Robert Musil: "Attempts to Find Another Human Being": Robert Musil to an Unknown Little Girl

Saturday, July 13, 2013

Robert Musil to an Unknown Little Girl

This previously untranslated Musil story, one of many short prose pieces Musil published in journals and magazines during his life, has been translated by me and published in Fiction Magazine: <www.fictioninc.com/features/to-an-unknown-little-girl/>

More marvelous Musil short prose will be appearing in the next issue of Fiction . I am looking for a publisher for a complete edition of these pieces, by the way.

2 comments:

scott hJuly 11, 2021 at 12:45 PM
that link doesn't seem to be working. I would like to see the piece (and don't read German..)
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Musil AttemptsJuly 11, 2021 at 1:15 PM
Hi,
The piece is in Thought Flights, published by Contra Mundum Press
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Attempts to Find Another Human Being

Around 1923 Musil planned to publish a collection of his essays under the title, "Versuche einen anderen Menschen zu finden" (Attempts to Find Another Human Being). In his notebooks he wrote:

"In fact, this could be the title for everything that I have ever written. I can think of no other excuse for spending one's whole life at a writing desk to become a beggar. [...] I can only imagine another duty with great difficulty. I have always been a writer, always pursued writing.
It has come to pass in my life that people have scolded me for it and have called me a sick human being, an intellectual, an unmoral human being, a scientist, in short, everything that I am not, and only with resistance, under the pressure of a few, people have become accustomed to thinking of me as what I believe myself to be, and want to be: a writer."