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WORK TITLE: This Little Art
WORK NOTES:
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RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, educator, and translator. American University of Paris, France, instructor; Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, Netherlands, instructor.
WRITINGS
Has translated works by authors, including Roland Barthes.
SIDELIGHTS
Kate Briggs is a writer, educator, and translator. She has worked as an instructor at schools in Europe, including the American University of Paris and the Piet Zwart Institute, in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Briggs has translated works from the author, Roland Barthes.
In 2017, Briggs released This Little Art. In this volume, she discusses her own work process as a translator and profiles other female translators, including Helen Lowe-Porter, who translated Thomas Mann’s works, and Dorothy Bussy, translator of André Gide’s writings. Briggs told a contributor to the American University of Paris website: “I had these ideas of translation as a creative practice, but I hadn’t really done something like that before. … It seemed complicated and problematic to me. It was a long process of thinking about translation … and then having something else that I wanted to say.”
Benjamin Moser, critic on the New York Times Online, remarked: “One of the many risks of imbibing too much Barthes is that his writing is as notable for fudging and preciosity as it is for insight, and Briggs shares with him a tendency to imprecise language.” Moser added: “‘What is a good translation?,’ Briggs asks. Like so many other questions in this book, this one is posed as a head-scratching koan. But it is usually quite easy to distinguish between a good and bad translation. Though we quibble about diction, and though critical evaluations will diverge, we can at the very least agree that a translation that misrepresents the author’s meaning is bad. Barthesian mystifications notwithstanding, translation is a concrete art. But arguments like Briggs’s are surprisingly common when working with translation.” Writing on the Nudge website, Rebecca Foster suggested the book’s length was an issue. Foster stated: “At 150 or 200 pages this would have been a fine, tightly honed essay; at more like 360 pages, it is rambling and likely to lose readers partway, unless they have a vested interest in translation.” Other assessments of the book were more favorable.
A Publishers Weekly reviewer described This Little Art as “beautiful” and concluded: “Briggs ‘s book is essential, not just for translators, but anyone who has felt the magic of reading.” Bella Bosworth, contributor to the Litro website, asserted: “This Little Art is generous, sentimental and needle-sharp, fierce and hesitant, flawed and perfect. All of it, all at once. This, in the end, is Briggs’ dazzling conceit: This Little Art enacts what it is describing, the way it is written echoing what is written. We walk through her mind, we see her hover over thoughts, question herself, stop, start again. What could be read as misplaced self-effacement (Is this what I mean?, she wonders) is actually bold and brilliant: the gloriously digressive, curious, self-questioning, unapologetically subjective act of translation.” Bosworth added: “In Briggs’ pauses, negotiations, vacillations, … and many varied answers we see a translator at work.” A writer on the Translationista website described the book as “a fascinating meditation on the art of translation that brilliantly intertwines threads plucked both from the world of books and ideas (particularly Roland Barthes, whom Briggs has translated) and the fabric of real life.” “This Little Art is rich, full of insightful anecdote and surprising analysis,” wrote Jan Steyn on the Music & Literature website. Carlos Fonseca, reviewer on the Bomb website, commented: “This Little Art reads like a jubilant tribute to that vital impulse that marks the reader’s attempt to engage with the pleasure of the text at the very basic level of language, a delight that derives from the minutiae of writing’s unfolding, the joy of seeing both how contingent language is and yet how absolutely necessary it appears in the works of writers and their translators.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, February 26, 2018, review of This Little Art, p. 81.
ONLINE
American University of Paris website, https://www.aup.edu/ (February 6, 2018), author interview.
Bomb, https://bombmagazine.org/ (January 4, 2018), Carlos Fonseca, review of This Little Art.
Litro, https://www.litro.co.uk/ (June 25, 2018), Bella Bosworth, review of This Little Art.
Music & Literature, http://www.musicandliterature.org/ (January 18, 2018), Jan Steyn, review of This Little Art.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (June 28, 2018), Benjamin Moser, review of This Little Art.
Nudge, https://nudge-book.com/ (November 6, 2017), Rebecca Foster, review of This Little Art.
Piet Zwart Institute website, http://www.pzwart.nl/ (September 12, 2018), author faculty profile.
Translationista, http://translationista.com/ (July 20, 2018), review of This Little Art.
White Review, http://www.thewhitereview.org/ (September 12, 2018), author profile.
KATE BRIGGS
Kate Briggs photoKate Briggs is a writer and translator based in Rotterdam. She is the translator of two volumes of lecture and seminar notes by Roland Barthes (Columbia University Press, 2011 and 2013). Further publications include: Exercise in Pathetic Criticism (Information as Material, 2011), On Reading as an Alternation of Flights and Perchings (NO Press, 2013) and The Nabokov Paper (Information as Material, 2013). This Little Art, a long essay on the practice of translation, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in September 2017: https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/this-little-art
KATE BRIGGS
Kate Briggs is a writer and translator. She teaches at the American University of Paris and the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. 'Translation in the First Person' is an excerpt from THIS LITTLE ART, a book in progress about the practice of translation.
QUOTED: "I had these ideas of translation as a creative practice, but I hadn’t really done something like that before. ... It seemed complicated and problematic to me. It was a long process of thinking about translation ... and then having something else that I wanted to say."
KATE BRIGGS ON THIS LITTLE ART
HOME>NEWS & EVENTS
On January 26 a joyous crowd applauded writer and former AUP Professor Kate Briggs as she discussed and read from her new work: This Little Art. This homecoming for Briggs was livened by her friends and former colleagues at AUP, roused with curiosity by Briggs’ takes on creating art, feminism and translation. A host of her former students was also in attendance, many of them taught by Briggs in courses such as Literary Translation and Creative Writing and Creative Translation.
This Little Art consists of multiple essays, but resists easy classification. It is very much a work of experimental translation and, in many ways, a thought piece on the challenges of translation and what translation can be. It is also novelistic in its prose, moving deftly from humorous quips to deeper questions of theory, imagination and what it means to create a translation. In parts, it is a memoir and a theoretical exploration, tackling questions of feminism and what it means when a woman translates a male author. In short, it is an extraordinary, intellectually playful accomplishment with its roots twined in Briggs’ time spent at AUP.
Translation makes things happen and we’re not in a position before we start translation to know what these things might be.
Kate Briggs
At our University Briggs developed her Translation as Experimentation course where the concept was to take translation beyond its rote limits and into the unknown. In some ways, this course also proved prescient to the thoughts that Briggs would transform into This Little Art.
“I had these ideas of translation as a creative practice, but I hadn’t really done something like that before,” Briggs said. “It seemed complicated and problematic to me. It was a long process of thinking about translation, doing translation, having some babies and then having something else that I wanted to say.”
Some of Briggs’ thoughts about translation also come from her involvement with the Center for Writers and Translators and its ongoing Cahiers Series. The series proved formative in Briggs’ growth as a translator and writer.
“The Cahiers Series has meant a lot to me in my exploration of the space between writing and translating,” Briggs said in discussing her involvement with the center and her own work.The evening wrapped up with Briggs fielding questions from a curious audience, signing copies of her book and sharing a laugh with friends, colleagues and former students.
Kate Briggs is the translator of two volumes of Roland Barthes’s lecture and seminar notes at the Collège de France: The Preparation of the Novel and How to Live Together, both published by Columbia University Press. She teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. This Little Art (Fitzcarraldo Editions) is now available wherever you get your books.
QUOTED: "beautiful"
"Briggs 's book is essential, not just for translators, but anyone who has felt the magic of reading."
This Little Art
Publishers Weekly. 265.9 (Feb. 26, 2018): p81.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* This Little Art
Kate Briggs. Fitzcarraldo, $20 trade paper (400p) ISBN 978-1-910695-45-6
This beautiful book, part memoir, part love letter, gives a glimpse of the art of translation, as Briggs recounts her struggle to render into English Roland Barthes's late lecture courses, La Preparation du roman and Comment vivre ensemble. She attributes her title to Thomas Mann's translator Helen Lowe-Porter, who saw translation as a "little art," little "as distinct from the big ones. Neither very important nor very serious." While differing with Lowe-Porter's view, Briggs shows her craft to be fraught with difficulty; one wishes to avoid mistakes, but often the correct interpretation of a sentence requires a deep level of empathy with the author. Translation is the product of "the dance of readerly excitement: the smack of an open hand on a desk, abrupt shifts in position, breath quickening or slowing down." Or it occurs in reaction to a sentence or paragraph that "you find ... has acted upon you." It is in such encounters with the text, and through the text, with the author, that translation happens--almost, it seems, as the byproduct of an intense intellectual adventure. Lucid and engaging, Briggs 's book is essential, not just for translators, but anyone who has felt the magic of reading. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"This Little Art." Publishers Weekly, 26 Feb. 2018, p. 81. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A530637483/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b1434927. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A530637483
QUOTED: "This Little Art is generous, sentimental and needle-sharp, fierce and hesitant, flawed and perfect. All of it, all at once. This, in the end, is Briggs’ dazzling conceit: This Little Art enacts what it is describing, the way it is written echoing what is written. We walk through her mind, we see her hover over thoughts, question herself, stop, start again. What could be read as misplaced self-effacement (Is this what I mean?, she wonders) is actually bold and brilliant: the gloriously digressive, curious, self-questioning, unapologetically subjective act of translation."
"In Briggs’ pauses, negotiations, vacillations, ... and many varied answers we see a translator at work."
All of it, all at once: This Little Art by Kate Briggs
BellaBosworthby BellaBosworth • 25th June 2018
All of it, all at once: This Little Art by Kate Briggs
Photo courtesy of Fitzcarraldo Editions
About a third of the way through Kate Briggs’ absorbing, intimate exploration of what it means to translate, she has Elena Ferrante appear and announce: “When I read a book, I never think of who has written it – it’s as if I were doing it myself.”
This bold claim of authorship is not as straightforward as it seems. Ferrante, amongst other things, is recollecting a childhood response to a phrase in Madame Bovary – the way a line, a sequence of words, can feel as if they were written for you. But employed in Briggs’ brilliant blend of essay, biography and manifesto, it becomes even more multifarious: at once an examination of the subjective nature of the experience of reading; a playful reference to Barthes’ The Death of the Author; a nod to the regular purging of translator by reader, publisher and reviewer; and the proposition that reading – and, boldly, crucially, translating – is an act of creation, is an art (though just a little one, of course).
This last idea, and the teasing “little” of the title, is the meat of Briggs’ book-length essay. She playfully yet determinedly dismantles the platitudes and received wisdom associated with translation – not least the assumption that translating is marginal to the ‘true’ art of writing, the slippery notion of ‘fidelity’ to an original text, and the well-worn image of a translator as a frustrated writer. Peeling back layers of meaning to question and uncover the essence of translation, she lifts it up and turns it in the light, showing us its intricacies, perfections, flaws and peculiarities, just as you would of a piece of art.
A translator and writer, Kate Briggs teaches at the American University of Paris and the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, and has translated Roland Barthes’ lecture notes for two courses at the Collège de France. It is these notes that provide one of the many entry points to her genre-bending work: Barthes sits alongside warmly flickering reels of Briggs’ personal life, an examination of Robinson Crusoe’s table-building, a biography of translator Helen Porter-Lowe, and epistolary exchanges between Andre Gidé and his translator Dorothy Bussy. We find ourselves just as stimulated in Barthes’ lecture hall as we do in a Parisian exercise class. She writes about her varied subjects with authority and yet modestly, tentatively – at times circuitously – advancing an idea over several pages only to stop and say: Possibly. Or not. Or, quite simply: I don’t know. This narrative amalgam of erudition and vacillation cleverly encapsulates the paradox of translation: at once definitive, because the words have been – have to be – chosen, and endlessly mutable, because it could always have been – and could still be – something else.
It is a quietly powerful thing, to make a decision. To choose between endless possibilities, put pen to paper and decide, announce: This, not that. Briggs describes how, in one of his lectures, Barthes produces an unusual image, that of a woman ‘stopping’ a ladder in her tights by wetting a finger with saliva and touching it to the ladder – like, Barthes says, a writer creating a “halt or temporary immobilisation in the run of culture”. Briggs extends the image: a translator, she posits, also presses her finger “down on the run of alternatives, the run of endless translation possibilities . . . and makes it stop”.
This stopping, this choosing, does not come without a price. A translator’s work – narrowing endless possibilities to just one – will always remain invisible to the reader. Yet accompanying any such decision is a vulnerability, a potential for embarrassment caused by a misreading or a mistake gleefully pounced upon by a reviewer. Particular attention is paid to translator Helen Lowe-Porter, whose translation of The Magic Mountain was the subject of a scornful essay listing its (many) errors. As Briggs points out: “translators are makers of wholes” and subjective beings determined to a great degree by place and time. And, besides, it is a price worth paying for the “extraordinary intellectual adventure” Briggs shows us. In many ways, This Little Art is a call to arms, a rallying cry: Translate! The poor pay, the impracticalities, and challenges are no counter to the thrill, the intellectual joy, the “peculiar hubris of wanting to rewrite sentences that you didn’t write”.
This precarious balance of multitudes is best realised in a stunning section on Helen Lowe-Porter, who refused to send a translation to her publisher until she felt like she had written the book herself:
What a privilege: to look after her children, while also doing the work she loved. Work that challenged her intellectually. Living a don’s wife’s life in Oxford, translating, writing out again, with her own hands and for years and years, the books that she admired.
But then – think about it: Can you imagine how difficult it must have been? A baby in the next room; elsewhere, a toddler, and another older child: deep inside the project of remaking the sentences of Der Zauberberg.
But no, that’s not exactly right either: she could afford a little maid, couldn’t she? She paid her £40 a year.
What privilege.
What pleasure: gaining indirect – unwarranted? – access to and simulating, in the comfort of her own home, the gestures of creative authorship.
What thanklessness, though.
What misassigned, regrettable power.
What admirable dedication.
And willing self-effacement.
What quantity of mistakes.
What hubris.
What an extraordinary intellectual adventure.
All of it, all at once.
This Little Art is generous, sentimental and needle-sharp, fierce and hesitant, flawed and perfect. All of it, all at once. This, in the end, is Briggs’ dazzling conceit: This Little Art enacts what it is describing, the way it is written echoing what is written. We walk through her mind, we see her hover over thoughts, question herself, stop, start again. What could be read as misplaced self-effacement (Is this what I mean?, she wonders) is actually bold and brilliant: the gloriously digressive, curious, self-questioning, unapologetically subjective act of translation. In Briggs’ pauses, negotiations, vacillations, queries and many varied answers we see a translator at work – a writer at work – deliberating, deciding, stopping the run, making art.
Kate Briggs’ This Little Art is available from Fitzcarraldo Editions for £12.99
QUOTED: "One of the many risks of imbibing too much Barthes is that his writing is as notable for fudging and preciosity as it is for insight, and Briggs shares with him a tendency to imprecise language."
"'What is a good translation?,' Briggs asks. Like so many other questions in this book, this one is posed as a head-scratching koan. But it is usually quite easy to distinguish between a good and bad translation. Though we quibble about diction, and though critical evaluations will diverge, we can at the very least agree that a translation that misrepresents the author’s meaning is bad. Barthesian mystifications notwithstanding, translation is a concrete art. But arguments like Briggs’s are surprisingly common when working with translation."
8/13/2018 Did He Really Say That? On the Perils and Pitfalls of Translation - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/28/books/review/kate-briggs-this-little-art.html 1/5
NONFICTION
Did He Really Say That? On the
Perils and Pitfalls of Translation
By Benjamin Moser
June 28, 2018
THIS LITTLE ART
By Kate Briggs
365 pp. Fitzcarraldo Editions. Paper, $20.
Even — especially — for those who are at home in different languages, translation is maddening.
“Hundreds of times I have sat, for hours on end, before passages whose meaning I understood
perfectly, without seeing how to render them into English,” wrote the great English Orientalist
Arthur Waley. Anyone who has ever tried translation knows the feeling: Some are put off by its
endless puzzles; others find them as addictive as chess.
Kate Briggs’s “This Little Art” is a meditation on translation, mainly derived from her experience
translating two volumes of lectures by Roland Barthes. It is full of quotes like the above, and of
speculations about how translation interacts with, distorts and intensifies reading: “This is a
translation!” she writes, of her own book. “I feel sure that something would happen — some
adjustment to your reading manner would be very likely to occur — if you were to hear me all of a
sudden insisting that it is.”
One of the many risks of imbibing too much Barthes is that his writing is as notable for fudging
and preciosity as it is for insight, and Briggs shares with him a tendency to imprecise language:
“We need translations,” she writes. “The world, the English-speaking world, needs translations.
Clearly and urgently it does; we do. And this has to be a compelling argument for doing them.”
But this is not an argument. It is an assertion, and Briggs misses the opportunity to examine it.
What, exactly, is so clear and urgent about the need for translation? Who, here, is the “we” —
middle-class English speakers? What kind of translations do we need: of what, by whom? Do we
derive something from a book from Berlin or Beijing that we cannot get from a work from Los
Angeles or London? Is foreignness, in other words, a positive quality in and of itself?
8/13/2018 Did He Really Say That? On the Perils and Pitfalls of Translation - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/28/books/review/kate-briggs-this-little-art.html 2/5
The perilous influence of Barthes in thinking about translation is evident in other ways, too. He
himself spoke no foreign language well, and was indifferent to translations of his work; his book
on Japan, “Empire of Signs,” is interesting — as long as one realizes that it is not about Japan but
about Barthes’s projection of himself onto an imagined empire.
This placing of subjective impressions over objective scholarship makes Briggs’s interest in
Helen Lowe-Porter, Thomas Mann’s translator (and Boris Johnson’s great-grandmother),
dismaying. A Pennsylvanian living in Oxford, Lowe-Porter “did not want to vegetate
intellectually” and set herself to translation. In the early 1920s, she fell into the prestigious job of
translating Thomas Mann, and, after his preferred translator “either fell or jumped out of a
window,” the job became a career. Lowe-Porter’s German was poor, as Mann himself knew;
subsequent scholars have documented scads of the “schoolboy howlers” that litter her work.
“Was no one checking?” Briggs mockingly sums up one critic’s reservations. “Was no one in
charge?”
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Despite her tone, these are good questions; like many others in this book, they dangle
unanswered. Briggs, herself a mother living abroad, feels sympathy for Lowe-Porter. She
acknowledges what that same critic called Lowe-Porter’s “errors of lexis, syntax and tense;
unexplained omissions; unjustified rephrasings,” yet goes on to imply that such shortcomings are
inevitable — that translation is an unverifiable mystery.
8/13/2018 Did He Really Say That? On the Perils and Pitfalls of Translation - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/28/books/review/kate-briggs-this-little-art.html 3/5
In three different professional capacities — as editor, translator and writer — I bristle at this
notion. As an editor of translations, I have seen how bad — how truly, appallingly awful — many
are. As a translator, I reject the suggestion that serious translators take such a lax view of
standards. And as a translated author, I have seen my work misrepresented in other languages. I
cannot speak for Thomas Mann, but I am surely not the only writer who finds distortion of my
words a grave offense.
“Was no one checking?” Well, who is going to revise that translation from the Latvian? If we wish
to publish a wide variety of international literature, we must place our trust in translators,
especially those working from languages few people in publishing houses can be expected to
know. With few controls in place, bad translators can get away with a lot. I am not referring to
minor errors, or to the kinds of rewritings that might lend themselves to theorizing. I am talking
about not understanding words, expressions and grammar — about “schoolboy howlers.”
“What is a good translation?” Briggs asks. Like so many other questions in this book, this one is
posed as a head-scratching koan. But it is usually quite easy to distinguish between a good and
bad translation. Though we quibble about diction, and though critical evaluations will diverge, we
can at the very least agree that a translation that misrepresents the author’s meaning is bad.
Barthesian mystifications notwithstanding, translation is a concrete art.
But arguments like Briggs’s are surprisingly common when working with translation. They are
compounded by the insistence that translators be respected as artists — no matter the quality of
their work. This is what Briggs suggests at many points in her book, as when she approvingly
8/13/2018 Did He Really Say That? On the Perils and Pitfalls of Translation - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/28/books/review/kate-briggs-this-little-art.html 4/5
quotes a scholar declaring that Mann’s “major stature” in the English-speaking world “is to a
very large extent the direct result of the efforts of his authorized translator.” Dare I suggest that
Thomas Mann’s stature might be the direct result of the efforts of Thomas Mann?
In any event, is it really too much to ask that Mann’s translator have good German? If so, should
we wish to see this neglect of basic professional competence extended to other fields: dentistry,
say, or aviation? But if translators are independent artists, the howler becomes a creative choice,
criticism becomes “shaming” or “policing,” and standards become a simple matter of opinion.
This is where I resist the insistence that translation is an unambiguous good. If that is true, then it
follows that any translation, and any translator, is good, too; and it becomes possible to sing the
praises of the Lowe-Porters: as artists entitled to their caprices.
Good translators approach their work in all sorts of different ways. They have egos as big as
successful people in any other arena, but the ones I respect are keenly aware of the difference
between creativity and appropriation. They might see their work as akin to a curator’s, a
librarian’s or a publisher’s. To such people works of art are entrusted — and part of that trust is
that they do not alter the objects in their care with inappropriate intrusions of their own
personality. There is no little art in mounting the successful museum show, but one would be
rightly appalled to find the curator touching up the Rembrandts.
“Look to the whole,” Briggs writes, quoting Lowe-Porter. Yet there is no whole without a vast
accumulation of seemingly trivial details. Like good musicians, good translators are obsessive;
and if the listener might not care, or might not realize he cares, about the difference between an
eighth note and a sixteenth note, the violinist does. No serious translator can minimize errors of
grammar or lexicon of the kind Lowe-Porter committed. We care because we know that
translating is not an art of fudging. Fussing over details is a matter of respect: of professional
self-respect, and of respect for the authors we translate.
If translation, like everything else, can lend itself to theorizing, it is first and foremost an art of
detail: “only a question,” as Virginia Woolf said of prose writing, “of finding the right words and
putting them in the right order.” The ironic jab of that teensy “only” is the kind of thing a
translator savors getting just right.
Correction: July 1, 2018
The biographical note with an earlier version of this review omitted a translator’s name. The
reviewer translated Clarice Lispector’s novel “The Chandelier” with Magdalena Edwards; he did
not translate it alone.
Benjamin Moserʼs co-translation, with Magdalena Edwards, of Clarice Lispectorʼs novel “The Chandelier” was published
in March, and his biography of Susan Sontag will be published in 2019.
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us on the Book Review podcast.
8/13/2018 Did He Really Say That? On the Perils and Pitfalls of Translation - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/28/books/review/kate-briggs-this-little-art.html 5/5
A version of this article appears in print on June 30, 2018, on Page 21 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Word for Word
QUOTED: "a fascinating meditation on the art of translation that brilliantly intertwines threads plucked both from the world of books and ideas (particularly Roland Barthes, whom Briggs has translated) and the fabric of real life."
Kate Briggs, “This Little Art”
It’s an exciting moment for new books on literary translation. One I read with special pleasure recently was Karen Emmerich’s Literary Translation and the Making of Originals, which argues clearly and cogently something that everyone in the field has no doubt viscerally felt but perhaps never articulated: that virtually every discourse of translation studies is predicated to a greater or lesser extent on the assumption that we know what an “original” is and can define it as a stable entity. The notion of stability is deeply embedded in the vast majority of our metaphors for discussing translation as transfer, and this book – by putting that stability in question – radically unsettles the field while at the same time opening up immediately compelling possibilities for new readings and understandings of the manifold, multifaceted relationship(s) between translation(s) (necessarily understood as inherently plural) and the shifting linguistic field that contains and comprises them (itself always in flux). She also teaches us new things about Gilgamesh, Greek folk songs, Emily Dickinson, Cavafy, and Jack Spicer. That was a great read.
And then this spring I picked up the new book This Little Art by Kate Briggs, a fascinating meditation on the art of translation that brilliantly intertwines threads plucked both from the world of books and ideas (particularly Roland Barthes, whom Briggs has translated) and the fabric of real life – the experience of attending an exercise class in Paris, issues of childrearing, and, yes, wrestling with translation problems. Delving into Thomas Mann, Briggs reexamines the work of Mann’s much-disparaged first English translator, Helen Lowe-Porter, finding much richer contributions to the development of the translator’s art than Lowe-Porter is generally given credit for. In challenging us to complicate our thinking about translation, Briggs’s book-length essai gains in depth on virtually every page, exploring all the different ways texts grow, expand, and shift in translation as new webs of association are woven in their new linguistic and cultural contexts. Her book is the perfect companion piece to Emmerich’s: two different approaches that both, with satisfying clarity, invite us to augment our thinking about what translation is and how it works.
I picked up Briggs’s book again three weeks ago when the The New York Times Book Review published a shockingly dismissive review of it by a reviewer who I’m not sure even read the book. The NYTBR editors must have had their doubts too, since they included Briggs’s book on a list of recommended new titles in the very next issue. If you’re interested, you can read the letter that a handful of colleagues and I co-authored in response to the review. Or just pick up Briggs’ book, and Emmerich’s, head to a beach or park or wherever you like to do your summertime reading, and enjoy!
A third recently-out title that belongs on this list is Mark Polizzotti’s Sympathy for the Traitor, which I very much look forward to picking up after I’ve read my way out from under the big juicy pile of National Book Award submissions (so many fantastic books in there!) currently impeding movement in the hallway of my apartment. Longlist forthcoming in mid-September.
QUOTED: "This Little Art is rich, full of insightful anecdote and surprising analysis."
KATE BRIGGS’S
THIS LITTLE ART
January 18, 2018
by Jan Steyn
This Little Art by Kate Briggs (Fitzcarraldo Editions, Oct. 2017) Reviewed by Jan Steyn
This Little Art
by Kate Briggs
(Fitzcarraldo Editions, Oct. 2017)
Reviewed by Jan Steyn
As a first-year Ph.D. student, I took a class from a History professor who promised that if there were one thing his students would learn from him, it would be how to read a book.
Here is his advice. First you skim the blurb on the back cover. Next you look at the index to see what the important terms are. Then you glance at the bibliography to find the important interlocutors. Next you peek at the introduction and the conclusion, paying special attention to the first and last paragraphs. Finally you look at the table of contents to get a sense of how the argument unfolds, and, if you have time, speed-read a chapter that is of particular interest to your own work. Then, to make sure you’ve extracted the maximum from the book in question, you write yourself a small note in the following form: “Author X’s book about Y and Z argues P and Q using methods D and E and evidence from F and G.” And voilà, you’ve read a book. Rinse and repeat. Try to read at least five books every day.
I suspected then, and have only grown more certain since, that this is a terrible way to read any book, even dry-as-dust history monographs. But there are few books for which this method would prove more disastrous than Kate Briggs’s This Little Art. The back cover promises “a genre-bending song for the practice of literary translation, offering fresh, fierce and timely thinking on reading, writing and living with the works of others.” It also gives us an assessment of Briggs as “a truly remarkable writer: distinctive, wise, frank, funny and utterly original.”
Instead of an index there is a note on sources:
It seemed impossible for me to write an essay about translation (as a form of close and long-term engagement with the work of others) without engaging very closely and at length with the work of others. I have done this in a variety of ways: citation, translation and citation, translation and paraphrase, translating and writing into and out of the passage at hand, writing and speaking with someone else’s words or letting someone else’s words write and speak their way through me. […] I have indicated what I’ve been doing, and on the basis of which source, in the notes below.
The notes that follow do indicate some of what Briggs has been doing with the work of others in the pages of her essay. Some but not all. There is not a note for every source. And there is not an “indication” for every combination of translation, citation, paraphrase, re-translation, and repetition. Still, while not comprehensive, the notes make for fascinating reading, giving examples and interpolations alongside sources and explanations of method.
There is no introduction or conclusion as such. The first chapter begins, “It’s Walpurgis-Nacht in the sanatorium and Hans Castorp, the hero of The Magic Mountain, has been made to feel hot and reckless by the atmosphere of carnival.” The final chapter ends, “Let’s say I’m actively parrying against the all-purpose explanation.”
The table of contents announces seven chapters (the numbers are mine): 1) Dragonese, 2) D̶o̶n̶'̶t̶ Do Translations, 3) And Still No Rain / Roland Barthes Rhymes with, 4) Amateur Translator, 5) Maker of Wholes (Let’s Say of a Table), 6) Who Refuses To Let Go of Her Translations Until She Feels She Has Written the Books Herself (Or, Translation and the Principle of Tact).
I am interested in tables, so I turn to the fifth chapter and start skimming. It begins with the Bibliothèque François Mitterand in Paris (the one with the four right-angled towers facing in on each other like open books and the “sunken forest garden” in its center). It ends with a plea to recognize the singularity of every translation. Ah, I think, she is here also “actively parrying against the all purpose explanation.”
And so: Kate Brigg’s book, This Little Art, is about translation, dragons, and tables. It argues for singularity and against all-purpose explanations. It applies the methods of genre-bending song and active parrying to evidence from Roland Barthes and the Bibliothèque François Mitterand…. You see? It’s terrible. Best to start again. Best to engage more closely and at length with this work of an other.
*
Kate Briggs was never my teacher. But she almost was. A year before the frustrating semester with the professor of five-books-per-day History, I was an MA student in the now-defunct Cultural Translation program at the American University of Paris, the same program where Kate Briggs taught a module on experimental translation in which she developed at least some of the ideas of her book. Since graduating from the Cultural Translation MA program I’ve spent seven years with one foot in the world of academia and another in that of (literary) translation. The more I learn about both these worlds, the clearer it becomes what a privilege it was to be the recipient of such a startlingly original and intellectually rigorous education. Still, my time there did not overlap with Kate Briggs’s. Reading her book is for me a way to revisit the missed encounter, to learn some of the lessons that I might have learned if she were my teacher. How different would I be today as a translator and intellectual had I entered the program one year later? It’s hard to say. But mostly, reading This Little Art, I feel that I might have been a different reader. A slower reader. A reader who reads again, obsessively, repetitively. A reader who cares more about the pace of reading. A better reader.
* *
Say it all too fast and we’re already at some all-purpose consensus. (Because who, really, could dispute the fact that books come from other books, that we all, indeed, have precedents?) Say it too fast and then: What else is there to say? We – you, I – switch off.
Kate Briggs tells a story of Roland Barthes telling a story about pacing. Two stories. At least two stories – other stories could also be about pacing since very few stories are not, in however indirect a way, about rhythm and relative speed. The first involves Barthes, an amateur piano player, listening to a radio emission of Bach being played on the harpsichord. The piece in question is one that Barthes himself likes – or rather “loves” if one, like Barthes, takes seriously the etymology of the word “amateur” – to play on the piano. But when Barthes plays it, he does so at a quarter of the pace of the radio broadcast. The professional musician is without a doubt “correct” in his pacing, but the piece is nevertheless lost to Barthes: “all the characteristics he had come to associate with the piece had disappeared.” Like translation, a musical recital is a repetition of an original. The French for rehearsal: répétition. The speed of the repetition changes everything.
The second story:
I think again of the woman he describes glimpsed from his window in the lecture notes on How to Live Together: the mother (or was it one of those nurses or nannies? – there are still so many of them working in the jardin du Luxumbourg) walking with her child, with her charge, in all likelihood on their way to or from home from the park, pushing the empty buggy out in front of her, while holding the little boy by the hand, while walking at her own pace, too fast for the small boy. […] An image briefly described, but one that Barthes insists is central – crystallizing – for all that he would come to think and say about rhythm and power, about the effects of imposing one rhythm on – overwriting – another.
This image turns out to be crystallizing for Briggs as much as Barthes; it is one she will evoke time and again, making a case for sensitivity to pacing, in reading and in translation. The work of translation dictates its own (slow) pace; it “demands a certain, un-condensable time with a work, and therefore, also, with the questions animating that work.” Like the little boy, it cannot be made to speed up without falling out of sync. One effect of slowing down when reading translations – slowing down to a pace closer to the pace of translation itself – is that one may begin to realize, not just to know in the abstract but to “stop and properly register,” that the work in question is twice-written, the second time by a translator. “This is a translation” each translation whispers sotto voce, a whisper that is just audible if one slows down the recording (enregistrement), slow enough to properly register…
* * *
Roland Barthes’s Collège de France seminars make for strange reading. The obvious reason is that they were not composed to be read at all. Or at least not read on the page by a general public. Lectures limn the regions between the ephemerality of speech and the permanence of writing. Far from literary bids for immortality, this kind of writing is moribund from the beginning: “A public lecture, openly offered, ventured speech, writing written for the lifespan of saying it out loud, is something that must and wants to die.” Public lectures, then, make an odd case for translation, which, as Walter Benjamin famously argued, is a way to usher in a text’s afterlife or survival [Überleben].
Kate Briggs is the translator of two of Barthes’s Collège de France seminars – How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces, and his final seminar, The Preparation for the Novel: Lecture Courses and Seminars at the College de France (1978–1979 and 1979–1980). These works, in translation, are kept in their lecture formats, suggestive and elliptical, notes for a discussion rather than the discussion itself. In French there now exists a new edition of La Préparation du roman based not on the lecture notes but on the recorded lectures themselves, transcriptions of the spoken that ironically seem more written than the scripted notes. Reading the Barthes seminars has many rewards, but it is heavy going and ultimately disappointing to many who have grown to love Barthes’s writerly prose. (It was Barthes, of course, who gifted literary studies with the enduring, though often challenged, distinction between styles that are lisible and scriptible, readerly, or made-for-reading, and writerly, or made-for-writing). The new edition of La Préparation du roman, taken from the oral, is oddly closer to this writerly prose. At moments of reading Briggs’s This Little Art, however, it comes to seem to me that Barthes’s translator’s reflections on the same subject matter that he broaches in the seminars is more Barthesian than either notes or transcript. These are moments of radical translation, translations that are, in the fullest sense, true (writerly) rewritings.
* * * *
So what exactly do we learn about translation from Briggs? What exactly do I, not present at Briggs’s seminars, learn from her writing?
It is not clear that Briggs intends to give lessons at all, but the ones she nonetheless conveys are certainly not meant to be universal ones; if anything, Briggs draws our attention time and again to the singularity of specific translations. The three dominant figures in This Little Art are each what Briggs calls “Lady Translators,” a deliberately “old-fashioned and unlikable and deeply condescending” phrase chosen to depict “those translators apparently at liberty to pick their projects, to follow their inclinations.” The three Lady Translators of This Little Art – Helen Lowe-Porter, Dorothy Bussy, and Briggs herself – are women who choose to translate gay men – Thomas Mann, André Gide, and Roland Barthes – in a certain (Barthesian) act of unrequited love. This Little Art is rich, full of insightful anecdote and surprising analysis. But what sticks with me, what I have learned and retained from this teacher who was never my teacher, from this book that was never a textbook, is a vivid sense of how often the normal moves of translation critique miss almost everything that is worth noting about the “little art” they seek to elucidate, especially when they forget the importance of pace, when they disregard the fact that the writing-again that is translation is also a writing-anew, and when they ignore the motivations, affect, and singularity of individual translators.
Jan Steyn is a translator and critic of literary works in Afrikaans, Dutch, English, and French. He is also a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at Cornell University where he studies and teaches contemporary world literature.
QUOTED: "At 150 or 200 pages this would have been a fine, tightly honed essay; at more like 360 pages, it is rambling and likely to lose readers partway, unless they have a vested interest in translation."
This Little Art by Kate Briggs
Review published on November 6, 2017.
Kate Briggs teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam and has translated two volumes of Roland Barthes’s lecture notes from French into English. A “little art” is how Helen Lowe-Porter, who translated Thomas Mann’s works into English in the 1920s to 1940s, referred to translation – a rather disparaging phrase that echoes the widespread opinion that translation is a lesser skill than writing, that only those who can’t produce their own work are reduced to translating others’.
It should not come as a surprise that Briggs takes issue with this belittling argument. Translation is not a substitute for one’s own writing, she contends, but a unique form of engaging with language and literature. It’s about solving word problems, as Lydia Davis has described, as well as about being seized by particular works or even individual sentences. For instance, Elena Ferrante claims to have never gotten over a line from Madame Bovary in which Emma exclaims at her daughter’s ugliness.
In essence, Briggs asserts, reading a translation involves a suspension of disbelief: you know that the words you are reading originally appeared in another language, but you must attempt to forget about the middleman and absorb them afresh. As she puts it, “there’s something from the outset speculative and, I would say, of the novelistic about the translator’s project, whatever the genre of writing … The translator asks us to go with the English”. However, one should bear in mind that no translation comes with “the promise of zero distortion,” since the individual translator brings to the work their own style and set of experiences.
I learned that translators earn a shockingly low per-word fee that is not in keeping with the amount of time it takes to do the work well (perhaps £90 for 1,000 words). I was interested in Briggs’s general thoughts about the translator’s art, but not necessarily in her extended examples: Lowe-Porter’s experience with Mann, Barthes’s interest in haiku, and so on. At 150 or 200 pages this would have been a fine, tightly honed essay; at more like 360 pages, it is rambling and likely to lose readers partway, unless they have a vested interest in translation.
Rebecca Foster 3/1
This Little Art by Kate Briggs
Fitzcarraldo Editions 9781910695456 pbk Sep 2017
QUOTED: "This Little Art reads like a jubilant tribute to that vital impulse that marks the reader’s attempt to engage with the pleasure of the text at the very basic level of language, a delight that derives from the minutiae of writing’s unfolding, the joy of seeing both how contingent language is and yet how absolutely necessary it appears in the works of writers and their translators."
Kate Briggs’s This Little Art by Carlos Fonseca
Part of the Editor's Choice series.
BOMB 142
Winter 2018
142 Cover Web
Interviews
Milford Graves by
Aakash Mittal
Celeste Dupuy-Spencer by Katherine Cooper
Meredith Monk and Jim Hodges
Lucy Dodd by Rashid Johnson
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins by Hilton Als
Jlin by Jibade-Khalil Huffman
Cate Giordano by Amy Ruhl
Don Mee Choi and Christian Hawkey
Friederike Mayröcker by Jonathan Larson
Editor’s Choice
Tuli Kupferberg’s YEAH by Michael Blair
Peter Funch’s 42nd and Vanderbilt by Gideon Jacobs
Roland Kayn’s A Little Electronic Milky Way of Sound by Keith Fullerton Whitman
Kate Briggs’s This Little Art by Carlos Fonseca
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s And Yet My Mask Is Powerful by Lynn Maliszewski
Myriam Gurba’s Mean by Lauren LeBlanc
First Proof
Portfolio by Laura Bruce
Tour by Klaus Kertess
On a Street by Constance DeJong
Only Mei Guo Ren by Wendy Xu
Moby Dick in Hollywood—Orson Welles by Pierre Senges
Luxe Chariot w/Bidet (Meals on Wheels) by Farnoosh Fathi
A Garden for Two by Brie Moreno
More
At the Peephole by Nuar Alsadir
Selahattin Kardestuncer: baba, tailor, migrant by Sermin Kardestuncer
End Page by Gabriela Vainsencher
Jan 4, 2018
Review
Literature
#142
ISSUE
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Art 1
(Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017)
Often, while reading a book, I’m engulfed by a desire to translate the text. Whether written in my native tongue or in a foreign one, I’m tempted to rewrite it in my own private language. This is, somehow, a movement within language itself, driving the text toward me as reader. This impulse lies at the heart of Kate Briggs’s inspiring This Little Art. Briggs delves into her experience translating Roland Barthes’s La Préparation du roman to offer us a poignant account of what this translation compulsion might be. She elegantly likens it to the actions of the avid but amateur aerobic exerciser who wakes up every morning to attend her dance class purely for the pleasure of energetically mimicking the gestures of others. This vindication of the figure of the amateur translator hints at the fact that all translation is an uncontrollable act of desire, a playful gesture that greets us at a fundamental level: the appeal of the text. As Barthes had already sketched out in his autobiography, the amateur—coming from the Latin amator, or lover—is the one who, in opposition to the professional, truly engages with the pleasure of her craft.
Faithful to this intuition, This Little Art reads like a jubilant tribute to that vital impulse that marks the reader’s attempt to engage with the pleasure of the text at the very basic level of language, a delight that derives from the minutiae of writing’s unfolding, the joy of seeing both how contingent language is and yet how absolutely necessary it appears in the works of writers and their translators: Thomas Mann and his translator Helen Lowe-Porter, André Gide and his translator Dorothy Bussy, Roland Barthes and Kate Briggs herself. It is perhaps the story of this last partnership that holds the key that unlocks the secret charm of this singular book, for This Little Art is as much about the late Barthes as it is about translation. Like two examples she offers—that of the researcher reading the 1500 books Flaubert is said to have read in order to write Bouvard et Pécuchet, and the reader who underlines each line of a book as if everything were important—Briggs has written a testimony about the possibility of reading a text so intensely that one feels tempted to recreate it. This utopian project, the contours of which mimic that of Borges’s enigmatic Pierre Menard, ends up sketching a beautiful homage to the late Barthes, who, in that last project of his, perhaps more clearly than anyone else, understood that all writing springs from a desire to render into our private idioms the appreciation we feel toward the work of others. In doing so, This Little Art inherits his unfulfilled desire to write a novel and traces around it a convincing plea for the art of translation—that all writing is, in a way, translation.
Carlos Fonseca was born in Costa Rica and grew up in Puerto Rico. His work has appeared in publications including the Guardian and The White Review. He teaches at the University of Cambridge and lives in London. He is the author of the novels Colonel Lágrimas and Museo Animal.