Walser Worldwide

How many Robert Walser translators have you ever seen in one place at the same time? Two? Three? Well, I just saw 18 of them (i.e. 19 counting me), and even spent an entire week tooling around Switzerland with them in a big Walserian herd thanks to the generosity of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, the Robert Walser Zentrum in Bern, and the University of Lausanne, which has a well-established translation studies program. The idea was to let all the Walserites, who usually labor in isolation in their various countries, know what all the others are up to, and in fact it was a pretty fascinating week. Part of our time was spent on Walser tourism: the group traveled to various locales where Walser lived and worked, and learned something about the places and Walser's life there. At every stop, there was a tour led by an often overqualified expert. Werner Morlang and Bernhard Echte, for example: the two gentlemen who spent 12 years crouching over little magnifying glasses on feet known as thread counters to produce the six volume edition of microscripts Aus dem Bleistiftgebiet. Echte showed us around Biel, where Walser was born, escorting us from location to location so we could see what it meant in geographical terms for Walser's father to come down in the world (clearly visible even now). Echte has published a book about Walser's childhood and youth in Biel, so he knows these locations inside out. He also showed us the beautiful old theater where Walser saw his first play, at age 15 (it was The Robbers by Friedrich Schiller), and the fountain he describes in his prose piece "The Old Fountain" that I translated once but never published, if memory serves. I should get on that.

Karl Walser: Kabuki-Theaterszene, 1908

We also visited the Museum Schwab in Biel to see an exhibit of works by both Robert Walser (first editions galore!) and his brother Karl, who in his day was a celebrated stage set designer, book illustrator and painter. We saw another of Karl's paintings in the museum at the Paul Klee Zentrum in Bern, which was showing a special exhibition on the influence of Japanese art in Europe (Karl Walser traveled to Japan and did a lot of painting and drawing there).

Bern is now the international focal point of Robert Walser research. The Walser-Archiv was once located in Zurich, but it moved to Bern several years ago, and its collections are now split between the research center in the Robert Walser Zentrum and the Swiss National Library (which houses the manuscripts). In the RWZ, director Reto Sorg talked to us about recent developments in Walser research, in particular the new in-progress edition of Walser's complete works, Berner Ausgabe, which is to include extensive commentary, updating the annotations done by Jochen Greven on his wonderful edition Sämtliche Werke in Einzelausgaben. We also met with Wolfgang Groddeck, who is heading up a team working on a more academic Kritische Ausgabe, several volumes of which have already appeared. Currently the Robert Walser-Zentrum is also showing a beautiful little exhibit of work by Robert Frank, a Swiss-born photographer who lives in New York and is inspired by Walser's writing. In the Swiss National Library, Peter Stocker showed us a number of Walser manuscripts, including several recently discovered letters Walser wrote to his maybe/maybe-not-fiancée Frieda Mermet. Stocker coached us through reading Walser's full-sized handwriting (in the old German script called Kurrentschrift) before inviting us to try our hands at deciphering a microscript.

Psychiatric Clinic, Herisau

Back outside on the streets of Bern, we were given a tour of some of Walser's many addresses by Werner Morlang, who wrote a book about Walser's life in Bern. Walser spent the last active phase of his professional life here before checking himself in to the Waldau psychiatric clinic in 1929. After that, Walser was transferred to Herisau, where he spent his last twenty-three years as a patient in the clinic there. And so the busload of Walserites traveled to Herisau as well (an idyllic little town in the middle of Appenzell in eastern Switzerland). The head of clinical services showed us around and talked to us about what life in the asylum was like in those days.

Villa zum Abendstern, Wädenswil

The clinic grounds are gorgeous, with views of the Säntis (the one Appenzell Alp), and we visited the cemetery where Walser was buried. On our way back to our home base in Bern, we visited Echte again in the house in Wädenswil on the shores of Lake Zurich where Walser's second novel The Assistant was set. Then we traveled to Lausanne and spent the day talking about a prose piece, "Die leichte Hochachtung," that each of us had translated into his/her respective language (16 languages in total). Our hosts were the inimitable Peter Utz and Irene Weber Henking.

All in all, it was a pretty fascinating week. And it ended with a weekend at the Solothurn Literary Festival (Solothurner Literaturtage), where a number of the translators from the group took turns playing "glass translator" (i.e. translating in front of an audience for an hour, typing on a computer screen projected on the wall in real time while narrating one's thought process), and four of us appeared on a panel to talk about translating Walser and other Swiss authors. For anyone who's interested, there's a podcast posted on the website of the Literaturtage, a report on the panel broadcast by the Swiss radio station SRF2 (starting at minute 3:30), and brief praise in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. When it was time for the panel to start, I was shocked to find something like 250 people crammed into the room, which appeared to be designed to hold 100 or so. But then every single event at Solothurn was packed to the gills, and the big readings may have had audiences of up to 1000. This is the one big yearly festival of literature held in Switzerland, and clearly a lot of people look forward to it and come. I kept hearing people saying they were traveling to other cities to sleep because there wasn't a single hotel room left in all of Solothurn. I heard readings by Matthias Zschokke, Erica Pedretti, Urs Widmer, Klaus Hoffer, Jenny Erpenbeck and Mikhail Shishkin (author of the great Maidenhair - he lives in Switzerland), plus a number of younger writers like Arno Camenisch, and my encounters with Swiss writing continued into the evenings, when the bars (esp. the Kreuz) were packed with successful writers rubbing elbows with newcomers. My last night there, I met Michael Hunziker, a young writer who'd just published his first novel, Vom Rand der Tropen, which looks interesting. In short, more literature than you can shake a stick at.

So that's my report on Walserweltweit. Now it's time to continue my travels.

You Can't Go Back (to Thun) Again

I've been traveling around Switzerland for the past two weeks, and haven't managed to blog about it yet, mostly because I've been traveling around at too lively a clip to find the time. The first week was spent as part of a band of 19 Robert Walser translators from 16 languages temporarily imported by the Swiss cultural foundation Pro Helvetia, the Robert Walser-Zentrum in Bern and the Universität Lausanne, which has a vibrant translation studies program. I'll blog about the week's adventures soon, but first I want to say something about Thun, because that is where I am right now. Once the official group program ended last weekend, I set off on my own to do some research for my biography-in-progress of Walser. In particular, I've been traveling to various places where he lived and checking them out, so that the book won't be lamentably short on local color. And for the most part I've been able to find spiritus loci galore. But in Thun, not so much.

Robert Walser lived in Thun for a few months in spring 1899, working in the brewery here, if we can believe the narrator of his 1907 story "Kleist in Thun," who makes this claim. The claim is made more plausible by the fact that Thun did indeed have a brewery back then, though it doesn't now. All that remains of the brewery is a bus stop ("Brauerei"), now in the middle of a neighborhood of 1950s-looking apartment buildings that adjoin an admittedly lovely hayfield with a view of the Alps. Much of Thun has a view of the Alps, and this is one thing about Thun that will probably never change, though as I learned today, one of the grandest of the Alps visible from Thun has now had two holes for electric lights bored into its knobby tip so that it can be lit up on special occasions for the amusement of tourists.

I first visited Thun 25 years ago (in July 1988, I think it was), and found the town sleepy, quiet, idyllic, though it was probably a bustling metropole compared to the Thun Walser had found not quite a century before. Now it's kind of like Banff: Just look at those mountains! Who cares about the town. People come here to practice various sports. Thun does still have an old village center that's still more or less authentic-looking, and the building where Walser rented a furnished room (at Obere Haupstrasse [Upper Main Street] 39) is still standing. That street is interesting too: it features raised sidewalks, so passers-by have the choice of

walking down in the street (lined with ground-floor shops) or one story above them, where the ground-floor shops are actually on the second floor. In "Kleist in Thun," Walser describes the street-level spaces being used to display market goods. (Walser's house is the yellow-orange one at the far left in this picture.)

The most striking thing about Thun is its castle. Construction began around 1190, so it's been around for a while. Its characteristic four symmetrical towers are visible far off in every direction, and that's kind of the point. This castle was never meant to serve as a residence; it was to be a symbol of Duke Berchtold V's power and easily defensible, which it clearly was, perched up on its hill. The only real room built into it was an enormous Knights' Hall (39 x 62 feet) that was anything but cosy. But there are lots of great slot windows for pouring boiling oil down on your enemies, if they make it that far. The moment I got to town I scampered up the hill to visit the towers, from which you have amazing views of the entire countryside. Then I noticed the crane next door. When I came down the dozen flights of steps, the nice lady at the entryway told me that the city had sold off this public property (castle outbuildings which used to house municipal offices) to a private investor who was raising the roof and adding one story to the building. She said no one in Thun understood what had made the city council sell off the building.

The house where Kleist stayed in 1802 and 1803, on a little island in the Aare River, is no longer standing, though it was still here when Robert Walser passed through. Some rich person later bought the island, tore down the old villa and built a new one. There's a sign posted in the little park outside, suggesting that visitors instead enjoy the Kleist statue (hideous) that was originally meant to mark his gravesite at Wannsee outside Berlin, but the Berliners rejected it (probably because it's so ugly), and so it wound up in Thun. The sign points out that it was free. In "Kleist in Thun," Walser describes a marble plaque on the house that visitors to the island can admire, be they Jews, Christians or swallows, suggesting that the island used to be open to the public.

Maybe I feel so disheartened by Thun because the beautiful old hotel Zunfthaus zu Metzgern (Butcher's Guild, though the name actually sounds nice in German) where I blissfully stayed 25 years ago - big rooms, big fluffy beds, big breakfasts with pots of hot tea and milk - has been hideously renovated, basically turned into a big student dormitory. I am writing this in a tiny little room that might be described as monastic if that were one of the furniture themes available at IKEA. The innkeeper made me pay in advance, explaining that she's had trouble with people taking off without paying their bills, possibly because no one is on duty until 10:00 or 10:30 a.m., apparently, which I take to mean that no breakfast will be served. There's WiFi, but only downstairs in the cornily-decorated restaurant, four flights down (I counted them as I was lugging my suitcase up the stairs - no elevator either).

Ah, whining about bad hotels, a classic blog gambit. The best way to forget about trifles like having to

use a bathroom down the hall is to take a walk along the shoreline promenade to Lake Thun, which is completely lined with mountains on its southern edge, truly a spectacular sight. I'm sure Robert Walser enjoyed it too, even though he wasn't inclined toward Alpinism (he liked to look at mountains but didn't climb them - the ones he did climb were actually hills). Walser didn't write his story set in Thun until seven years after he left the place, giving his memories time to develop the golden sheen visible about the edges of this story, which is really one of his best, though untypical for his work. He really does set out to write a voice for Kleist that diverges from his own, with a lot of uncharacteristically short sentences (like: "Nice idea that. Easy enough to think up in Potsdam," when Kleist is just remembering he'd wanted to become a farmer when it occurred to him to come to Switzerland). In short: go read Walser's story, and read Kleist as well, and then maybe just skip the trip to Thun. Next up: Bern, Biel, Bellelay, Täuffelen, or who knows what else.

Announcing the Publication of In Translation: Translators on Their Work And What It Means

Those of you who teach probably know what it's like to have assembled - over the course of years if not decades - all your favorite essays and articles to read with your students, and if you're nothing at all like me, these documents might be collected, neatly labeled, in a series of file folders numbered with the weeks of the semester. Or maybe you're like me, and they're around here somewhere, didn't I just see one of them in one of these piles? It's helpful for people who share my talent for chaos to have all our work tools in one place, and the best place for articles and essays one might want to lay one's hands on with minimal stress is between the covers of a book. With this in mind, I am delighted to announce the publication of an anthology of essays on translation that Esther Allen and I have been working on for the last couple of years: In Translation: Translators on Their Work And What It Means. The book will be coming out officially from Columbia University Press on May 24, but I've been hearing rumors that copies have already been sighted in bookstores around the country, so it's probably already possible to pick one up locally. Or else you can get yours online: the Press is offering to sell the anthology at a 30% discount to readers of this blog if you order via the CUP website using the code INTALL. If you're closer to England and would like to order the book from the U.K. distributor, Wiley, send in your order by e-mail mentioning the code INTALL to receive the discount.

Did I say yet that this book contains most of my favorite essays about literary translation, all of them written by actual translators who are also scholars, writers, thinkers and teachers of various sorts? Clare Cavanagh, Richard Sieburth, Alice Kaplan, Haruki Murakami, Lawrence Venuti, Forrest Gander, Eliot Weinberger, Jason Grunebaum, José Manuel Prieto, Christi A. Merrill, Catherine Porter, Maureen Freely, Ted Goossen, Michael Emmerich, David Bellos and Peter Cole, in no particular order. It's a really good book, and designed to be pleasurably readable by anyone with an interest in international literature and its journey into English (or Japanese, Spanish, etc.), not just students enrolled in translation-themed seminars. It's got an essay by me too, about revising translations, and one by Esther about the history of Spanish-language translation in NYC. You'll find a complete table of contents on the CUP website. I hope you'll have a look.

Oh, and mark your calendars for Thursday, June 6, when we'll be holding an official launch for the book as part of the ceremony for the 2013 Gutekunst Prize. If you're in town, please come raise a glass with us at the Goethe-Institut at 72 Spring St., 11th Floor, starting at 6:00 p.m.

2013 Best Translated Book Award Winners Announced

I know you've been waiting impatiently to hear the outcome of this year's Best Translated Book Awards, so here's the scoop:

The fiction prize goes to George Szirtes for his translation of László Krasznahorkai's Satantango, which I very much enjoyed reading (and also to Krasznahorkai himself for writing the book), and the poetry prize goes to Sean Cotter for his translation of Nichita Stanescu's Wheel with a Single Spoke, which I'm looking forward to reading, and to Stanescu himself. So the winning languages this year are Hungarian and Romanian, which I'm glad to see. Those are two languages whose literature deserves more attention anyhow, and seeing two fine translators honored for challenging projects is always satisfying.

The presentations were made during an event at the PEN World Voices Festival that seemed not to have made its way into the official program. Maybe next year. And meanwhile congratulations to the winning translators, their authors, and their publishing houses, New Directions and Archipelago.

What I Learned at the 2013 London Book Fair

The week before last, I flew across the ocean to attend the London Book Fair as a guest of the LBF Literary Translators' Centre (and thanks to the support of the Arts Council England). I'd never been to the LBF before and found it fascinating. It's much smaller than the dauntingly gargantuan Frankfurt Book Fair, and the Literary Translators' Centre - a co-production between the LBF and English PEN - was an amazing hub of activity throughout the Fair. One end of the Centre was a stage area in which panel discussions were held back to back all day (including two in which I was invited to participate: this one and this one),

"A Common Language: Literary Translation in the US and the UK, with Esther Allen, Kate Griffin, Antonia Lloyd-Jones, me, and Samantha Schnee. Photo by Lawrence Schimel.

and the other end was set up with a bunch of little tables where the translation crowd could gather to talk shop and network. The day before the fair began, representatives from translation organizations on both sides of the ocean assembled for what turned out to be a four-hour long powwow on the resources available in our respective countries; the idea was to think about ways to strengthen our transatlantic cooperation and also to learn what we can from each other to develop our individual resources on the national level. After the summit, Daniel Hahn, national programme director of the British Centre for Literary Translation, asked me to write up my impressions for publication in In Other Words, BCLT's biannual journal. With his permission, I am posting them here as well:

What I Learned at the London Book Fair

The London Book Fair kicked off for me this year with a Translation Summit kindly hosted by the Gulbenkian Foundation and organized by the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT) and the UK Translators Association. I learned a lot of things there. For one, I learned to envy my U.K. colleagues their excellent network of literary translators’ organizations. Three of them in particular work together to offer translators in the U.K. many kinds of support: the Translators Association (TA, a subsidiary of the Society of Authors); the Writers in Translation programme at English PEN; and BCLT, which is based in Norwich. In the United States, we have only two major organizations: the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) and the Translation Committee of the PEN American Center, and even taken together they have a narrower range of focus and activity than their U.K. counterparts.

Not that there aren’t also things that make my U.K. colleagues envy me. On some counts, U.S. translators are ahead. Those with established reputations can generally get their names printed on the front covers of their books and have been able to do so for at least the better part of a decade; I put this in all my U.S. contracts and rarely even have to have a conversation with my publishers about it, whereas my U.K. publishers regularly balk at this, and my U.K. colleagues report that front-cover credits for translators are rare. And grants are available in the U.S. that are designed specifically to provide direct support to translators. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) offers substantial fellowships in the amount of $12,500 or (in exceptional cases involving long, difficult books) $25,000, though the latter are rarely awarded; one can receive these fellowships once a decade.

There are also smaller grants that often go to emerging translators: the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grants, available to translators working on book-length projects, whether or not they have publishers lined up, and whether or not they live in the U.S. These grants were made possible by the generosity of translator and translation advocate Michael Henry Heim, who established the Translation Fund at the PEN American Center with a large endowment nearly a decade before his death in 2012.

In addition to administering these grants, the PEN American Center offers a model contract on its website. It also awards prizes for outstanding literary translations in poetry and prose, along with a lifetime achievement award, the Ralph Manheim Medal, which is awarded once every three years.

The second major U.S. organization, ALTA, is an academic-style association that puts on a large translation conference each year unlike anything that currently exists in the U.K. and offers travel stipends to encourage beginning translators to attend the conference. It also publishes a translation studies journal, Translation Review.

Like the PEN American Center, the TA in London publishes a model contract on its website. The TA also provides a legal consultation service—translators can submit their contracts for vetting before signing them—and suggests an “observed rate” (currently £88.5/1000 words) that translators can request in payment for their work. U.S.-based organizations cannot do the same for fear of prosecution under anti-trust laws, though the “observed rate” that tends to get talked about in New York as a recommendation is $150/1000 words. But in the U.S. many translators, particularly those without established records of publication, work for far below this rate (sometimes 50% below), while in the U.K. the TA’s “observed rate” is widely adhered to, even by publishers hiring younger translators who know what to ask for. The model contracts on both sides of the pond advise translators to ask for royalties in their contracts; in the U.K. royalties for translators are pretty much universal, while in the U.S. they must be negotiated for, and some publishers categorically refuse to provide them.

English PEN—unlike the PEN American Center—is able to make grants to publishers to support the translation costs and publicity/marketing expenses for translated books. U.S. publishers have only the cultural institutes of foreign countries to turn to, which means that it is considerably more expensive to publish translations of books from countries whose governments do not offer subsidies.

One more thing I envy is the U.K.’s Emerging Translators Network, which provides encouragement, career strategizing and other sorts of peer support to younger translators who haven’t yet made names for themselves. Younger translators in the U.K. can also apply to participate in an excellent mentorship program through BCLT that pairs experienced translators with translation apprentices—many of whom have already completed a masters degree in translation—for six months of editing and career guidance. The mentors are paid for their work. What a splendid idea this is. Certainly mentorship takes place in classrooms on both sides of the ocean, but extensive individualized guidance on a long-term project is rare. In the States, I was asked to serve this year as a mentor in a program organized by the Yiddish Book Center, but that was the first I’d heard of such mentorships in the U.S. I’d love to see a support framework of this sort established over here. BCLT also hosts summer courses at the University of East Anglia.

After the Translation Summit, the American contingent was left thinking it’s time for us to establish a Translators Association of our own to provide workshop training, mentorship, publishing/promotional subsidies and direct financial assistance to a larger number of literary translators. We’ll be working on that one. Both the U.K. and the U.S. colleagues agreed that it would be good to create an international Anglophone translators association to help us pool our resources across the pond (and the Pacific too, and in India). People kept bandying about the name World Translators Federation—in large part, I’m afraid, for the sake of the acronym.

In any case, it’s clear that establishing an international umbrella organization to link together a global network of local organizations of English-language translators (including a potential new one to be set up in the U.S.) would go a long way toward ensuring that Anglophone translators around the globe will be able to profit from the resources and advances developed in each of our respective countries and network internationally. In an era of Global English, it might well be time to call instead for an era of Global Translation.

Siri Hustvedt on Authors & Translators Blog

The idea behind the blog Authors & Translators - launched only this past March - is to give authors a chance to say something about the translators they've worked with and their experience of being translated, and to give translators a forum to talk about working with their authors. This collaborative blog has grown a lot over the past month. The blog presents a standard set of open-ended questions for each group to answer. Contributors can respond in any language, and then the blog uses Google Translate to make their comments accessible in other languages. Google Translate, as we know, is problematic, so I have mainly limited myself to sampling the contributions submitted in languages I can read, but I also note that pretty much all the authors and translators who are able to write in English tend to do so for the blog, so their remarks are accessible to readers of English without the help of a not-so-literate machine.

The most recent author to contribute to Authors & Translators is Siri Hustvedt, who reads several languages and speaks appreciatively of her translators and the profession as a whole:

I think of the profession with profound admiration. I think of all the books I have read, which would have been unavailable to me had they not been translated into English. Without translation, my literary life would have been greatly impoverished. I would have developed another mind altogether. I also feel ashamed about the tiny number of books in translation that are brought out in the U.S. by major publishers every year. This is a sign of both American arrogance and provincialism. And yet, writers continue to write all over the world, and translation goes on. I am deeply grateful to my translators for remaking my work into their own languages.

For the rest of her comments and to check out the other authors and translators featured on the site, visit the Authors & Translators website.

A Master Class with Michael Emmerich

English-language translators of Japanese literature based in NYC (or able and willing to travel) will be seriously in luck next week: The British Centre for Literary Translation is hosting a free-of-charge one-day workshop with the wonderful Michael Emmerich (translator of Kawabata Yasunari, Yoshimoto Banana, Takahashi Gen’ichirō, Akasaka Mari, Yamada Taichi, Matsuura Rieko, and Kawakami Hiromi) and editor Elmer Luke, who has an impressive resume as (among other things) an editor of literary translations from the Japanese. The two will come together to spend a long day (10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.) on Friday, May 3 with workshop participants at the Center for Fiction in NYC. The workshop's impressive price point (free) is made possible by a grant from the Nippon Foundation.

Here's the workshop description:

This day-long masterclass will be structured around close work on texts sent in advance to participants. Discussion will centre on the differences in approach evident in variant translations of the same texts. Participants should have a good working knowledge of Japanese, as well as some experience in literary translation, and will be invited to prepare their own translations of some of the texts under discussion. This masterclass will also focus on the next stage of translation – editing the English text. As Michael Emmerich puts it, participants will explore "what happens when the translator begins to detach the English text from the Japanese text, to look at the English text as an English text that has to go out and live its own life."

If you would like to participate, you must apply ASAP: the closing date for applications is Friday, April 26. To apply, send a note to Sarah Bower (click here for e-mail) outlining your literary translation experience and explaining why you would like to attend, and attaching your CV. BCLT writes, "We recommend you make your application early as places are limited, and we will be asking successful applicants to prepare some brief translations for discussion during the class. Participants will be sent the texts for translation in advance, to be completed by 29th April." As you see, you'll need to get your applications in ASAP, which probably means today. Happy applying, and I hope you'll have the chance to participate in this excellent workshop!