The Walk

1 June 2012

Territory Rights — Worldwide including Canada, but excluding the British Commonwealth.

Robert Walser (Author), Susan Bernofsky (Translator)

Description

Robert Walser's preferred alternate version of his classic tale. In a new translation by Susan Bernofsky, The Walk is an elegant consideration of walking and the philosophical musings it engenders.

A pseudo-biographical “stroll” through town and countryside rife with philosophical 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. However, Walser heavily revised his most famous novella, altering nearly every sentence, rendering the baroque tone of his tale into something more spare. An introduction by translator Susan Bernofsky explains the history of The Walk, and the differences between its two versions.

Reviews

"Incredibly interesting and beautiful." — John Ashbery

"One of the most profound products of modern literature." — Walter Benjamin

"The Walk is a good place to start reading Walser, and offers a kind of bridge between the novels and the microscripts.... The walk is a search for freedom, is an act of freedom itself, and the writing feels free to launch into invective, or drape itself in courtesy, as it pleases. It is an attempt to approximate writing to life, to subject it to circumstance and chance encounter, but for all its overt artificiality the story is deeply affecting." — The Times Literary Supplement

"Walser’s project is mirrored and echoed by modernity’s general obsession with interiority and exploring new forms of subjectivity. We should understand Walser’s poetics of smallness as being as grandiose as anything that modernity has produced." — The Quarterly Conversation

"The hope that shines forth in the moments of self-knowledge, transcendence, and grace Walser describes is anything but meager: on the contrary, it is exultation the writer feels when he perceives the sublime in the tiniest details of everyday life." — The Brooklyn Rail

Also By: Robert Walser

Looking at Pictures
Robert Walser, Susan Bernofsky, Lydia Davis, Christopher Middleton
Hardback, 2015
A special side of Robert Walser: his essays on art
Fairy Tales: Dramolettes
Robert Walser, Daniele Pantano, James Reidel, Reto Sorg
Paperback, 2015
Three mini-plays by the German wunderkind and asylum-dweller.
Fairy Tales: Dramolettes
Robert Walser, Daniele Pantano, James Reidel, Reto Sorg
E Book, 2015
Three mini-plays by the German wunderkind and asylum-dweller.
Microscripts
Robert Walser, Susan Bernofsky, Maira Kalman
Paperback, 2012
Now in a gorgeous new paperback edition with full-color illustrations by Maira Kalman, Microscripts is a one-of-a-kind masterpiece.
The Tanners
Robert Walser, Susan Bernofsky, W. G. Sebald
E Book, 2012
"The Tanners is a contender for Funniest Book of the Year."—The Village Voice

Also By: Susan Bernofsky

Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel
Yoko Tawada, Susan Bernofsky
Paperback, 2024
A moving story about friendship, illness, and the poetry of Paul Celan by the astonishing Yoko Tawada, winner of the National Book Award
The Metamorphosis: A Norton Critical Edition
Franz Kafka, Mark M. Anderson, Susan Bernofsky
First Edition, E Book, 2021
“This fine version, with David Cronenberg’s inspired introduction and the new translator’s beguiling afterword, is, I suspect, the most disturbing though the most comforting of all so far; others...
Visitation
Jenny Erpenbeck, Susan Bernofsky
Paperback, 2017
A bestseller in Germany, Visitation has established Jenny Erpenbeck as one of Europe’s most significant contemporary authors.
Go, Went, Gone
Jenny Erpenbeck, Susan Bernofsky
Paperback, 2017
New York Times Notable Book 2018;Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2018; Lois Roth Award Winner
An unforgettable German bestseller about the European refugee crisis: “Erpenbeck will get under your skin”...
Go, Went, Gone
Jenny Erpenbeck, Susan Bernofsky
E Book, 2017
New York Times Notable Book 2018;Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2018; Lois Roth Award Winner
An unforgettable German bestseller about the European refugee crisis: “Erpenbeck will get under your skin”...

Paperback

9780811219921

117 x 180 mm • 96 pages

£8.99

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