Such a Façade, Madame, Is Odd (Late Poems and a Lost Novella)

Such a Façade, Madame, Is Odd: Late Poems and a Lost Novella is the first English translation of a “lost” work by the major Swiss modernist author Robert Walser, along with a selection of his late poems, most in English for the first time. The novella did appear in Walser’s Collected Works under the title “Diary Fragment, 1926,” but it has never been published on its own (except in Spanish); translator Damion Searls notes the problem with this title, in that the work is not a diary, not a fragment, and not about 1926. What it is is a pendant to his beloved novella The Walk, though it easily stands on its own: written in Walser’s famous miniscule “microscript,” it was recopied and reworked into a finished story. Like The Walk, “A Journal of My Experiences” provides a selective and very literary chronicle of Walser’s daily life in Switzerland: city strolls, country outings, and encounters with various people, including his obsession with one special lady, along with various philosophical and self-reflexive flights of thought and fancy. The poems range in tone from the whimsical to the despairing and reveal the innermost concerns and workings of this singular writer’s mind. Presented alongside their German-language originals, Damion Searls’s translations of these late poems capture Walser’s loopy rhyme schemes and manic melancholy energy in a way that has not been seen in English before. As the TLS asks of Walser’s work, “Are we dealing with pure literature, the vagaries of the everyday, jokes, or empty fancies? The writing is radical and elegant enough to encompass all these possibilities and many more.”