Book record
Thirty poems
Robert Walser
Translated from German by Christopher Middleton
Thirty poems, by Robert Walser and translated by Christopher Middleton from German, brings Swiss German-language poetry into English through Robert Walser's thirty small poems, walking intelligence, and the modest grandeur of noticing without possession. The metadata gives the reader a doorway, but the real value is what happens once the poem begins making its own weather. I would read it for walking, smallness, snow, and the strange dignity of a minor-looking sentence, not as a fixed lesson about a nation, period, or school. The best entry point is still the poem itself: the line that catches, the image that refuses to explain itself, the feeling that arrives before paraphrase. Thirty poems belongs in the translated poetry library because it gives the library a Swiss classic of humility, motion, and delicate strangeness.
- Published
- 2012
- Publisher
- New Directions Pub.
- Language
- German
- Country
- Switzerland
- ISBN
- 9780811220019