SOURCE: "Nervous Laughter," in The New York Times Book Review, June 3, 1990, pp. 26-7.

Below, American scholar and translator Hafrey finds fault with Susan Bernofsky's translation of Walser's pieces collected in "Masquerade" and Other Stories.

In recent years, the Swiss-German writer Robert Walser (1878-1956) has acquired the reputation of a neglected master of 20th-century German literature. The author of many volumes of fiction, poetry, journalistic essays and "dramolettes," Walser drew the attention of contemporaries like Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse and Robert Musil. Susan Bernofsky, who has selected and translated the pieces by Walser collected in "Masquerade" and Other Stories, notes that he was "a writer whose singular, virtuoso, absolutely essential otherness cost him the favor of the reading public of his day." That is a judgment with which the author himself would probably have agreed.

Difference was a touchstone for Walser, but difference of a particular kind. The seventh...