NYRB NEWS
Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April
The first English translation of stories by the great Dutch writer Nescio
Nescio wrote of madness and sadness, youth and youth lost, and courage and vulnerability with a beauty that few before or after have managed. His depictions of the Dutch landscape and scenes of Amsterdam—its canals, its streets, and its people—have no equal on any page.
Richard Howard and Marina Harss are finalists for French to English translation awards
Earlier this month the French-American Foundation and the Florence Gould Foundation announced the finalists for their 25th Annual Translation Prize for excellence in translations of French works into English published in 2011.
We are thrilled that Richard Howard, translator of Marc Fumaroli’s When The World Spoke French, and Marina Harss, translator of Elizabeth Gille’s The Mirador: Dreamed Memories of Irène Némirovsky by Her Daughter, have been nominated for this prestigious award.
There will be one Fiction and one Non-Fiction prize presented at the annual Awards Ceremony on May 23rd, in New York. Each winning translator will receive a $10,000 cash prize funded by the Florence Gould Foundation.
Gregor von Rezzori’s An Ermine in Czernopol praised in The New York Times Book Review
In his glowing review in the March 4th issue of The New York Times Book Review, John Wray describes An Ermine in Czernopol as a “mid-20th-century masterpiece” and compares Rezzori’s work to the novels of Vladimir Nabokov.
An Ermine in Czernpol is one of the volumes of Gregor von Rezzori’s Bukovina Trilogy, the others being Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and The Snows of Yesteryear. We’re offering the three volumes at 30% off their combined retail prices.
March Birthdays
We start off with William Dean Howells (1837-1920), who was born on March 1st, and whose Indian Summer, the story of a season in a life of an American newspaper publisher turned expat in Italy, is at once a brilliant comedy of errors and a charming, memorable romance. Or, as John Updike said, “A midlife crisis has rarely been sketched in fiction with better humor, with gentler comedy and more gracious acceptance of life’s irrevocability.”
Up next is Yuri Olesha (1899-1960). Born in Odessa on March 2nd to a card-playing father, Olesha grew up to be the author who decried the loss of the artistic freedoms before the First Congress of Soviet Writers. His masterpiece Envy depicts an anti-hero who both hates and is deeply jealous of his Soviet superiors. Envy is a darkly comedic depiction of humanity both its best and its worst, and, as was written in The New York Times, “Every page of Olesha demands to be read and seen again.”
March 4th marks the birth of Alexandros Papadiamantis (1851-1911). Hailed by Milan Kundera as “The greatest Modern Greek prose writer,” Papadiamantis wrote The Murderess, a tale of crime and punishment that will send chills up any reader’s spine. It is the story of Hadoula, an old woman living in the margins of society, who, rocking her new-born granddaughter to sleep, realizes that there is nothing worse than being born a woman—and that there’s something she can do about it.
Finally, on March 6th, join us in paying tribute to Gabriel García Márquez, Nobel Prize winner and author of many renowned and beloved works. We’re proud to have published in the NYRB Classics series his Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littín, a true-life adventure story and a superb work of modern reportage about an exile’s return to Chile.
Two NYRB Classics featured in NPR’s Three Books Series
Listen to Alex Gilvarry on Cassandra at the Wedding and Emma Straub on Great Granny Webster.
My Dog Tulip video on Amateur Thursdays
My Dog Tulip is J.R. Ackerley’s memoir on his German shepherd, whom he described as the “ideal friend.” It is a bittersweet retrospective account of their sixteen-year companionship, as well as a profound and subtle meditation on the strangeness that lies at the heart of all relationships. In vivid and sometimes startling detail, Ackerley tells of Tulip’s often erratic behavior and very canine tastes, and of his own fumbling but determined efforts to ensure for her an existence of perfect happiness.
In 2009 My Dog Tulip was brought to life as an adult, animated film, with the voices of Christopher Plummer, Lynn Redgrave and Isabella Rossellini. The film is now available on DVD.
Other J.R. Ackerley books, all from NYRB Classics:
We Think the World of You
Ackerley’s only novel, We Think the World of You tells the story of an unlikely love affair, following its course along its many surprising and heartbreaking twists and turns. The book was described by Ackerley himself as “a fairytale for adults.”
Hindoo Holiday
Hindoo Holiday is an intimate and very funny account of an exceedingly strange place, and one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century travel literature.
My Father and Myself
Ackerley’s pursuit of his father is also an exploration of the self, making My Father and Myself a pioneering record, at once sexually explicit and emotionally charged, of life as a gay man. This witty, sorrowful, and beautiful book is a classic of twentieth-century memoir.
A Letter From Susan Bernofsky, Translator of Robert Walser’s Berlin Stories
In 1905 Robert Walser packed his bags and left behind his native Switzerland for the bustling metropolis of Berlin. The fledgling author, twenty-seven years of age, had just published his first book of fiction, Fritz Kochers Aufsätze (Fritz Kocher’s Essays), and moving to Berlin was the obvious next step for him to take in the pursuit of a proper literary career. Just a year before he had been supporting himself as an on-again-off-again bank clerk and copyist, but now he was looking to become a proper novelist, an endeavor that would require all his strength. When he arrived in the German capital, he moved into the apartment of his brother Karl, a painter, who had made the pilgrimage to Berlin the year before and quickly established himself as the foremost stage set designer of the age.
Walser soon discovered, however, that his brother’s high-society lifestyle was not to his liking. The fancy soirées they attended made him feel like a bumpkin, and he soon developed a reputation for uncouth conduct. Karl would receive invitations to dinner specifying he could bring Robert “only if he wasn’t too hungry.” It may well have been this gentrified arts scene in which artists and their patrons socialized together that made Walser decide to enroll, only a few months after his arrival, in Berlin’s Aristocratic Servants School. Here he studied the art of waiting on table, polishing shoes, and shaking out carpets. When he graduated, he took a job as an assistant butler at a count’s castle in Silesia, where he spent the better part of the winter. His publisher was instructed to send him letters only in unmarked envelopes, since he didn’t want his employers to know he was a writer.
He was a writer, though, and remained true to his craft. Over the next three years he would write and publish three novels: The Tanners, The Assistant, and Jakob von Gunten, as well as producing scores of short pieces for publication in magazines and newspapers. Berlin Stories collects all the short work Walser wrote in Berlin about Berlin, as well as a selection of later pieces in which he looks back on his life in the metropolis. These stories are the record of a city in the throes of modernity. Berlin was already a vast metropolis, one of the great cities of Europe. It got its first subway in 1902; thirty-five different streetcar lines converged at Potsdamer Platz; and automobiles zipped in and out among hackney carriages on its crowded streets.
If the city was on the move, so was Walser. He walked the streets collecting impressions. He was a fast writer, and liked to write about things in rapid motion. In “Aschinger” he describes a Berlin-style fast-food restaurant, and his walk stories—like “Good morning, Giantess!”—show us the city as a blur of glimpses. “In the Electric Tram” talks about learning how to sit when riding in this newfangled vehicle, and “Full” features a monologue by a disgruntled omnibus conductor.
“A metropolis,” Walser writes, “is a giant spiderweb of squares, streets, bridges, buildings, gardens, and wide, long avenues […], a wave-filled ocean that for the most part is still largely unknown to its own inhabitants, an impenetrable forest, an opulent, overgrown, huge, forgotten, or half-forgotten park, a thing that has been built up too extensively for it to ever again be oriented within itself.” A fire breaking out in the city produces a “thick, seemingly incessant rain of small, light sparks and embers [that] flies out of the dark air and down into the crowded street, sowing a crop of glowing snow.” The wonder that the city and its life inspired in him is evident in the vibrancy of his sentences, and I have taken pains to let the vividness of his impressions enliven the prose of my translation as well.
Finally, Berlin was also a city of the theater for Walser, something he experienced both as an audience member and through his brother’s work and friends. The young author had started out dreaming of becoming an actor, even auditioning once for the celebrated Josef Kainz (who pronounced the teenage enthusiast devoid of thespian talent). Throughout his life Walser maintained his love of the stage and wrote a great deal about performances in Berlin, including both high art (“On the Russian Ballet”) and low (“Cowshed”). My favorite of his theater texts here is the one entitled “An Actor,” devoted to a lion in Berlin’s Zoological Garden; this actor is a cousin to Rilke’s famous panther.
Walser left Berlin in 1912, never to come back. His Berlin Stories offer a wonderful kaleidoscopic portrait of this city that both entranced and overwhelmed him, a mixed response that made its way into these stories—at times he describes the advent of modernism’s technologies as almost hostile. For him, city life is best perceived not from the back seat of an automobile but by walking the streets, whether first thing in the morning or late at night. These stories are records of a quite particular time and place, but also of a very unusual sensibility, one whose quizzical shaping gaze presents the city as a terra incognita of intoxicating possibility.
Best Wishes,
Susan Bernofsky