Speaking to the Rose is a 2005 English-language short story collection of 50 works by the Swiss author Robert Walser, including feuilletons, short stories, prose pieces, and a poem. The works are translated by Christopher Middleton. The book is published by the University of Nebraska Press.

The included works date from 1912 to 1932 and focus on Walser's pieces that hadn't been previously collected in book form. The book includes 14 translations from the "pencil area" or "microscripts" (aka the B texts or "Bleistiftgebiet"), which were manuscripts Walser had written in a tiny coded script on random papers and cards.

Background Microscripts It took 17 years for German scholars Bernhard Echte and Werner Morlang to decipher Walser's microscripts, which they did at the Robert Walser archive in Zurich. 14 pieces from those manuscripts are included. Middleton notes in the preface that although these texts are "the outcome of judicious and gradual deciphering", they were never finalized, polished, or proofread by Walser himself. The final results of the deciphering and transcription process have only a small number of "doubts" (i.e. remaining ambiguities), which aren't considered substantial.

Title The line "speaking to the rose" appears in the included piece "The Gifted Person." Flowers and roses are also mentioned by Walser in several other included pieces. One of Walser's published books in his lifetime was titled The Rose ("Die Rose" in German) in 1925.

Format and genre Tom Whalen described the format or category of the works as "feuilletons, sketches, stories, rambles, essays, improvisations" and settled on the word writings as the best term.

Reception In a review at the London Review of Books, Michel Hofmann said that Walser "resists [a] summary description". Hofmann cataloged many seemingly contradictory descriptions in analyses of Walser, and stated that all were true. Hofmann also quoted Christopher Middleton, writing that Walser is a "wild particle" who people read for "his blithe difference from colleagues in any age or any condition – for his perfect and serene oddity."

In a review at Marginalia, Tom Whalen wrote that "Walser’s central themes of self-effacement, the primacy of the imagination, the liberating aim of creative play are richly displayed in the new volume." Whalen praised the piece "The Gifted Person" as "astonishing improvisation, designed simultaneously to inspirit language, ironize kitsch, and mock the arbiters of literature who judge books only by the principles that can be extracted from them." Whalen also said that readers are fortunate for Christopher Middleton's "quirky brilliance" as a poet and skilled translator.

Style and themes Noted scholar and translator Mark Harman wrote in a review that Walser "infuses every page he writes with a sensibility that is, as one of Walser's figures says of himself, 'alert to everything.'" Harman argued that the intense self-consciousness in Walser's voice makes the fragmented portrait modern. He called Walser's cast of characters "constantly in flux, [..] they speak with unmistakable voices. By turns effusive and reticent, self-effacing and self-inflating, long-winded and laconic, solitary and convivial, their beguiling voices lure us into Walser's web." Harman also said the narrators and personae are "prone to wayward meditations, sudden enthusiasms, and startling flashes of insight." He noted Walser's blend of naivete, sophistication, and insouciance.

Pieces included The 14 titles below that have non-standard title capitalization, i.e. lowercase keywords, are works from Walser's microscript manuscripts (the penciled "B" texts or "Bleistiftgebiet"), which Walser never finalized or edited himself.

"A Note on Van Gogh’s L'Arlesienne" (1912) "Brentano" (1913) "Writing Geschwister Tanner" (1914) "The Back Alley" (1916) "The Story of the Prodigal Son" (1917) "The Cave Man" (1918) "Dreaming" (1920) "Hercules" (1920) "Odysseus" (1920) "Theseus" (1920) "Olga’s Story". (1921) "Something about Goethe" (1921) "The Robber" (1921) "The One and Only" (1924 composition, 1938 published) "Finally she condescended" (1924) "The Fairytale Town" (1925) "The Blind Man" (1925) "And now he was playing, alas, the piano" (1925) "An Essay on Lion Taming" (1925) "These little services" (1925) "Ramses II" (1925) "Spanish Wine Hall" (1925) "It can so happen that" (1926) "Brentano (III)" (1926) "From the Life of a Writer" (1926) "Letter of a European" (1926) "O how in this not large" (1926) "Apparently not a cloud was to be seen" (1926) "The White Lady" (1926) "The Red Thread" (1926) "I would like to be standing" (1927) "Loud expressions of opinion" (1927) "Letter to a Patient Lady" (1927) "The stage-space might have measured" (1927) "Looking out into the landscape" (1927) "It’s still not so long ago" (1927) "Cabaret Scene" (1927) "The idea was a delicate one" (1928) "Execution Story" (1928) "To a Poet" (1928) "She addressed me in the formal style" (1928) "Prose Piece" (1927 or 1929) "My Endeavors" (1928) "I Was Reading Two Stories" (1930) "A Propos the Kissing of a Hand" (1930) "The Avenue" (1931) "Heroic Landscape" (1931) "The Gifted Person" (1932) "The Lake" (1932) ""Kennst Du sie?" (1930, poem. Presented in the Epilogue.)

Footnotes

References