The Center for the Art of Translation has an interview up with Susan Bernofsky, translator of Robert Walser’s novel The Tanners, among other works. She talks about the six volumes of Robert Walser’s miniaturized shorthand that has come to be known as the “Microscripts.” Her translation of selections from these are forthcoming from New Directions.
But wait, what are Microscripts?
As described by the New Directions blog (scroll down the page a bit):
Robert Walser wrote many of his manuscripts in a highly enigmatic, shrunken-down form. These narrow strips of paper (many of them written during his hospitalization in the Waldau sanatorium) covered with tiny ant-like markings only a millimeter or two high, came to light only after the author’s death in 1956.
Even further down the page, Bernofsky elaborates: Although the writing was, at first, considered a secret code, “in fact they were written in a now-antiquated form of German handwriting shrunken down to a height of between one and two millimeters. What’s more, Walser wrote them in pencil, and his pencil was not always sharp.” Only about half a dozen people in the entire world can actually read them, Bernofsky says, and it took two scholars twelve years to transcribe the six volumes:
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.
But nobody really knows, because Walser never talked or wrote about it, and in fact he claimed to have stopped writing after 1933.
The Center for the Art of Translation is presenting a “Lit and Lunch” lecture by Bernofsky on Tuesday, February 9th at noon at the 111 Minna Gallery in San Francisco; and on the following day, Bernofsky will be lecturing and presenting a talk on Walser’s microscripts at Stanford. See the interview for details.
