On Thursday, April 16th at 8 p.m. (the day after Robert Walser would be 131), Susan Bernofsky will read from The Tanners, her translation of Walser’s first novel (Geschwister Tanner, 1907), the last to find a home in English (forthcoming from New Directions in June, with a foreword by W.G. Sebald). The Tanners tells the story of four young brothers and a sister: 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.
Robert Walser — admired by Kafka, Musil, and Walter Benjaminº — is a radiantly original author. He has been acclaimed “unforgettable, heart-rending” (J.M. Coetzee), “a bewitched genius” (Newsweek), and “a major, truly wonderful, heart-breaking writer” (Susan Sontag). The Los Angeles Times called him “the dreamy confectionary snowflake of German language fiction. He also might be the single most underrated writer of the 20th century.”
Susan Bernofsky, co-chair of the PEN Translation Committee, is the translator of four books by the great Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser, as well as novels by Jenny Erpenbeck, Yoko Tawada, Hermann Hesse, Gregor von Rezzori, and others, and the author of Foreign Words: Translator-Authors in the Age of Goethe. The 2006 recipient of the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize, she has also received awards and fellowships from the NEH, NEA, American Council of Learned Societies, and the Lannan Foundation. Bernofsky is currently writing two books: a biography of Robert Walser, and a novel set in her hometown, New Orleans.
ºto say nothing of Ashbery, Bernhard, Canetti, Dara Wier, Elfriede Jelinek, Friederike Mayröcker, Gonçalo M. Tavares, Guy Davenport, Guy Lesser, Guy Pettit, Helen Mirra, Hermann Hesse, Ilse Aichinger, Jack Pendarvis, James Tate, Julie Hecht, Lisa Olstein, M. Kasper, Mary Ruefle, Martin Lechner, Matthea Harvey, Millay Hiatt, Peter Gizzi, Tom Whalen, Uljana Wolf, und so weiter…
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