Harp & Altar
POETRY
Stephanie Anderson is the author of two chapbooks, In the Particular Particular (New Michigan Press, 2007) and The Choral Mimeographs (Dancing Girl Press), which is forthcoming in 2009. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Handsome, Octopus, Tin House, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago, where she is the co-editor of Projective Industries.

 

Walter Arndt is Professor Emeritus of Russian Language and Literature at Dartmouth. He has produced a number of notable translations including Goethe’s Faust, Aleksandr Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, and poems by Rainer Maria Rilke. His translation of Eugene Onegin won the Bollingen Poetry Translation Prize in 1962.

 

Jessica Baron is finishing her MFA in poetry at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. The poem that appears in this issue is from her thesis-in-process, “My Art in Play,” based on the work of Constantin Stanislavski. While pursuing poetry, Jessica also continues to act professionally in Colorado. She has work out or forthcoming in Matter, Wheelhouse, Listenlight, Parcel, Reconfigurations, and Mrs. Maybe.

 

Joshua Cohen is the author of four books, including the novels Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto (Fugue State Press, 2007) and A Heaven of Others (Starcherone, 2007). Another novel, Graven Imaginings, is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press. Essays have appeared in The Forward, Nextbook, The Believer, and Harper’s. North Vain, Bluff, from which the piece that appears in this issue is excerpted, is the second book of a series entitled Two Great Russian Novels. He lives in Brooklyn.

 

Julia Cohen has six chapbooks out or forthcoming from horse less press, Small Fires Press, H_ngm_n B__ks, Dancing Girl Press, Transmission Press, and Greying Ghost Press. She lives deep in Brooklyn and blogs at www.onthemessiersideofneat.blogspot.com.

 

Claire Donato is an MFA Literary Arts candidate at Brown University. Recent poems have been published or are forthcoming in Coconut, Caketrain, Shampoo, and Cannibal. A first chapbook, Someone Else’s Body, is forthcoming from Cannibal Books in 2009. Her hometown is Pittsburgh, PA.

 

Evelyn Hampton has fiction forthcoming in Unsaid Magazine and published in Smokelong Quarterly, among other places. She lives in Seattle. Occasionally she updates her blog at endtable.net/evelyn.

 

Mark Harman, a native of Dublin who has written extensively about modern German and Irish literature, is a professor of German and English at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, PA. His translation of The Castle received the Modern Language Association’s first Lois Roth Award in 1998. His newest book is a translation of Kafka’s Amerika: The Missing Person, published by Shocken in November 2008.

 

Matthew Henriksen edits Cannibal Books and Typo from Fayetteville, AR, and is the author of Is Holy (horse less press, 2006). Two new chapbooks will appear in 2009 from Cue Editions and Single Sheet Press.

 

Lily Hoang’s first book, Parabola, won the Chiasmus Press Un-Doing the Novel Contest. She is also the author of the forthcoming novels Changing (Fairy Tale Review Press), Invisible Women (StepSister Press) and The Evolutionary Revolution (Les Figues Press). Her eBook Woman Down the Hall is available through Lamination Colony. She currently teaches English and Women’s Studies at St. Mary’s College in Indiana.

 

Peter Markus is the author of three short books of short-short fiction, Good, Brother (Calamari Press, 2006), The Singing Fish (Calamari Press, 2006), and The Moon Is a Lighthouse (New Michigan Press, 2003). His newest book is the novel Bob, or Man on Boat, published this year by Dzanc Books.

 

Patrick Morrissey’s poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Typo, Tarpaulin Sky, and Colorado Review. He lives in Brooklyn.

 

Bryson Newhart holds an MFA from Brown University. Recent or forthcoming publication credits include No Colony, Sein und Werden, Defenestration, 5_trope, Caketrain, elimae, Tarpaulin Sky, The Dream People, and BDtDaEAtC. Older writing can be found in Taint Magazine, Snow Monkey, 3rd bed, Failbetter, and others.

 

Michael Newton’s gallery reviews have appeared in previous issues of Harp & Altar.

 

Formed by choreographers Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs in 2003, robbinschilds presents performance, installation, and video works that explore the intersection between architecture and human movement. The company’s work has appeared in venues including Dance Theater Workshop, the New Museum, BAM, P.S. 122, and Autumn Skate Bowl in New York; Fritz Haeg’s Sundown Salon and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in L.A.; and the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid. robbinschilds was recently commissioned to create original choreography for David Byrne on his world concert tour and is currently preparing a new performance work, Sonya and Layla Go Camping, to premiere at The Kitchen in May 2009.

 

Elizabeth Sanger graduated from SUNY Plattsburgh in 2004 and received her MFA in poetry from the University of Montana in 2006. Her work has appeared in Conjunctions, Phoebe, Meridian, Touchstone, Past Simple, Typo, and Verse Daily and is forthcoming in the Saranac Review and Drunken Boat. She lives in Florida with her partner and three wildly spoiled cats.

 

Peter Jay Shippy is the author of Thieves’ Latin (University of Iowa Press, 2003), Alphaville (BlazeVOX Books, 2006), and a novella-in-verse, How to Build the Ghost in Your Attic (Rose Metal Press, 2007). His poems have recently appeared in American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, and Shenandoah, among others. He teaches literature at Emerson College in Boston.

 

A.L. Steiner is a Brooklyn-based artist whose photo and video installations, curatorial, and performance work has been presented internationally. Steiner is a member of the collective Chicks on Speed and co-curator of Ridykeulous. She is represented by Taxter & Spengemann, New York.

 

G.C. Waldrep is the author of Goldbeater’s Skin (Center for Literary Publishing, 2003), Disclamor (BOA Editions, 2007), and Archicembalo, which won the 2008 Dorset Prize from Tupelo Press and is due out in 2009. He is also the author of two chapbooks, The Batteries (New Michigan Press, 2005) and One Way No Exit (Tarpaulin Sky, 2008). He lives in Lewisburg, PA, and teaches at Bucknell University.

 

The Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878–1956) was a self-taught and prolific artist who published three novels and ten volumes of short prose during his lifetime. Despite the praise he received from figures such as Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin, much of his writing remained unpublished or unread until the rediscovery of his work in the 1970s. After a period of time in Berlin, he returned to Switzerland in 1913, where he lived for the rest of his life. Confined to a mental institution in 1929, he spent his remaining decades in asylums. His books available in English include Robert Walser Rediscovered, edited by Mark Harman (University Press of New England, 1985); Jakob von Gunten, translated by Christopher Middleton (NYRB Classics, 1999); and The Robber, translated by Susan Bernofsky (University of Nebraska Press, 2007).

 

Oskar
Robert Walser

He began this strange behavior at a very early age by going his own way and finding such evident pleasure in being alone. In later years he recalled very clearly that nobody had made him aware of such things. All by itself the strange need to be alone and apart had appeared, and was there. All alone he drew from within himself the thought that it is beautiful to shut oneself off so as to gain fresh desire and feel renewed longing for being open and for going out harmlessly among men. It was a kind of calculation that he made, a kind of task that he set himself. He had moved into a wretched, half-destroyed house on the Bergstrasse; he lived there in a shabby little room, which was equipped and decorated with a remarkable lack of furnishings. Even though it was winter, he would have no heating. He did not want any comforts. Everything around him had to be rough, inhospitable, and miserable. He wanted to bear and endure some thing, and ordered himself to do so. And that, nobody had told him either. All alone he had the idea that it would be good for him to order himself to bear hardship and malice in a friendly and good-hearted manner. He considered himself to be at a kind of upper-level school. He went to university there, as a weird and wild student. For him it was a question of observing how far he ought risk pushing himself, how daring he might be. Every once in a while, fear entered his room and grazed him with the cold crêpe of despair. But he had taken up the dare to become peculiar, and he had to keep it up, almost against his will. The oddities take whoever has set foot among them, lead him further, pull him away, never again let him go. His days and his nights he spent alone. Two small children lay in the next room, right against the wall. He would often hear them crying pitiably. He lay sleeplessly during entire long dark nights, as if sleep were an enemy, frightened and fleeing from him, and as if wakefulness were a good friend, unable to tear himself away from him. Every day he went on the same walk through the frozen winter meadows and felt as though he were on a day-long hike through unknown and unfamiliar regions. Each day resembled the next. No young person would have been able to find this way of life beautiful. He, however, wanted it thus; he ordered himself to consider this way of life beautiful. Since he wanted to see attractions, he saw them; since he was searching for depth, he found it; since he wanted to get to know misery, it revealed itself to him. He endured all so-called boredom with joy and pride. To him the sameness and the one and only color seemed beautiful, and that single tone was his life. He wanted to have nothing to do with boredom. So for him it did not exist. He governed himself thus. Thus did he live. He kept company with those calm women, the hours, as though with sensuous and physical beings. They came and went, and Oskar, that was his name, never lost patience. To him impatience meant death. Perseverance, into which he freely and voluptuously sank, was his life as a man. Swathing and surrounding him with sweet fragrance of roses was the thought that he was poor. He belonged to the poor with body and soul, and with all his thoughts and feelings and with his whole heart. He loved the hidden paths between the high hedges, and the evenings were his friends. He knew no higher joy than the joy of day and night.

[1914]

 

Translated from the German by Mark Harman

 

 

This selection appears with the permission of Suhrkamp Verlag and the translator.