Manhattan Girl
The Viennese Expressionist writer and literary activist Robert Müller (1887-1924) worked in New York for a few months in 1909-10. His short story Manhattan Girl, published just a century ago, clearly draws on memories (imagined and real) of the Big City to create a tour de force of interior monologue touching on nature, culture, language, race, gender and the basis of human desires.
At night the city came to visit in his room
The January 2020 edition of The Brooklyn Rail’s InTranslation web magazine includes my translation of Müller’s short story Manhattan Girl, dating from 1920. This is, I believe, the first time that anything by Müller has appeared in English. Here are the first few lines:
At night the city came to visit in his room. Fifteen storeys up in the giant hotel. It’s a woman, she asks him his name. She’s a woman, and is unable to give her name. In springtime nights nameless smells and sounds rise up towards me, the things are there but the new words are missing. You have to create a new language. The sentences must be a rapid-fire salute of images. They must have the panting breath of madness. They must convey the rhythm of a blood-rhapsody.
For that’s it, exactly. It’s a torment to lie here and have to think things over, about what they’re called. It’s obvious they have a name, for they are absolutely things that are known, that have passed through the whole brain. It’s a torment. I sense how this gradually all revolves around me myself, how it concerns my own particular configuration of limbs. …
In the course of translating Müller’s major novel Tropics – The Myth of Travel, I discovered the German text of this story online at a website called http://www.yab-bibliothek.org. This site seems now to be defunct, alas. Maybe more web-savvy readers can find it archived somewhere. (The story is no doubt included in one of the now 17 volumes of Müller’s collected works published by the Igel Verlag.)
During his short life Müller attracted considerable attention in the German-speaking world for his writings and cultural activism. After the First World War he built up Austria’s biggest book and magazine distribution business; its failure during a financial crash likely led to his suicide aged only 36.
But then – Müller was completely forgotten for some sixty years. Only in the 1980s did Germanist scholars begin to study his work. There are now numerous critical essays and monographs in German, but as yet very little in English even in scholarly journals and volumes. (See e.g. David Midgley: ‘A Journey into the Interior: The Self as Other in Robert Müller’s Novel Tropen’, in Robert Craig and Ina Linge (eds.): Biological Discourses. The Language of Science and Literature around 1900, Oxford: Peter Lang 2017, pp. 317-38. David edited the latest German edition of Döblin’s verse epic Manas – my translation of which will appear in 2020 from Galileo Publishing.)
In its next edition (March 2020), the InTranslation website will feature a chapter from my translation of Tropics, which is meanwhile still under consideration by a New York publisher.
