Cover

ALSO BY ROBERT WALSER

FROM NEW DIRECTIONS

The Assistant

A Little Ramble

Looking at Pictures

Microscripts

The Tanners

Thirty Poems

The Walk

Foreword

FOREWORD

“Cinderella, she seems so easy.”
Bob Dylan, “Desolation Row”

In his hometown of Biel, where he was born in 1878 and which he left in 1895, Robert Walser discovered his passion for the theater. Inspired by Friedrich Schiller, he dreamed of becoming an actor and playwright. As a writer, Walser retained and masterfully cultivated this histrionic passion for the spoken word. He expressed, imitated, and perfectly adapted the immediate presence of speech into writing, which also complemented his arsenal for irony.

Walser is not an author who strives in the free and open. “We are so glad in dark, meditative holes,” he wrote in 1907 in his essay “The Theater, a Dream.” He loved the delimited and well-defined space. Restriction allowed him to compress and unfold his imaginarium. Since his youth, Walser knew that the magical effect of literature finds its most wonderful expression in the theater. “Are the fictions not dreams, and isn’t the open stage nothing other than its wide-open mouth talking in its sleep?”

Although Walser admired the theater, he never wrote directly for the stage. Instead, he imparted a theatrical Grundgestus in his prose (Brecht’s word meaning fundamental gesture, attitude, posture), which the fairy-tale dramolettes—translated here by Daniele Pantano and James Reidel—also demonstrate. They are short, closet plays that do not retell the familiar fairy tale but rather recall their symbols and tropes. “Whether they could ever be put on with, for instance, music is totally questionable and seems for the present utterly beside the point. They are tempered for speech and language, to a beat and a rhythmic enjoyment,” Walser wrote to a publisher in 1912.

As it turned out, Walser’s fairy-tale dramolettes found their way to the stage during the 1970s, when young troupes and little theaters discovered them. Representing a milestone in the history of their reception is Heinz Holliger’s opera Snow White (Schneewittchen), which is based on Walser’s text and premiered at the Zurich Opera House in 1998 with great success. Originally, in 1901, Cinderella (Aschenbrödel) and Snow White were published in the journal Die Insel. In 1919, Walser gathered them with other dramolettes for the volume Comedies. Around the same time he likely wrote Thorn Rose (Dornröschen), or Sleeping Beauty, which appeared a year later in the journal Pro Helvetia. The Christ Child (Das Christkind), also dates from that time and was published in Die Neue Rundschau in 1920. It can be read too as a fairy tale or, more properly, a verse morality.