More Walseriania from the Brooklyn Rail, this time an interview by Jed Lipinski with Walser translator Susan Bernofsky:

Rail: Do you have an affinity with the prose of the people you translate, like that of the German-speaking Swiss writer Robert Walser?

Bernofsky: Most of the authors I’ve spent the most time working on, Robert Walser in particular, are concerned with the plasticity of language: they use idiosyncratic ways of talking about things to create a fictional universe. I’m just working on a Walser story, “A Sort of Cleopatra,” which begins with a sentence half a page long that contains more relative clauses than could possibly fit in a single thought. The main thing he’s saying—that a young woman dissatisfied with her lot is imagining herself as Cleopatra with a viper at her breast—gets so thoroughly modified and relativized that by the time the sentence is finished, Walser has created an elaborate metaphor-packed tableau to represent the woman’s ennui. When a teacher first showed me some Walser texts, I immediately fell in love with them, and even 25 years later I still find his way of creating fictional worlds utterly delightful.

And:

Rail: It can be difficult to reconcile the relative darkness of Walser’s upbringing and life with the relentlessly lighthearted and funny tone of books like The Tanners and The Assistant. Through your research and translations, have you reached any conclusions about his work?

Bernofsky: What makes Walser’s texts so powerful, I think, is the way they scintillate with a wide variety of emotional and literary registers at one and the same time. Often there’s a sense of a deep sadness lying beneath a surface that might be filled up with chirps and twitters, but that doesn’t mean that this sadness is the true meaning of the texts—the whole point of Walser is the coexistence of all these opposites in a single moment—in every single moment.

Read more here.

Sam :: Jul.09.2009 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »