HANDKE THE FRIEND OF PRINCES, PRESIDENTS, OF MILOSEVIC AND KARADIC AND BURDA THE MEDIA KING

Schon wieder ist er mit einer Obrigkeit!
HANDKE THE FRIEND OF PRINCES, PRESIDENTS, OF MILOSEVIC AND KARADIC AND BURDA THE MEDIA KING

Bundespräsident empfängt Peter Handke =

   Wien (OTS) - Bundespräsident Dr. Heinz Fischer hat heute den
österreichischen Schriftsteller Peter Handke, der sich gegenwärtig in
Wien befindet, zu einem Gedankenaustausch empfangen. Das Gespräch
fand in der Präsidentschaftskanzlei statt. Unter anderem sprachen
die Herren ueber folgendes:

Fischer [lachend]: Ja, und verdreschen Sie noch ihre Weiber, Herr Handke?

Handke: [lachend]: Nein, dazu bin ich jetzt zu alt.

Fischer:[lachend]: Schade. Die gehören doch einmal am Tag, und einmal am Tag in den Arsch.

Gemeinsames schallendes Gelächter.

Fischer: Also, was wünschen Sie sich von mir?

Handke: Dass Sie sich für den Karadic einsetzen, in Scheveningen.

Fischer: Ich dachte das wäre Ihr Ressort?

Handke: Meine Wenigkeit kann in diesem Fall nichts nutzen... Dabei funktioniere ich nur als eminence Grise
       ....
Fischer: Sie habe die Macht des Faktischen im Sinn?

Handke: Genau nach meinem Sinn gesprochen, wie ich schon immer sage: Das faktische sieg, wie bei Stalingrad,
        der Sieg der Fakten....

Fischer: In dieser Hinsicht hat sich einiges bei Ihren Ansichten verändert seitdem wir zum letzten Mal
        gesprochen...

Weiteres durch 
Rückfragehinweis:
   Österreichische Präsidentschaftskanzlei, Presse- und Informationsdienst
   Tel.: (++43-1) 53422 230
   
- 
pressebuero@hofburg.at
   http://www.hofburg.at

- 

A LETTER TO VARIOUS AMERICAN PUBLISHER TO TAKE UP THE SLACK

WHERE FARRAR, STRAUS LEFT OFF

I wanted to call your attention especially to a recent marvelous title that Farrar,

Straus declined, Kali [note of mine attached which can also be found at the

page devoted to this novel at 

http://www.handkeprose2.scriptmania.com/

FSG it appears  consulted Handke's current chief translator Krishna Winston

who said it was like some other Handke that had already been done, and also

that she did not want to be completely overwhelmed. While I entirely understand

the second of her reservations, I also entirely disagree with the first,  as is spelled out in detail in my "Note". Handke prides himself on not repeating himself,

and can be said, with all the other contradictions he has committed, not  to have doneso in this instance, so far.

 Moreover, there are other important Handke titles on which Farrar, Straus

has passed, most importantly the second volume of his spontaneous diary 

notations, Die Geschichte des Bleistifts [The History of the Pencil, L'Histoire de Crayon and also in Spanish and Portuguese,  etc.,  published by Residenz Verlag, Salzburg in 1981] which details not only Handke's then troubled state of mind, as in the first diary volume Weight of the World, but, more importantly, details his thinking on how his art is changing, focusing on what would become "the change" to what is called his "homecoming" period, and on Walk About the Villages. This, aside Villages, happens to be my  favorite - that is valuable to me - Handke title!

There are two further diary volumes Am Felsfenster Morgens and Gestern Unterwegs [Mornings, at the Boulder Window + Yesterday, On My Way] that were published by 

 former Residenz editor Jochen Jung at his own firm Jung & Jung, also Salzburg at about 1989 and 2005 respectively. As an American publisher I would combine the two into one volumeand edit them with the English speaking public in mind. 

Scott Abbot has just completed a wonderful translation of Handke's great 1999 play

Voyage by Dugout: The Play about the Film About the War and some marvelous

plays remain untranslated: La Cuisine   [and unusually delightful text that he

did for the Serbian director Materic] ; Zurüstungen für die Unsterblichkeit [Preparations for Immortality 1996] and the most recently produced play

Als der Tag uns scheidet, a pendant to Beckett's Krapps Last Tape that has received wide noticeand, being a two character play, is beloved by cash-strapped theaters for that reasons alone!

And another, about guerrillas! partisans! -Storm Still - is about to premiere in Vienna.

Scott Abbot wants to do a combined edition of all of Handke's Yugoslavia texts

aside the one that was published by Viking, Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia that is, to combine that with the first Abschied vom Traum vom 9ten Land, Sommerlicher Nachtrag, and Unter Tränen Fragend as well as Daimiel & Rund um das Tribunal as well as the most recent of those texts, one which deserves to be published as a stand alone it is so extraordinary [see the prose site for a discussion of it, also the Handke blogs] Die Kuckucke von Velica Hoca [The Cuckoos of Velica Hoca] where Handke, the old cusser of journalists, shows how to do it right.

Farrar Straus started to mispublish Handke about the time that they

combined the novel A Slow Homecoming with the diary of walking The Lesson of

Saint Victoire and the memoir of Handke raising his daughter Amina, A Child's Story

instead of doing these very different books separately. This made for an entirely

confused reception, which persists, vide Benjamin Kunkel's introduction to the

recent NYRB Books reprint of A SLOW HOMECOMING where he speculates 

in true postmenstrualist fashion on how these texts [which were never meant

to be published together or regarded in that dried Tampax fashion] how that

space between them exist in sprung rhyme, I am kidding]

That FSG passed on three of Handke's greatest texts Walk about the Villages and The Art of Asking  and The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other done respectively by Ariadne Books and Yale University Press, doing so despite the fact that Kaspar and Other Plays had gone through more than ten editions by then, that the second play collection, tThey Are Dying Out and Other Plays had sold out, and actually ought to have been reprinted.

 

Fault for this mis-publication lies chiefly with the now deceased Runyonesque Culture-Vulture Roger Straus. Scott recently called my attention to a letter that Straus, in the early 90s,, sent to Siegfried Unseld and which Unseld gave to Handke who showed it to Scott....a daisy chain  now coming full circle - which says that he's got a major problem:Handke .... and it appears in usual fashion that Rogah failed to reflect that Handke sales - which is what the problem was then about, prior to Rogah! dissociating himself from Handke's undertakings in matters Yugoslavian - of his very own making since FSG had sold semimasspaperback editions of prior work several times over, and the first book of plays had had 10 + editions. Rogah and his succession of editors who get Handke piled on their desk on joining the firm, imagine being settled with the re-incarnation of Goethe as you a very junior thing start to work at such an august firm... well Handke must have had at least ten of them by now. A couple of the earlier ones, one of whom also was mine, and Nancy Meiselas were fine, and so was the recently departed Annie Wedekind... but how can one even keep up with the whelming and how can they poor things with having this towering work bestowed on them, a tower that keeps on growing. Elizabeth Sifton fresh out of Radcliffe got Saul Bellow and swam, did not sink, and I can

see why Saul would have been happy too... after possible initial apprehensions....

read Ms. Sifton's delightful account of the experience at:

http://www.slate.com/

However, two editors who were not really Handke's editors, Michael DiCapua,

who if he had had his druthers initially would have blackballed Handke

as he did so many other of my projects, as well as Steve Wasserman who

when he ran Noonday Books, the forever stepchild paperback line, and

Hill + Wang, the designated  play-publishing wing, appears not to have

known either what do to do with these plays or the prose.

 Thus it continues to be amateur time, and I am Jonah ambergris that survived

that experience who realized early on translating the early plays and directing

them and participating in their production that the kid from Griffen was a genuis,

and it would have taken a genius to guess how he developed, a matter that Siegfried

Unseld, too, then had his hunches.

I myself have no interest in translating any of these,  as a matter, since I have

to complete some of my own scribblings, the only author for whom I would

interrupt these is last year's Büchner Prize winner, Josef Winkler, one of whose books I did for Ariadne. His work gives me a great charge.

However,  there is a bunch of what look like fine translators from the German, a whole new generation  has sprung up in the meanwhile. Perhaps even Mr. Joel Agee who commented unfavorably on Krishna Winston's translation of Handke's recently published Don Juan might want to try his hand at one of these. He did a fine enough

job with a Nossack whom I introduced at Farrar, Straus these many years ago.

If anyone wants to republish my translations of INNERWORLD and of NONSENSE AND HAPPINESS and add the wonderful long poem GEDICHT AN DIE DAUER, as Bartelsby

in Spain did just now in Spain with their complete Handke poems....

I will send this on also to a few other American publishers that have sprung

up to do translations once I have their e-mails.

The first Robins are back in Seattle but no early morning mating calls yet

to ease me out of my dreams into the  day.

Michael Roloff

A SECOND LETTER TO THE NY TIMES BOOK REVIEW RE AGEE AND MENTION OF TRANSLATIONS

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/books/review/Agee-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3
Perhaps the NY Times Book Review could make it a practice of asking reviewers of translations
if they comment on the translation, whether favorably or not or interestingly, to cite chapter and verse and make reasoned comments. * That way, among other matters, my better, Krishna Winston, won't have to ask me whether maybe there is is something to Agee's reservations or whether they are merely the gratuitous carpings of a fellow translator as  one encounters them with such frequency especially among the amateurs of that caste who do not reflect on the fact that most cats can be skinned at least in two and often nine ways. Since the publisher, however, to whom I brought and for I whom translated three volumes of Handke, including a dozen plays had failed to heed my several requests to send me a copy of the book and if need be charge my account, I was unable to reassure Krishna or express agreement with Mr. Agee's assessment except to tell her that in her translation of the 350 K words CROSSING THE SIERRA DEL GREDOS unfortunately I encountered two words that struck me as wrong and one awkward passage, lucky man that Handke is to have found her
to take up where Ralph Mannheim left off, some of whose work, especially when it came to matters of linguistic contemporaneity since he had lived abroad for so long, and the rhythms of Handke's prose, since after all Handke can be approached, ought to be as a prose poet, made me anything but happy.

As I mentioned in my first communication on the Agee review, which to be found on-line at
  http://adswithoutproducts.com/2010/02/13/the-nyt-continues-its-campaign-against-low-testosterone-levels-in-male-writing/
and at: http://handke-trivia.blogspot.com/
Mr. Agee's was in many ways the best review that Handke has received in your pages, not that that is unfortunately saying very much, although Joel's review can let itself be seen even without making such a baleful comparison,  to, say that criminal act of non-reading that your Neil Gordon perpetrated in your pages on the occasion of CROSSING THE SIERRA DEL GREDOS or the piece of idiocy done there by Lee Siegel - Agee pretty well got what Handke was up to, except for that non-pertinent last paragraph. I was not left too unhappy that he does not know nor did mention into what line of Handke's Don  Juan assaying fits; or that he failed to appreciate the pure virtuoso nature of the danse that Handke performs, two steps forward and one back, as Handke also explores PLACE [the last dramas ] a place near his No-Man's-Bay, the foret de Chaville, as is his custom; that is, the nature of Handke's formalism, the sheer performance of that... at that point, after all, we are getting into deeper waters than one needs to as a reviewer. Or that there
is a "Don Juan" who "appears with the same woman" in Handke's My Year in the No-Man's-Bay, which is a nice enough joke that happens to refer to the in many ways enviable genuine reincarnation Erich Wolfgang Skwara  who has had four, several of them extraordinary, novels published in translation, especially his Don Juan novel, The Plague of Siena, of none of which the Book Review has taken any note,
perhaps because they were done by that small publisher of no end of Austrian treasures, Ariadne Press, who also happen to be the publisher of Handke's greatest and richest work Walk About the Villages, which
also seems to have passed you by and many another East Coast Publication and reviewer. Or...

Sincerely yours,
Michael Roloff  [as "Der Getreue Korreptitor"]
http://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name
Member Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute and Society http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html

This LYNX will LEAP you to my HANDKE project sites and BLOGS
http://www.handke.scriptmania.com/favorite_links_1.html

"Degustibus disputandum est" {Theodor Wiesenthal Adorno}
"May the foggy dew bediamondize your hoosprings + the fireplug
of filiality reinsure your bunghole! {James  Joyce}
"Sryde Lyde Myde Vorworde Vorhorde Vorborde." {von Alvensleben}
"Siena me fe, disfescimi Maremma." {Dante}
"Ennui [Lange Weile] is the dreambird that hatches the egg of
experience." {Walter Benjamin, the essay on Leskov.}

http://analytic-comments.blogspot.com/
http://summapolitico.blogspot.com/

*I will always recall a moment when both Helen Wolf, a most distinguished old time publisher,
and I a comparative novice, both members of the PEN AMERICAN CENTER's Translation Committee
cast the most baleful of looks at each other, with amazing simultaneity,  as that committee proceeded well into a second meeting to wrangle over the placement of a single comma in its mission statement, as though their lives depended on it, as it does in only one instance I have encountered during my nine lives,
in a passage in Robert Musil's great novella THE PORTUGUESE WOMAN.

A Lettter to Johnathan Gallassi re Handke's DON JUAN

Dear Mr. Gallassi

Below is a letter of mine to the NYTimes Book Review about Agee's piece + a comment I left at the blog "ads without products" 

http://adswithoutproducts.com/2010/02/13/the-nyt-continues-its-campaign-against-low-testosterone-levels-in-male-writing/

that is discussing that title.

Meanwile I had a letter from Krishna asking me how I felt about Agee's comment about the translation  and replied that I never make such comments without chapter and verse and that I found two troubling

words and one troubling formulation in her DEL GREDOS.

I wrote FSG and then you requesting a review copy for which you could also charge my account, I made millions for FSG and get biannual royalties.

It has not reached me and I am about to write to your owner in Germany, and Roger Straus who was a cherry picking crook managed to screw me out of half my royalties, but all those people are gone and dead, and so there are no hard feelings to anyone there except perhaps to that little girl who kept Annie Wedekind's e-mail address but never replies as Annie did so perfectly. As a once abandoned child, the irritation that non-response elicits is one sequaelae I expect i will never get over. Especially since I had a grandmother who said "manners is something you are born with." Photo attached. [The year is 1935, that is my Grandfather Werner von Alvensleben in back who already survived the 'night of the long knives, a death sentence and the first of four concentration camps, my father and my mother who both survived their gestapo prisons, and my grandmother, Alexandra von Einsiedel, who came to our place outside Bremen in the last years of the third Reich and was starving herself to die in sympathy with her there pictures closest relatives. You notice me as that dream flitting back and forth between the two rows, look closely, like a humming bird!]

 So if you could send Don Juan and also the Fred Seidel, old friend large chunks of whose Final Solutions I published in another life time at Metamorphosis, and which I asked for half a year ago.

1] THE LETTER

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/books/review/Agee-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3

 

When Joel Agee writes "For all its engaging and delicate ruminations, and despite its bold, humorous claim to be “the definitive and true story of Don Juan,” the book left me wanting to hear again Mozart’s treatment of the same theme. That music has everything Handke’s prose lacks: brio, verve, declarative intensity, a vast range of emotion and, last but not least, brilliant, joyful virility."

 Agee suffers from adjectivitis, a much more serious ailment than conjunctities because it will not respond to anti-biotics. The comparisons he makes are just as inapt and inept. I happen to delight in the formal dance Handke performs there, it is as good if not better and lighter than what he does in his THREE ESSAYS [on Tiredness, the Juke Box, and The Day that Went Well. And if you read what I write about Handke - even though his backer and once translator - I have no compunctions about criticizing him when I feel he can be criticized within his own terms, and do a better of of it than any  German or American reviewer. 

I myself have not written about Don Juan so far,

 I have a page devoted to Handke's DON JUAN @:

 http://www.handkeprose2.scriptmania.com/index.html

 s!

2] thought it was the best review Handke has ever gotten in the NY Times, which i realize is not saying much considering that it has treated him to some of the stupidest and most insulting reviews this side of archangelsk. i have a roundup of the handke reception at my

http://www.handke-trivia.blogspot.com

and since i decided about twenty years ago to focus exclusively on a developting target – handke and his work – from every imaginable side, there have been unanticipated findings: i.e just looking at the handke reception both for his plays and his prose you notice how entirely incapable is of dealing with “the new” , which allegedly the culture and the whole business community is always championing. how these reviewers are incapable of even descring their own reaction.

it is a thorougly depressing. and so it never comes to intelligent criticism or consideration of his work, ditto for no end of others of course.

“As I was saying.” [which is how 'Ride Across Lake Constance begins] I liked the review quite a bit

except for that moronic ending, which manifested to me that Agee who is no slouch as a memoirist or translator hadn’t really understood, taken delight, or contemplated what ought really to happen to the reader after that danse. close but not as good as william gass might have been.

--
MICHAEL ROLOFFhttp://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name

Member Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute and Society

This LYNX will LEAP you to my HANDKE project sites and BLOGShttp://www.handke.scriptmania.com/favorite_links_1.html
http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html

"May the foggy dew bediamondize your hoosprings + the fireplug
of filiality reinsure your bunghole! {James  Joyce}
"Sryde Lyde Myde Vorworde Vorhorde Vorborde." [von Alvensleben]
"Siena me fe, disfescimi Maremma." [Dante]
"Ennui [Lange Weile] is the dreambird that hatches the egg of
experience." Walter Benjamin, the essay on Leskov.
http://analytic-comments.blogspot.com/ http://summapolitico.blogspot.com/

A Letter to Jonathan Galassi at Farrar, Straus re: Handke's KALI

Dear Jonathan,

I believe I sent you something I wrote on Handke's KALI as part of my Handke Project some time ago [attached once more]
and have since heard from Krishna that she urged you not to publish it because:

[a] it was like some of Handke's other things;

and

[b] she wanted time to translate other things, or maybe a relief from the onslaught, if not only from what of course seems like a rabbit
if you are used to the usual author [not to me who knows that Handke has been writing like crazy since adolescence, not just typing
or scribbling either as some others might, and has done so also because it happens to be ... how shall I put it ... a solution to the
way his psyche happens to be constituted, a necessity].  And turned over 10,000 fine pages that he wrote between 19075 and 1990
to the Marbach Institute that bought half his papers!

To  point [a] there is to say: Handke's pride, as a writer, is not to repeat himself, and he has remained true to
that resolve, and berates others who do not, he explores certain formal problems thoroughly; will even find a way of resolving a host of them in one feel swoop
as he does in THE HOUR WE KNEW NOTHING OF EACH OTHER, which comprises everything he did in his early dramas.
To understand that it helps to be a musician, or at least to know the laws of formalism. I doubt that anyone at FSG has the
faintest of what I am talking about???

KALI happens to be truly different except possibly in that, like  Don Juan, it takes a figure also of the literary past,
Lancelot and Iseult ,and gives it his own modern, near Wagnerian, but not Liebestod, twist, rather the opposite,
nonetheless a book that Wagnerians and other romantics would enjoy immensely - anyway, that's how I would try to hustle it!
On the sheer level of writing  and then reading a real READER experiences the book very much on the order of an opera - Handke has not done anything along those lines except that as of Absence a filmic element has entered his prose, and not just the ways the scenes are cut.
But, to quote the 80 year old Goethe, talking to Eckermann: "The dear sheeples have no idea what time and effort it has cost me to lean to read. It has taken me eighty years, and I couldn't claim to have reached my objective."

Die guten Leutchen, fuhr er fort, wissen nicht, was es Einem für Zeit und Mühe gekostet, um lesen zu lernen. Ich habe achtzig Jahre dazu gebraucht, und kann noch jetzt nicht sagen, daß ich am Ziele wäre."

Moreover, Krishna hasn't the faintest about Handke preceding her coming in with one of the three essays.
 I have pointed out to her several times how essential it is to read at least WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES
on which Handke has drawn ever since, even a long section in DEL GREDOS reaches back to those rhythms.
It is THE text to understand the change that Handke underwent, the summa of it. Anyone at FSG read it?
Huh? Maybe the tenth Handke editor there, whoever that might be since Annie Wedekind departed,
who it was a pleasure to correspond with.

Qua book, KALI  is as perfect as Handke's other shorter things; whereas MORAWIAN NIGT is not,
and I wish there had been an editor at Suhrkrampf who had had the guts to point this out to him.  Handke flinched.
It is a most problematic grab bag no doubt a feast for postmenstrualists like Benjamin Kunkel to moisten their dried up inter-textual Kotexes with.

to [b] the obvious answer is that there exist other first rate translators and Krishna feeling that she is the
only one and besieged is a sign of myopia or of translator stress, for latter of which syndromes she has my sympathy.

FSG has been seriously remiss over the years, prior your becoming the helmsman, in publishing Handke,
failing to to the big plays as of VILLAGES [I had a fine git-to with Steve Wasserman about his tenure at Noonday/ Hill and Wang
not that long ago]; its failure to follow up WEIGHT OF THE WORLD with GESCHICHTE DES BLEISTIFTS [The History of the Pencil]
which would clue a reader in on why and how he has changed, and maybe give one or the other reviewer the idea
that Handke would forever develop, dreadful prospect of course for that riff-raff, but not for his loyal readers.
Handke's romance language publishers have done a far better job than FSG. But it's never too late!

Best
 
The next communication, in just a few days will be  Some Comments on Handke's Die Tablas des Daimiel[devastating, stay tuned! which will appear on the http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/]

MICHAEL ROLOFF

There now exist a translation of Handke's EINBAUM, called VOYAGE BY DUGOUT

it is a fine one, too, by Scott Abbot, and I devote a page at
http://www.handkedrama2.scriptmania.com/
that is the second of the two
http://www.handkedrama.scriptmania.com/
sites to it on a page entitled CANOE, also some photos and excerpts.
I am completing a fairly long note on the play which I will post at the site and here sometime the second week of December 09.

Farrar, Straus + Giroux

The below is a comment on the Jonathan Gallassie interview about Farrar, Straus + Giroux at:


http://www.pw.org/content/agents_editors_qampa_jonathan_galassi


As a former quite small publisher [of Urizen Books http://isbndb.com/d/publisher/urizen_books.html ] who got his first
steady job at Farrar, Straus, in 1966, and brought them Nelly Sachs, all the Hesse books, Hans Erich Nossack, Christa Wolf, and most importantly, Peter Handke, I would say that the now nearly venerable firm has much improved under Jonathan Gallassi's guidance. Jonathan's description of Roger Straus and his conduct of editorial meetings,
 brings to mind the founder's rather Runjonesque, which I must admit I appreciates, as I appreciate "characters" of all kinds. What is surprising, especially in this retrospect, is how many far nicer people were working there at the time, Hal Vussel, Mr. Henry Wohlforth, the treasurer, Ms. Nicholson, author of a manual on style, in rights and permissions, Ms. Miller, Roger's assistant. Overall though, I would have to agree with the decision by Robert Giroux, as quoted in Christopher Lehmann-Haupt's obituary - Christopher also wrote Rogers obit for the N. Y. Times - that thought of Roger was so distasteful as to keep him from writing a history of the firm.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/05/books/06giroux.html?scp=2&sq=robert%20giroux&st=cse
Each sentence in those two obits is well weighed. Not that Roger was not serious, but he was not passionate about literature, he liked the social side, the hobknobbing at least as much,  having no end of never enobling Nobel Prizes, and in that respect Roger does not compare either with his contemporary American [Alfred Knopf, Bennet Cerf, George Braziller, to mention just three of the many] or European equivalents such as Siegfried Unseld of Suhrkamp, Michel Krueger of Hanser Verlag, even a true hobknobber and delightfully social animal such as Ledig-Rowohlt of the Rowohlt Verlag could get down and translate and edit with the best of them and had languages and world wide interests; ditto for Jonathan Maschler of Cape, Mathew Evans the then editor of Faber, no end of great French, Italian and Spanish publishers.

I want to tune this point with a very specific example, that of the publication history of the work of Peter Handke in this country, an author since he burst on the scene in 1966, of some 66+ books, who has developed and changed over the course of time to an author of the importance of the greatest in German literature in the past two hundred years.   The fellow Handke translator Scott Abbot mentioning, a few weeks back, in a discussion on what is everybody's favorite Handke title at
http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/
that Handke, while he and Handke were together in Yugoslavia, had shown him a letter from "Robert" Straus to Siegfried Unseld where Straus mentions that he's got a big problem called Handke, elicits these thoughts on Farrar, Straus   has published Handke in this country:  Farrar, Straus did 11 printings of KASPAR AND OTHER PLAYS. FS+G sold the first half a dozen Handke titles to various paperback publishers for reprinting, the Brit Methuen shared upfront costs, over and over, and so certainly did not lose any money. However, in all these years I have never seen an ad for a Handke book in this country. Even the diary-novel, as I think of it, Weight of the World did well, not that FS +G has had the good sense to publish it's successor Die Geschichte des Bleistifts which exists in the major Romance languages of course, to inform Handke's English language reading public, as this book does and can, how Handke's thinking on writing and his project is changing.[Little chance that the mostly idiot reviewers that the mostly idiot book review editors assign books to would take the trouble to give the matter of change any thought to as they so very obviously have not, baffled! I happen to have about each and every review, and there exists a single outstanding one, by Willim Gass in the L.A. Book Review when it was edited by Stever Wasserman]. First major mistake of Roger's was to fail to publish HISTORY OF THE PENCIL, the second and more serious one was to publish A SLOW HOMECOMING jointly in one volume together with LESSON OF SAINT VICTOIRE and A CHILD'S STORY [to save money and also on the individual presentation which these three very different books deserved.  These failures in publishing finesse are compounded by failing to put books which had wide readerships in their paper editions with Avon and  Collier Books into the FS+G quality paperback imprint Noonday Books to make for continuity [many have recently been reissued by New York Review of Books Books] and then in passing on Handke's greatest plays, WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES  [Ariadne Books] and THE ART OF ASKING + THE HOUR WE KNEW NOTHING OF EACH OTHER [Yale University Press] and many others not even translated yet. So what Roger is complaining to to Unseld is something that was easily remediable by him if he had been as good a publishers Handke's French and Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, etc Publishers were. Handke, also, has had about ten different editors assigned to him since I left there in 1969. Some first rate, the first several, some not, but each of course incapable or unwilling to construct the history of publication, that is to be a real editor! Recently the excellent Annie Wedekind left and so far I haven't found out to which overworked novice Handke has been assigned. Imagine, you're a bright young thing and Goethe is assigned to you! Elizabeth Sifton had a wonderful piece in Slate some years ago about being assigned Saul Bellow when she was a very junior editor at Vikinghttp://www.slate.com/id/2116502/ 
Evidently Ms. Sifton did not drown, but this indicates the amateurishness with which these matters can be handled. And the case of a foreign author
is then far more serious, especially of the new editor who assumes that load does not know the original language.