Microscripts
Bilingual edition, translated and with an Introduction by Susan Bernofsky
Afterword by Walter Benjamin
ISBN 978-0-8112-1880-1; Online Ordering
W.G. Sebald called Robert Walser “a clairvoyant of the small,” and nowhere is the phrase more apt than in his “microscripts.”
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. At first considered a secret code, the microscripts were eventually discovered to be a radically miniaturized form of a German script: a whole story could fit on the back of a business card.
Microscripts gathers 40 short pieces — stories, poems, fragments, “dramolettes” — in this gorgeously illustrated co-publication with the Christine Burgin Gallery. Each microscript is reproduced in full color in its original form: the detached cover of a trashy crime novel, a disappointing telegram, the inside of a soap wrapper. Schnapps, rotten husbands, small-town life, the radio, pigs (and how none of us can deny being one), jealousy, Van Gogh and marriage proposals are some of Walser’s subjects. These texts take strength from Walser’s motto: “To be small and to stay small.”
“One of the profoundest products of modern literature.”
—Walter Benjamin
“Incredibly interesting and beautiful.”
—John Ashbery
“[These] painstakingly transcribed texts brought to light some of Walser’s most beautiful and haunting writing . . . . The incredible shrinking writer is a major 20th-century prose artist who, for all that the modern world seems to have passed him by, fulfills the modern criterion: he sounds like nobody else.”
—Benjamin Kunkel, The New Yorker
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