On April 15, 2021, Deutsches Haus at NYU and the Consulate General of Switzerland in New York presented a conversation between writer and translator Susan Bernofsky and poet and writer Eileen Myles about Bernofsky's “Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser,“ (Yale University Press, 2021), the first English-language biography of Swiss author Robert Walser. In their conversation, Myles and Bernofsky reflected on Walser's intriguing work and life, problems of translation, and on how we can read Walser from today's perspective.

About „Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser”:
The great Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser lived eccentrically on the fringes of society, shocking his Berlin friends by enrolling in butler school and later developing an urban-nomad lifestyle in the Swiss capital, Bern, before checking himself into a psychiatric clinic. A connoisseur of power differentials, his pronounced interest in everything inconspicuous and modest—social outcasts and artists as well as the impoverished, marginalized, and forgotten—prompted W. G. Sebald to dub him “a clairvoyant of the small.” Walser's revolutionary use of short prose forms had an enormous influence on Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Robert Musil, and many others. He was long believed an outsider by conviction, but Susan Bernofsky presents a more nuanced view in this immaculately researched and beautifully written biography. Setting Walser in the context of early twentieth century European history, she provides illuminating analysis of his extraordinary life and work, bearing witness to his “extreme artistic delight.”