Thirty Poems
Robert Walser author Christopher Middleton translator
Format:Hardback
Publisher:New Directions Publishing Corporation
Published:19th Jun '12
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
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.
"The magnificently humble. The enormously small. The meaningfully ridiculous. Robert Walser’s work often reads like a dazzling answer to the question, How immense can modesty be? If Emily Dickinson made cathedrals out of em dashes and capital letters and the angle of winter light, Walser accomplished the feat with, well, ladies’ feet and trousers and little emotive words like joy, uncapitalized…the two worked out in hoarded words a kindred kind of literature." -- Rivka Galchen - Harper's Magazine
"The single most underrated writer of the 20th Century." -- The Los Angeles Times
"The poems also give us Walser's manner in concentrated miniature, and it could be that rhyme - joining the disparate, cultivating the arbitrary - is at the heart of what he is doing. They are odd, whimsical, insouciant things, exhilarating in their ability to be what they are." -- The Times Literary Supplement
ISBN: 9780811220019
Dimensions: 185mm x 135mm x 10mm
Weight: 173g
64 pages