This Little Art

by Kate Briggs

  ‘Kate Briggs’s This Little Art shares some wonderful qualities with Barthes’s own work – the wit, thoughtfulness, invitation to converse, and especially the attention to the ordinary and everyday in the context of meticulously examined theoretical and scholarly questions. This is a highly enjoyable read: informative and stimulating for anyone interested in translation, writing, language, and expression.’

  — Lydia Davis, author of Can’t and Won’t

  ‘In This Little Art, Kate Briggs looks at the “everyday, peculiar thing” that is translation, testing it out, worrying at its questions. She deftly weaves her recurring threads (Roland Barthes, Crusoe’s table, The Magic Mountain, aerobic dance classes) into something fascinatingly elastic and expansive, an essay – meditation? call to arms? – that is full of surprises both erudite and intimate, and rich in challenges to the ways we think about translation. And so, inevitably, to the ways we think about writing, reading, artistry and creativity, too. As a translator, I’m regularly disappointed by what I read about translation – it feels self-indulgent, irrelevant in its over-abstraction – but This Little Art is altogether different. It comes to its revelations through practicality, curiosity, devotion, optimism, an intense and questioning scrutiny, as the work of a great translator so often does.’

  — Daniel Hahn, translator of José Eduardo Agualusa and winner of the International Dublin Literary Award in 2017

  ‘Not so much a demystification as a re-enchantment of the practice of literary translation, that maddening, intoxicating ‘little’ art which yokes humility and hubris, constraint and creativity – in Briggs’s passionate telling, you can practically hear the sparks fly.’

  — Deborah Smith, translator of Han Kang and winner of the Man Booker International Prize in 2016

  ‘Briggs interrogates and celebrates the art of translation. She wears her erudition lightly in this highly readable essay that makes intriguing connections and raises more questions than it answers. Urgent and pertinent questions that challenge us as readers, writers and translators and offer much food for thought.’

  — Ros Schwartz, translator of Tahar Ben Jelloun, Georges Simenon and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

  ‘This Little Art maps the current landscape and disputed territories of literary translation with exquisite precision. With xenophobia on the rise across the western world, the complex art of translation has achieved a new level of relevance for English-language readers and Briggs has crafted an excellent exploration of the reasons why.’

  — Idra Novey, author and translator of Clarice Lispector

  ‘Just as there is something intimate about the act of translation – the translator is inhabiting the text being translated, reading it as closely as possible – there is an intimacy to This Little Art, Kate Briggs’s wonderfully evocative essay on translation. We feel the author is talking to us from across the table about the most important things – novels, language, beauty, art – but in a confidential, friendly way, in a way that makes us listen more closely. Translation, Briggs shows us, is a conversation – between the author and translator, between the translator and reader – and it is this conversation that keeps literature alive. I hope this book will produce not only more readers appreciative of the art of translation, but also more translators willing to engage in the courageous and daunting task of true close reading, that most intimate act we call translation.’

  — Charlotte Mandell, translator of Maurice Blanchot, Jonathan Littell and Mathias Enard

  THIS LITTLE ART

  KATE BRIGGS

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DRAGONESE

  DON’T DO TRANSLATIONS!

  WOULD-BE WRITER

  AND STILL NO RAIN / ROLAND BARTHES RHYMES WITH

  AMATEUR TRANSLATOR

  MAKER OF WHOLES (LET’S SAY OF A TABLE)

  WHO REFUSES TO LET GO OF HER TRANSLATIONS UNTIL SHE FEELS SHE HAS WRITTEN THE BOOKS HERSELF (OR, TRANSLATION AND THE PRINCIPLE OF TACT)

  SOURCES

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  DRAGONESE

  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. Standing a small distance behind him, in the doorway of the little salon, is Frau Chauchat. She is dressed in a startling gown of thin, dark silk.

  Was it black? Probably.

  Or, at most, shot with golden brown.

  Cut with a modest little neck, round like a schoolgirl’s frock. Hardly so much as to show the base of her throat. Or the collar bones. Or, beneath the soft fringes of her hair, the slightly prominent bone at the back of her neck.

  But all the while leaving bare to the shoulder her arms.

  Arms so tender and so full.

  So cool and so amazingly white, set off against the dark silk of her frock.

  To such ravishing effect as to make Hans Castorp close his eyes. And murmur, deep within himself: ‘O my God!’

  He had once held a theory about those arms. He had thought, on making their acquaintance for the first time – veiled, as they had been then, in diaphanous gauze – that their indescribable, unreasonable seductiveness was down to the gauze itself. To the ‘illusion’, as he had called it. Folly! The utter, accentuated, blinding nudity of those arms was an experience now so intoxicating, compared with that earlier one, as to leave our man no other recourse than, once again, with drooping head, to whisper, soundlessly: ‘O my God!’

  Later, agitated by the silly drama of a drawing game, he’ll walk straight up to her and boldly ask for a pencil.

  She’ll stand there, in her paper party cap, looking him up and down.

  ‘I?’ she’ll ask. ‘Perhaps I have, let me see.’

  Eventually, she’ll fetch one up from deep within her leather bag: a little silver one, slender and fragile, scarcely meant for use.

  ‘Voilà,’ she’ll say, holding it up by its end in front of him, between thumb and forefinger, lightly turning it to and fro.

  Because she won’t quite hand it to him, because she’ll give it to him and withhold it, he’ll take it, so to speak, without receiving it: that is, he’ll hold out his hand, ready to grasp the delicate thing, but without actually touching it.

  ‘C’est à visser, tu sais,’ she’ll say. You have to unscrew it.

  And with heads bent over it together, she’ll show him the mechanism. It would be quite ordinary, the little needle of hard, probably worthless lead, coming down as one loosened the screw.

  They’ll stand bending toward each other. The stiff collar of his evening dress serving to support his chin.

  She’ll speak to him in French, and he’ll follow her.

  He’ll speak to her in French uneasily, feeling for the sense.

  A little further on she’ll command, a bit exasperated and more impersonally now: ‘Parlez allemand s’il vous plait!’

  And in the copy of the novel I have open next to me as I read and write, Hans Castorp replies in English. Clavdia Chauchat has asked him, pointedly, in French, to address her in German, and his reply is written for me in English. I mean, of course it is. It’s an everyday peculiar thing: I am reading The Magic Mountain in Helen Lowe-Porter’s translation, first published in 1927. A novel set high up in the Swiss Alps, one of Germany’s most formative contributions to modern European literature (so the back cover of my edition tells me) and here they all are acting and interacting – not always, but for the most part – in English. And I go with it. I do. Of course I do. I willingly accept these terms. Positively and very gladly, in fact. Because with French but no German – I look at my bookshelves: also, no Italian and no Norwegian, no Japanese and no Spanish, no Danish a
nd no Korean (and so on and so on) – I know that this is how the writing comes:

  An unassuming young man named Hans Castorp travels up from his native city of Hamburg to Davos-Dorf. When the train stops at the small mountain station, he is surprised to hear his cousin’s familiar voice: ‘Hullo,’ says Joachim, ‘there you are!’

  Roland Barthes speaks into the microphone on 7 January 1977. It is the day of the inaugural lecture, marking his appointment to Chair of Literary Semiology at the Collège de France. Towards the end of his address he’ll speak of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and the strange age of his body. How he realized, upon rereading the novel the other day, that the tuberculosis he had experienced as a young man can’t have been the current treatable version of the disease. How it was, down virtually to the last detail, the disease of the novel, which is set in 1907. Barthes will speak of rediscovering Mann’s novel again the other day (for the purpose of preparing the lecture course on living-together he’d begin the following week), and realizing, quite suddenly, with a kind of stupefaction – the kind of stunned bewilderment, he says, that only the obvious can produce – that this made his body historical. In a sense, the contemporary of Hans Castorp’s. Its age much older than his own age on that January day, which was sixty-one. What to do? This is the question that the lecture comes around to ask. What to do in this old and untimely body – now, in this new setting, on this new public stage, in what he’ll call the new hospitality of the Collège de France? Forget, is the answer he’ll offer. Forget and be carried forward by the force of forgetting, which is the forward-tilting force of all living life: forget the past, forget age, and press forward. Which is to say: begin again. Even, be born again. ‘I must make myself younger than I am,’ he’ll say in Richard Howard’s translation of the lecture. ‘I must fling myself into the illusion that I am contemporary with the young bodies present before me.’ And so, right here, before those young bodies and witnessed by them, start ‘a new life’ with new concerns, new urgencies, new desires. Already he’ll have said: ‘I sincerely believe that at the origin of teaching such as this we must always locate a fantasy, which can vary from year to year.’

  For a long time, the inaugural lecture was the only part of Barthes’s Collège de France teachings available for reading: first published as Leçon in French in 1978, Richard Howard’s translation was then included in Susan Sontag’s A Barthes Reader, which appeared in 1982. The notes for the lecture course he’d begin a week later – that is, on 12 January 1977 – would not be published in French until 2003, and the English translation a further decade after that. These lags in publishing and translating that produce new readerships: bodies like my own, as yet unborn at the time of the lectures themselves, listening now to the sound files of the audio recordings, reading the notes, making them speak and be spoken to by – making them contemporary with – my own present moment. ‘Who are my contemporaries?’ Barthes would ask in a lecture delivered a few months later: ‘Whom do I live with?’ The calendar, telling only of the forward march of chronological time, is of little help. The way it brackets together work produced in the same set of years, as if shared historical context were the condition or the guarantor of a relationship. The way it holds more distantly dated relations apart. My copy of The Magic Mountain lies open next to Howard’s translation of the inaugural lecture, the one that was delivered before a packed auditorium; all those young bodies, they must be older now, pressed together in their seats, the aisles, out into the corridors. ‘I should probably begin with a consideration of the reasons which have led the Collège de France to receive a fellow of doubtful nature,’ is how Barthes opened his address. Although that can’t really have been what he said.

  What then? What, really, did he say? Or, to put the question another way: What is it, exactly, that the translators are asking me to go along with? Not that Barthes’s public discourse or that Mann’s prose should appear in English – the idea that this is all wholly normal. I know, on some level, that it’s not. I know that Mann wrote in German. I know – really, I know – that Barthes wrote and delivered this lecture in French, in Paris, at the Collège de France (he’ll even speak, in the lecture, of what it is to speak in French). I know it in the sense that, if queried, I’d be likely to say: Yes, yes, of course, I do realize this. It’s not quite that I am thinking, when I read Barthes’s address in English, that this is all exactly as it should be. It’s more that when it comes to writing and reading translations the question of what is wholly normal or truly plausible, of what was really said or written, gets suspended, slightly. The translator asks me to agree to its suspension. To suspend, or to suspend even further, my disbelief. This can’t really have been what he said (Barthes spoke in French; he claimed to barely speak English at all); nevertheless, I’ll go with it. In this sense, there’s something from the outset speculative and, I would say, of the novelistic about the translator’s project, whatever the genre of writing she is writing in. The translator asks us to go with the English of Joachim’s greeting, the English of Barthes’s lecture, in much – or is it exactly? – the same way as the fiction-writer asks us to credit the lake just visible from the station; to see rather than query the grey waters, how the firs on its shores are dense and then thin.

  Here’s a novel with a mountain on the cover. A novel set high up in the Swiss Alps, one of Germany’s most formative contributions to modern European literature. I turn to the first chapter, the small opening paragraph: ‘An unassuming young man was travelling, in midsummer, from his native city of Hamburg to Davos-Platz in the Canton of the Grisons, on a three weeks’ visit.’ And the magic of it is that I get caught up – to begin with unexpectedly, and then really quite quickly and for a long while caught up – with this journey, the steep and steady climb that never comes to an end. Which means that somewhere I must have already said: Yes. Okay, I accept. Look at me: I’m gone, I’ve gone with it.

  ‘But there really is not room to dance,’ she’ll say – eventually, when I reach this scene. This strange, abruptly and extensively bilingual scene, marking the midway point of The Magic Mountain.

  ‘Would you like to dance?’ he’d asked, some pages after the exchange with the small silver pencil.

  And then again: ‘What do you say, shall we dance?’

  ‘But there really is not room,’ she’ll reply. ‘Et puis sur le tapis –,’ switching without warning from English to French and back again – ‘Let us look on:’

  In the scene I am reading, Clavdia Chauchat and Hans Castorp speak to one another in French. Which both presents and stages a problem:

  ‘Winter is descending on Minnesota and I’m thinking I’d like to give Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain a second reading,’ writes a reader named nanojath. It’s 8.19 p.m. on 29 October 2008 and he has just posted for advice on ask.com:

  ‘Problem: in the translation I own, the extensive French dialog, most particularly in the Walpurgis-Night section (last section of Chapter 5) is not translated, and I don’t speak French.’

  ‘I’ve looked for translations online a couple of times but this machine translation’ – the link he provides is broken – ‘is the best I’ve come up with, and although a reasonable amount of semantic content can be dredged out of that, it just won’t do (for me) as a companion to reading the actual novel.

  My ideal would be a proper literary translation I could grab online. Second choice would be input on translations that render this dialog in English, so I can troll around the local library system for a copy to photocopy the relevant section.

  I really don’t want to buy another copy of The Magic Mountain.’

  This scene presents a problem – a translation problem whose solution here clearly presents a reading problem – but it also lays bare the fiction, the thin layer (or degree of slight separation?) of further fiction that the translation introduces and asks us to accept. (Fiction, writes Barthes – I’m paraphrasing here: like the transfers used in transfer-printing, like the technique of p
rinting onto ceramics; ‘a slight detachment, a slight separation which forms a complete, coloured picture, like a decalcomania.’) To be clear, if Hans Castorp is prepared to address Clavdia Chauchat so hesitantly and uneasily in French, it is in the first place because he can: twenty years old, a serious young man in pre-War Europe, he could speak more than one European language, at least a little bit. But there’s more to it than that. If Hans Castorp is prepared to announce, in French, his decision to address her in a language he doesn’t speak well – ‘moi, tu le remarques bien, je ne parle guère le français’ – speech-acting it, as the philosophers might call it: saying it and doing it at the same time. Here I am writing in English (so I am). Now I am writing in French (no, and this is the problem: no you’re not). If he is actively choosing, in this moment of observing the dancing, the strange spectacle of the masked patients of the sanatorium, dancing now, on the carpet before them, it is because he prefers it: I prefer this language to my own, he says, ‘je préfère cette langue à la mienne, car pour moi, parler français, c’est parler sans parler, en quelque manière – sans responsabilité, ou comme nous parlons dans un rêve. Tu comprends?’ It is because speaking in French, for him, is like speaking without speaking somehow. It is like speaking without responsibility – or in the way we speak in a dream. Do you see?

  Yes, French. Addressing her, speaking with her, he prefers French – he chooses French.

  But over what?

  Over German. It would have to be German of course.

  Of course, of course.

  Suddenly, and as if for the first time, this scene makes me aware of the agreement I made. I come up against the belief I suspended: