures of twentieth-century fiction. Little Snow Landscape opens in 1905 with an encomium to Robert Walser’s homeland and concludes in 1933 with a meditation on his childhood in Biel, the town of his birth, published in the last of his four years in the cantonal mental hospital in Waldau outside Bern. Between these two poles, the book maps Walser’s outer and inner wanderings in various narrative modes. Here you find him writing in the persona of a girl composing an essay on the seasons, of Don Juan at the moment he senses he’s outplayed his role, and of Turkey’s last sultan shortly after he’s deposed. In other stories, a man falls in love with the heroine of the penny dreadful he’s reading (and she with him?), and the lady of a house catches her servant spread out on the divan casually reading a classic. Three longer autobiographical stories—“Wenzel,” “Würzburg,” and “Louise”—brace the whole. In addition to a representative offering of Walser’s short prose, of which he was one of literature’s most original, multifarious, and lucid practitioners, Little Snow Landscape forms a kind of novel, however apparently plotless, from the vast unfinishable one he was constantly writing.

Little Snow Landscape

en dagbog

Jakob von Gunten

Writings, 1912-1932

Speaking to the Rose

Maria Dobrevska

Razhodkata

racconto

La passeggiata

Isabel Castro Silva

Os irmãos Tanner

Daniele Pantano

Poems

Der Räuber

Kleine Dichtungen

Published in 1908, the novel is a notebook, a boy?s impressions of life at the school for servants run by the brother and sister Benjamenta. The lesson of the school is humility and the rejection of power and ambition. It is a lesson that the narrator, Jakob von Gunten, learns well. From his vantage point, he is able to see through the absurd posturings of his fellow students. Like his creation Jakob von Gunten, Robert Walser understood of the attractions of infinitesimal smallness and kept well away from the corruptions and temptations of literary life. An outsider who spent his last twenty-seven years in an asylum, Walser was a writer?s writer whose work was much admired by Kafka, Hesse and Mann. His voice appeals to all those who savour silence in an epoch of deafening noise. Now a major feature film directed by the Quay Brothers, Institute Benjamenta is Walser?s masterpiece. Ninety years after its first publication, this edition offers the chance to read a truly extraordinary classic.

Institute Benjamenta

Jakob von Gunten: Ein Tagebuch by Robert Walser

Ein Tagebuch

Jakob Von Gunten

In a small, exquisite clothbound format resembling the early Swiss and German editions of Walser's work, Thirty Poems collects famed translator Christopher Middleton's favorite poems from the more than five hundred Walser wrote. The illustrations range from an early poem in perfect copperplate handwriting, to one from a 1927 Czech-German newspaper, to a microscript.

Thirty Poems

Over 50 original full-color artworks address newly translated writings of Robert Walser

In the Spirit of Robert Walser

A Little Ramble

«Kafka è un caso particolare del tipo Walser», scrisse Robert Musil nel 1914, frase evidentemente ingiusta, ma che pure coglie un nesso essenziale. Grande scrittore che fu amato subito da altri grandi scrittori, come Kafka, Musil o Walter Benjamin, e poi con lentezza, ma sicuramente, ha continuato a conquistarsi lettori fino a oggi, Robert Walser (1878-1956) è, nel nostro secolo, un autore insieme centrale e appartato. Pianta esotica nata sul suolo svizzero, virtuoso del linguaggio, estremo erede dei grandi romantici, dai quali discende la sua meravigliosa, ininterrotta ironia, Walser ha creato un’opera vasta, ma costituita per la maggior parte da testi minuscoli – le sue famose «prose brevi» –, priva di uno sviluppo apparente, sparpagliata e elusiva. In questo minuzioso, immenso tessuto lo "Jakob von Gunten" (1909) è il libro più compiuto, anche il più complesso e il più caro al suo autore. L’azione di questo romanzo-diario si svolge all’interno di un istituto dove alcuni ragazzi imparano a servire. Luogo ambiguo, non si sa se di tortura o di felicità, insieme quotidiano e fantastico, sospeso nel tempo, I’Istituto Benjamenta viene osservato e subìto dal giovane Jakob von Gunten, che ce ne svela progressivamente i segreti e ogni volta li rinnova. Qual è il potere del burbero e tenebroso Signor Benjamenta e della sua angelica sorella Lisa, i due esseri che guidano lo sparuto manipolo degli allievi? Che senso ha lo sconcertante insegnamento dell’istituto, simile a una oscura «educazione a rovescio»? Abbiamo di fronte a noi un turpe inganno o un paradiso camuffato? Come "Il Castello" di Kafka – dove per altro è stato avvertito l’eco dello "Jakob von Gunten" – così anche questo romanzo di Walser ha provocato interpretazioni opposte, che però hanno lasciato intatto il suo mistero: l’immagine dell’Istituto Benjamenta resta come uno dei luoghi memorabili della letteratura del Novecento. Il saggio di Roberto Calasso, che accompagna questa edizione, si propone di individuare una matrice mitologica del romanzo che permetta di leggerlo in una nuova prospettiva.

Born in Switzerland in 1878, Robert Walser worked as a bank clerk, a butler in a castle, and an inventor's assistant before discovering what William H. Gass calls his "true profession." From 1899 until he was misdiagnosed a schizophrenic and hospitalized in 1933, Walser produced nine novels and more than a thousand short stories and prose pieces. Walser's contemporary admirers were few but well-placed. They included Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, Robert Musil, and Walter benjamin. Today Robert Walser is widely regarded as one of the most important and original literary voices of the twentieth century. In "Masquerade" and Other Stories, Susan Bernofsky, presents a representative selection of Walser's work, from his first published fiction to the stately prose of the last years before his voice vanished forever behind the asylum walls. Written between 1899 and 1933, these 64 sketches, scenes, stories, and wanderings through landscapes and dreamscapes are characterized by startling, skewed comparisons, warpings of syntax, vagaries or perspective, and a delight in contradiction. Quirky, playful, and sometimes bizarre, Walser's texts were unconventional by the standards in the context of today's fiction.

Robert Walser

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