Posted on January 19, 2010 by Scott Esposito

(As we gear up for Susan Bernofsky’s Lit&Lunch appearance on February 9 we’ll be sharing various information about her and Robert Walser, whom she’ll be talking about. Today we have an interview with Bernofsky covering some of the more intriguing aspects of his career–among other things, the tiny, nearly unreadable Walser-writings known as the microscripts and his decision to quit writing when he had 23 years left to live.)

Scott Esposito: You’ve translated a number of books by Walser, with more to come plus a biography of him of that you’re working on. As a translator, what is it that has kept you coming back to him?

Susan Bernofsky: Every time I read Walser I find myself nearly jumping out of my chair with delight and disbelief that he has pulled off yet another unprecedented weird strange beautiful literary stunt. He has a way of describing the universe that walks a fine line between the maudlin and the trivially playful–and somehow he always manages to stay right in the middle, in that sweet spot where he achieves a sort of guileless profundity that takes the reader by surprise again and again. His literary fireworks are so controlled, so sly, so knowing, and all the while he’s got such an innocent look on his face. I just love watching him play on his tightrope, and of course it’s a very tempting challenge to see which of his feats can be mimicked in English.

SE: Although Walser was admired by the likes of Kafka, Musil, and Walter Benjamin, it’s only recently that he’s become popular in the U.S. Do you know if it has always been the case in the U.S. that he was overlooked? And did he ever fall into the category of neglected genius in Europe?

SB: Walser died in obscurity in Switzerland in 1956, his work known to only a very few. It was not until the 1960s and 1970s that his novels and stories began to be rediscovered in Switzerland, Germany, and Austria. He was translated into lots of languages soon thereafter (and everyone in Europe knows he’s a major modernist author), but English lagged behind, even though English was the first language into which he was translated in the first place! Christopher Middleton discovered his work as a young professor living in Zurich and translated the novella “The Walk” while Walser was still alive.

SE: Since you’re working on a biography of Walser, I’d like to ask what you think of his decision to quit writing, which he made in 1933 when he had a full 23 years yet to live. Do you have any theories as to why he chose this, or if he would have been able to produce anything worth reading during that period of his life?

SB: It’s far from certain that Walser ever stopped writing. His guardian Carl Seelig says that when he asked Walser about returning to the literary life, Walser brushed off the idea. The quote “I’m not here to write but to be mad” that gets bandied about a lot may be apocryphal. In my opinion, Walser did not trust Seelig and may or may not have been honest with him. There’s one witness, a former attendant from the Herisau asylum, who says that he saw Walser writing all the time during his years there, standing up at a windowsill and writing on tiny slips of paper (like the microscripts we have). But some Walser scholars have challenged this claim, saying the man made it up to get attention.

SE: The book you’ll most be talking about at Lit&Lunch is The Tanners (excerpt at the link), which was Walser’s first novel and was published in your translation by New Directions last summer. What were the challenges and the pleasures of translating this book?

SB: Unlike The Assistant, The Tanners is not thickly plotted–the story tends to meander about, taking lots of surprise detours–so the book gets most of its narrative energy and tension from the storytelling itself. I was very conscious of keeping a sense of forward momentum in the individual sentences and paragraphs.

SE: As I read The Tanners I was struck by the lightness of the prose, how it seemed to maintain a fundamentally joyful feel despite communicating a great deal of weight and existential angst. In the translation, did you try to stay close to the shape and the cadences of the German sentences (as Breon Mitchell told the Center he did in his recent translation of The Tin Drum), or did you go with something a little more Englished?

SB: Thank you, I’m so glad you felt the prose as buoyant! I agree absolutely with Breon–it is crucial to preserve the cadence of the original sentences, which often means nudging the English syntax around a bit. It’s crucial that the information contained in a sentence arrive in the proper order, because to recast sentences entirely, or to break long sentences into parts, makes the universe feel very different to the English-language reader. Each sentence is its own little journey, and I try to keep the itinerary intact. And even though it’s something the reader probably won’t be explicitly conscious of while reading, the paths followed by the individual sentences play a major role in determining what the world of the story feels like.

SE: I’d also like to ask you about a work of Walser’s called The Microscripts that is forthcoming from New Directions in your translation. As I understand it, these were writings that Walser made in such a tiny script that for a long time people simply couldn’t decipher them and thought they were some personal language that Walser had invented. (And I should add that Walser’s novella “The Robber,” which you’ve previously translated, is also a microscript.) When translating these, did you ever work directly from the microscripts, or did you rely more on a fair copy that was easier to read?

SB: We decided to reproduce full-size facsimiles of the microscripts in this collection, and when you see them, you’ll understand why there are no more than half a dozen people in the world who can read them at all (and after many months of study). It took two devoted scholars twelve years to transcribe the six volumes of these texts. That’s two years per volume! In the late ’80s I watched them at work, peering through tiny magnifying lenses and discussing each word at length. These published transcriptions are what I based the translations on. I think of Walser’s miniature writing as a sort of shorthand he developed for his rough drafts, and he wrote like this for many years. There’s been a lot of speculation about why and when he developed this technique. The writing is an enormously reduced Kurrent script–that’s an old form of German handwriting people stopped using around WWII. By the way, I’ll be giving a talk and slide show on the microscripts at Stanford on Feb. 10, at 12:00 p.m. (Dept. of German Studies, Building 260, Room 216).

SE: And lastly, what do you think the future holds for Walser? Do you think this flurry of notoriety means that Walser is with us English-language readers to stay?

SB: We saw a flurry of Walser enthusiasm in the early 1980s thanks to Christopher Middleton’s beautiful collection Selected Stories with an introduction by Susan Sontag, and that set the stage for the renewed interest we’re seeing now. I do think that Walser is now here to stay because the interest in his work is now so widespread and coming from such different quarters. There are entire blogs devoted to his work and I’m constantly getting e-mails from people who love his books, including lots of visual artists. All of a sudden he’s attracting a young audience, too, and I think that means he’s got a fan base that will continue to look out for new books of his in English. Maybe we’ll get to test Hermann Hesse’s famous prediction after all: “If Robert Walser had 100,000 readers, the world would be better.”