ROBERT WALSER
LAKE PIECE
This piece is very simple, it’s about
a beautiful summer
evening and many people who promenaded back and forth along
the shore of the lake. The crowd of people, of which I too was a
part, was extraordinary. The whole city seemed to be taking a
walk. If I say that the wide, nocturnal lake resembled a slumbering
hero whose breast even while asleep is moved by concerns of
bravery and noble thought, I am perhaps expressing myself a bit
too audaciously. Many skiffs festooned with lights moved about in
the dark water. The streets and side-streets that led to the lake
seemed to me to be canals, and I easily imagined that the night was
a Venetian night. Bright firelight flared up reddish here and there
out of the black, and night figures strolled in the light and dark
patches. Nor were lovers missing who tenderly embraced and
kissed behind all kinds of thickets, nor a caressing and lisping,
gently stroking and, like murmuring water, rippling night music.
The half-moon on high resembled, how shall I say, a wound, from
which I gather that the lovely body of the night was wounded, as a
beautiful noble soul can be bruised and wounded, and because of
this reveals even more clearly its grandeur and beauty. In life,
which is rough and ignoble, the bruised noble soul sometimes
makes a fool of itself, but not so in the art of poetry, the poet never
laughs about the vulnerability of sensitive souls. As I walked over
an arched bridge, I heard from below, out of the water, a wonderful
voice making its way up to me; it was a brightly clad girl in a
gondola who was passing here, and I and perhaps one other, who
was also intrigued by the tender voice, bent over the railing to
listen with utmost attention to the charming song that in the circus
or concert hall formed by the gentle night warmly and brightly
faded away. We two or three, we who were listening, admitted to
ourselves that we had never heard such beautiful singing, and we
said to ourselves that the song of the sweet-tempered singer
gliding onwards in the almost invisible skiff was magnificent less
through art and great vocal ability than through a wonderful
intensity of soul and the rapture of a dear generous heart. We told
ourselves moreover—that is, it occurred to us to think that perhaps,
yes, even in all likelihood—the young singer in the dark boat below
would be fervently blushing over the bravery and magnanimity of her
song and over her ability to intoxicate and excite herself, and that her
charming, joyfully young and sweet cheek would be burning intensely
with shame over the freedom and enthusiasm of the heavenly, songful
outpouring. The song became like a kingly palace and it grew to a
fabulous size, so that one believed one saw princes and princesses
dancing and galloping past on splendidly festooned horses. Everything
transformed itself into resounding life and into a resounding
beauty, and the entire world seemed like kindness itself, and one could
no longer find fault with life, with human existence. Especially appealing
and wonderful was the way the girl exposed her tender soul
while singing, opened up all her secrets, rose beyond herself and beyond
her modesty, beyond all instilled decency, openly expressed all
thinking and yearning, so that in the manner of heroines she towered
like a figure into the air. The battle which the tender creature waged
against shyness and ordinary behavior yielded the most beautiful timbre,
and listening, as mentioned before, to the shamefully proud sound
were a few people who all regretted that now little by little the song
lost itself in the distance.
(1917)
I confess that the invention of the story
I’m telling here has caused
me the greatest difficulties, though it’s likely you will find it
a little
silly. It deals with a lazy nimble person and a nimble lazy person. It
needs to be noted that the nimble one with all his squirrel-like nimbleness
lagged far behind the lazy one’s clumsy laziness, and this astounded
him not a little, which really is quite understandable. The
strange and remarkable thing about this simple and foolish story, which
fortunately is not all that long and prolix, is that basically the nimble
one is the lazy one, and basically the lazy one is the nimble one, for
the nimble one was, alas, in reality only too nimble, and the lazy one,
fortunately or unfortunately, splendidly proved himself in the totality
of his laziness, in that he was not at all nimble, yet basically was all
the same much nimbler than the nimblest of the nimble, whereas, alas,
the nimble one in the complete abundance of his nimbleness and agility
was certainly in no way lazy, and yet was all the same much lazier
than the laziest of the lazy, which in any case is really quite regrettable.
The nimble one in any case surpassed the lazy one in proper
nimbleness, but all the same he came off badly and in the end finished
far behind the lazy one, who in any case, providing we’re not grossly
mistaken, greatly transcended the nimble one in laziness, in that he
was as lazy as the personification of laziness, yet all the same was not
at all as lazy and much nimbler than the nimble one thought, whom he
left far behind and magnificently defeated, about which remarkable
circumstance the pitiful, poor nimble one almost died of fright. This,
my dear reader, is the story of the nimble and the lazy or the lazy and
the nimble, depending on which one you prefer and how you like it.
Judge it gently, laugh at it, and don’t be altogether angry with
its author
in whose head it stuck so fast he found himself compelled to
write it down just to be rid of it.
(1917)
—translated
from the German by Annette Wiesner
and
Tom Whalen
