Do You Know Meier?

Robert Walser (1878-1956) was a Swiss essayist, poet, clerk, novelist, short-story writer, dramolettist, servant, theater-lover, microgrammatist, and inveterate walker. His light touch and disarmingly unsophisticated prose (particularly in early works such as Fritz Kochers Aufsätze, essays written from the perspective of a school boy on such topics as “Nature” and “Art”) conceal, but only ever partially, a melancholy restlessness, a lonely, erotic longing, and above all, a fierce pleasure in—and uncompromising dedication to—language.  It is this dedication and pleasure that has him follow language down the most twisted of corridors and into the densest of thickets, even when it threatens to dissolve the object he is describing (“everything he has to say completely fades in importance compared to the meaning of writing itself” Walter Benjamin claimed of Walser); it is this pleasure and dedication that drives his peculiarly jointed phrases, his sly neologisms (it is no accident that a listing of his occupations contains an invented word or two), and the persistent self-reflexivity with which he questions, mocks, and at times applauds his own choice of metaphor or semantic construction within the text. Walser is an enchanted and enchanting observer of a fleeting world in which he himself—as a commuter on a tram, as a pedestrian in the park, as a writer—is one of the most carefully scrutinized and deconstructed phenomena.

I mentioned the neologisms—a delight for the reader and a torment for the translator, who must find a way to render Walser’s game with the German compound noun and separable prefix verb in another language, in this case English. In the following piece, written in 1907 during his early, optimistic Berlin period, he came up with two gems: heraussteinklopfen and emporhosenbeinen. The former appears in one of those conversations with himself where he second-guesses his own writing: he is a fool for not being able to come up with a better word to describe how hard this Meier makes him laugh, for not being able to heraussteinklopf a better turn of phrase from his writerly head. This lovely word is a combination of the verbs herausklopfen, literally to knock something out of something, figuratively to wake someone abruptly, with steinklopfen, to break up rocks or stones. The image it evokes is of a metaphor being rather violently broken out of a stubborn, stony, authorial head, perhaps it is even sleeping (like a rock) and needs to be jolted awake to do its job (it is generally prisoners who are made to break stones). At the same time, there is the intimation of a more patient, precise work, that of shaping rough, formless rock into something that is usable, perhaps even beautiful: the jumbled heap of words in the writer’s head as the rock that has to be hewn into a vivid, apt simile. I finally went for "stone-chisel," but in the spirit of Walser I’m now having second thoughts: would "stone-knock" perhaps have been better, preserving more of the violence of the original? Or should I have been more daring, eschewing the timid hyphen and reproducing the exaggerated compactness of Walser’s German: "stonechisel"?  Oh fool, not to be able to stone-chisel a better equivalent out of your translator’s head!  (Die Treppe emporhosenbeinen, by the way, became “to trouser-leg up the steps”).

Another tricky moment in the text is its very refrain: "Meier spelled with an I," Meier mit ei Our main character, our star, has a name as common as they come, just as his profession, that of a beer-hall clown, was a dime a dozen in Walser’s early twentieth-century Berlin.  But Walser has a knack for taking the banal and quotidian and transforming it into the quixotic and peculiar just by looking at it very closely. And so Meier is not simply Meier but  "Meier spelled with an I" rather than a Y, an E rather than an A, and he is a clown who not only makes you laugh but makes you roll up in a laughing ball and shudder tragically on top of that. Walser emphasizes the specific spelling of Meier’s name several times throughout the short text, playing with the sound of the diphthong, which in German is also an interjection expressing mild surprise (my dictionary translates it as “hey” or “oho”). While my choice sacrifices the joke in the final sentence, where a list of scary sounds meant to frighten and alarm (“ha,” “nah”; hu, nä) ends in the reassuring gentleness of Meier’s ei, it does underscore the way in which Walser constantly circles back on himself, the way in which the first person peeps out from behind the third person in his mischievously layered texts.

—Millay Hyatt