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Oppressive Light: Selected Poems by Robert Walser

Oppressive Light represents the first collection of Robert Walser's poetry in English translation. My translations attempt to accurately capture Walser’s linguistic acts of disappearance, his “countermoves”--poems as spontaneous creations, “out of knowledge and ignorance,” with rhyme and meter being external rather than internal vehicles--against the “significant” and “perfectly structured” verse written by his contemporaries, such as Rilke, Hofmannstahl, and Hesse. Furthermore, the collection allows the scholar the opportunity to fully address and explore the poems’ aesthetic and philosophical implications vis-à-vis Walser’s prose.