Don Byron

[BFrank]

NY Times

June 12, 2005

Susan Bernofsky and Don Byron

Dr. Susan Bernofsky, a college professor and literary translator, and Don Byron, the clarinetist, composer and arranger, were married last evening in Mount Tremper, N.Y. The Rev. Dr. Linda Anderson, a Unitarian Universalist minister, officiated at La Duchesse Anne, an inn.

The bride, 38, was until last month an assistant professor of German at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. She is the author of "Foreign Words: Translator-Authors in the Age of Goethe," a work about translation history and theory that is to be published next month by the Wayne State University Press. She has also received a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies to write a book about the Swiss-German novelist and short story writer Robert Walser, whose works she has translated into English, along with those of Gregor von Rezzori and Jenny Erpenbeck.

The bride graduated from Johns Hopkins University and received a master's degree in fiction writing from Washington University and a doctorate in comparative literature from Princeton. She is a daughter of Shirley Bernofsky and Dr. Carl Bernofsky of New Orleans. The bride's father retired as a research biochemist at the Tulane University School of Medicine. Her mother, also retired, was a special-education teacher at McDonough 24, an elementary school in New Orleans.

The bridegroom is 46. His latest album is "Ivey-Divey" (Blue Note, 2004) in which he explores the music of Lester Young. His albums since his debut in 1992 have incorporated classical, salsa, hip-hop, funk, klezmer, and jazz styles including swing, bop and downtown improvisation. This fall he is to become a visiting associate professor of music at the State University at Albany. Until April, Mr. Byron was an artist in residence at Symphony Space in Manhattan.

The bridegroom graduated from the New England Conservatory of Music. He is the son of Donald E. Byron of the Bronx and the late Daisy A. Byron. The bridegroom's father, who is retired, was a letter carrier for the Postal Service in Manhattan and also a bassist who played jazz and calypso music in and around New York City. The bridegroom's mother was a clerk at Verizon in Manhattan.

[maren]

Congratulations!

to Bernofsky's translation of Walser's The Robber

...and this book, too:

[king ubu]

I could hardly believe reading anyone bothers to translate Walser to English... great! However I assume the translations are of his three novels? Or rather four, since the "Robber" has been taken care of, already?

Me biggest Walser fan (almost) on planet earth (and elsewhere).

[king ubu]

I could hardly believe reading anyone bothers to translate Walser to English... great! However I assume the translations are of his three novels? Or rather four, since the "Robber" has been taken care of, already?

Me biggest Walser fan (almost) on planet earth (and elsewhere).

←

Not this Robert Walser, to be precise.

I see Amazon lists one book of short prose here. Check this out, I beg you! This is what he was the master of (not to put down his novels, but he was mainly great doing these "Prosastückli")!

Also if ever any of his other books turn up in English, don't hesitate! He published five or six or so books of short prose before and after and between the novels.

And if the "microgrammes" turn up in English, that would be another thing to jump for! Of course the king has the complete German edition of those... the "Robber" is part of these, too, but has been published before they deciphered the rest. Absolutely fascinating writings!

Death of a poet... this was how Walser was found, Christmas day 1956, in the hills around Herisau, Switzerland, where he spent the last 25 years of his live in an asylum, having stopped writing (consquently).