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The opening lines of incantatory prose in The Big Music evoke the austere beauty of the northern reaches of the Scottish Highlands, its vast landscape of hills and moorland and the seemingly endless, silent space stretching out beneath an ever-changing sky. We are made to feel a sense of human non-belonging in this stark environment, an understanding of oneself as fundamentally alien no matter how familiar the land might be or become, even after a lifetime. Then comes another level of distancing, as the author wonders aloud how best to begin: with “a few words and the scrap of a tune put down for the back of the book in some attempt to catch the opening of the thing, how it might start.” Before long, scholarly-sounding footnotes appearthe University of California, Berkeley, led to four decades on the West Coast. It would be pat to say he gave us the past, and we gave him the future. It implies that the scales were equal, when there are 314 million of us and only one of him. Nevertheless, it’s partly true. In his American exile, he could publish freely, in a number of translations as well as in Polish, and he could become a Nobel poet with an international profile.

Swiss-born modernist Robert Walser is perhaps the most unsung of these influential “writer’s writers,” and two recent collaborative texts underscore his ability to speak across artistic mediums. A Little Ramble: In the Spirit of Robert Walser, to be published in April by New Directions, includes short microscript