Kutsch

Robert Walser (1878-1956)—admired by Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, and Walter Benjamin—wrote as many as eight novels (four have survived) and thousands of the short prose texts that became his trademark. Called “a clairvoyant of the small” by W. G. Sebald, Walser drafted many of his works on small slips of found paper in a pencil script so tiny that when a trove of manuscripts was discovered after his death, it was believed initially that he had been writing in secret code._(updated 4/2011)

Susan Bernofsky is the translator of Yoko Towada’s novel Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel (New Directions, 2024) and works by Robert Walser, Jenny Erpenbeck, Franz Kafka, and Hermann Hesse. Her book Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser (Yale University Press, 2021) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. A Guggenheim, Cullman, and Berlin Prize fellow, she teaches literary translation at the Columbia University School of the Arts. She is working on a new translation of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain for W.W. Norton. (updated 10/2024)