This Little Art

by Kate Briggs

  So this was never in English, then. This was always in German.

  And German as a language quite different from the French that the characters are now choosing to speak.

  Or, this was always supposed to have been in German, and to be received as if it were still, somehow, in German, and I did know this, implicitly, even as I accepted the novel in English. This is the belief-suspension that reading a translation requires: even when all logics point to the characters speaking, acting and interacting, to the prose having been written, the feelings and ideas having been articulated, in German (the story of an unassuming young man making his way, in midsummer, from his native city of Hamburg to Davos-Platz), here it all is in English, and here I am being invited – expected? – to go with it.

  And I do. Clearly, I do.

  It’s an everyday peculiar thing: an altogether obvious and necessary thing, only right now producing a whole new bewilderment.

  And then it occurs to me: if the novel that Mann originally wrote in German has been translated, comprehensively, into English (since this is, after all, TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN, as the title page of my edition announces in full caps) then the long sections of French in this exchange can’t have been translated at all. I mean, these passages, the lines of French that I have been copying out – which appear in French on the page, ‘even in the English translation’, as nanojath points out – can only be transcribed Thomas Mann.

  The translator has lifted the French passages directly from the German edition and is hoping for enough familiarity on the part of her readers that they’ll be capable of reading them.

  Or, if not that, then enough goodwill on the part of her readers that they’ll be willing to skim over them.

  Then again, what else was she going to do?

  A note. It’s true. She might have translated the French into English and written a note, making us nod as we read: flagging up from the bottom of the page or somewhere else in the book that what we’re about to read or have just read is/was said in French, the rest of it in German, and here is all of it in English. Which is what John E. Woods does in his retranslation of the novel, published in 1995. (The newer translation that jedicus, another ask.com poster, answering back from across the internet just twelve minutes later, will direct nanojath toward: have a look on Google Books, he suggests; there might be a few pages of the Woods translation missing, but you should now be able to read most of Chapter 5.)

  Or italics. She might have translated the French into English and marked the difference between the English-translated-from-the-French and the English-translated-from-the-German in italics. Or a new font maybe, like in the dragon-training book I have been reading aloud to my sons at bedtime. When the hero speaks a bit of Dragonese, and in all the places where the dragons speak to one another in their peculiar deep-sea language, their words are written out in English but printed in something like Adobe Gothic. Which makes for an interesting evening conundrum: should I assume a dragon accent when I read the dragon bits aloud? Like the villains once did in the movies? Or should I just tell them, announcing as I read: right, okay, so, listen boys, you’ll hear this bit in English, but since it’s a dragon who’s speaking, and speaking in a language that no human, bar the hero, is supposed to understand, what you’ll truly be hearing, according to the logic of the book, is a kind of live instant translation. A bit like that scene in the Bible, the New Testament, which I realize that perhaps you don’t know, but there’s this scene where the Apostles speak and the miracle of it is that everyone hears their words as being spoken directly and simultaneously in their own languages, with no delay and with no interval. Speech multiplied and diversified but in this moment without difference – as a counter to the story of Babel, this time without it apparently making any difference. Or the scenes in Elena Ferrante’s novels, the ones I have stacked in a pile by my bed, when her characters abruptly switch from Italian into dialect and back again but rather than producing passages of dialect on the page, Ferrante asks me to imagine it. Even in the Italian, so I learn from an interview with her translator Ann Goldstein, she asks her readers to imagine it. And to hear the switch, to hear the sudden change in cadence, in vowel-sounds, in familiarity, in violence and in urgency, and in this instance to register what this switch means, and all the real and powerful difference it makes, but without actually seeing it or hearing it or reading it. And all these further invitations to suspend my disbelief, to note without having to contend with the very real and very material differences between these different languages, recalling somewhere, for me, a difficulty that Gilles Deleuze sets out at the beginning of an essay called (in Daniel W. Smith’s translation) ‘He Stuttered’. It has to do with dragons (really, it does. Or at least to my mind and on some level it does). It’s often said that you can tell a bad novelist by his over-use of speech tags, writes Deleuze, in my memory of how the essay begins. You know, the kind of writer who wants to distinguish between his characters. But instead of introducing variety into their manners of speaking, will simply write: ‘he murmured’, ‘he sobbed’, ‘he giggled’ and so on. We can laugh at this, but in fact it’s a tricky thing. Because, say you’re a writer and you want your character to stutter. Or, say you’re a writer and you want the dragons in your story to speak in some ancient icy reptile tongue. What do you do?

  Well, it would appear that you can only do one of two things. Either, you can say it. You can say to your reader: this is how they speak. You can announce it. You can indicate the stutter, tagging it, but without actually performing it:

  ‘No!’ he stuttered. (‘Yes!’ iced the dragons, in their cold lizardy language, which no one bar the hero is supposed to understand.)

  Or, you can write the stutter out. You can show the stuttering on the page, you can perform it, but without announcing it:

  ‘N-n-n-n-o!’ he said. (‘Yes!’ said the dragons.)

  What else are you going to do?

  In fact, it soon becomes clear that I don’t need to do anything. My kids don’t need me to keep reminding them of the dragon-difference. They’ve got it; they get it: this is what books do, Mum. Or, this is what good books do: they make us hear the different voices. They make us feel and in this way believe that they are written in different languages, in different orders of language here competing against each other, even when they appear to be, or when convention or convenience or the contested boundaries of so-called national literatures insist that they are written in just one. And they’re right, of course they’re right. And this might be somewhere along the way towards what Deleuze is saying in his essay too, in relation to what he’ll come to offer as a third option available to or thrust by circumstance upon the writer, which would be neither to announce it, exactly, nor quite to perform it but to write in such a way that would make the language itself stutter. And stammer. To write – perhaps? – in the way Hans Castorp speaks French. How he can say, in English, ‘Oh I speak German, even in French,’ and I can see that this is true: that his hesitant and uneasy French does indeed appear to have been somehow modulated, patterned – stuttered? – by the difference of the other language, as well as his agitation, his nerves. I’d like to talk about all this a bit more: to find the passages in the dragon-training book where we think we can hear and feel the charge, the strange tremor of the ‘dragon-speak’ even when they’re not actually speaking, where we feel that language itself has been made colder, or older. But you know, it’s bedtime, and it’s no surprise that my kids have not been listening for a while now. They were long ago already somewhere else: scaling the cliff-face above the sea, into the black cave with the bag for the hunt. I’m the one who wants them to pause on the threshold of believing for a moment, and think for a bit longer about how this translation pact works: the translator as necessarily invested in instating her own further fiction, and working to make it hold. Not because it is her all-purpose and always default intention to produce unremarkable English. To write German, or Italian or French prose again as if it
had all been originally produced right here, and then to insist that this is all normal and how things should be. But for the prior reason that before we’re in a position to register the strangeness, the stuttering or otherwise of the prose – the ways in which the project of translating Mann or Ferrante or Dragonese might put new pressures on the English language, forcing the discovery of new, or tapping into old and neglected resources. Which is to say: before we’re even in a position to critique or worry over the decisions made by the translator, some provisional agreement has already been made. We have accepted the book in English. We have accepted that the book is now written in what appears to be English. The translator has made this thing that we now have at least minimally in common. And we share it – we are already sharing in it – in the most basic sense that we can at least now hold it and read it and copy out from it. I am a translator, responsible in part for the delayed appearance of Barthes’s lecture notes in English: beginning work on translating the first Collège de France lecture course some thirty or so years after the fact. I am also an invested reader of books in translation, altogether willing to go with what the translator is asking me to accept. And it occurs to me that if I keep returning to this scene in The Magic Mountain, to this extraordinary scene of difference and desire as played out by the offsetting of one historical language against the other, and by speaking the one inside or while at the same time speaking the other, and with all of it happening for me in a third, it is because when reading translations I, too, seem to have trouble making myself pause, and registering for a moment. And registering not just like some box I might tick, unthinkingly, casually, on some webpage or other – yes okay cookies, yes okay translation, I get it, I’ve got it, I accept your terms – but to stop and properly register. With a small gasp in the course of reading. That if the French is still Mann’s, lifted intact and unaltered from the German text in which it was once embedded. Then what this means. What this also means. What this must also mean is that all the pages of prose framing the conversation written in French. Which is to say, the whole novel: the great climb and descent of The Magic Mountain, including the midpoint sentences I read and wrote out above – I’m thinking again of the thin, dark silk. Yes, and – what was it? The soft fringes of her hair.

  The slightly prominent bone at the back of her neck.

  The amazingly white arms.

  The mechanism with its hard little needle of lead – were handled by Helen Lowe-Porter.

  We receive them twice-written; the second time by her.

  DON’T DO TRANSLATIONS

  Don’t do translations, I remember being advised, about a decade ago, by a well-meaning professor. At least, not if you’re planning on making a living. Or, let’s say, on getting a job in the university. It’s a thankless thing, really. A ‘little art,’ Lowe-Porter called it, despite the great determining resonance her own work would have. You could try writing a monograph instead. Perhaps a monograph about translation. But don’t spend your time, and certainly not all your time, on doing them.

  The first time I heard the word monograph I wasn’t exactly sure what it meant.

  The dictionary offers ‘a learned treatise on a small area of learning. Or a written account of a single thing’. Which makes things difficult. Because translating is not a small area of learning, and nor is a translation ever an uncomplicatedly single thing. But it turns out that academics use the word to mean something different, making the mono, the just one, refer not to the subject matter – which might be a vast area of learning, or a book about many things – but to how the book is written. A monograph is a book written by just one person: a singly-authored original contribution to knowledge.

  Don’t do translations, he said, a decade or so ago.

  Not if you want. Well, what exactly?

  What exactly did I want?

  Now I think of it, a different question might have been: what is it that you have found in the practice of translation? That is, in the writing of literary translations – since, among all the many instances of translation currently happening everywhere and all the time in the world, this is the form your activity seems to take? What is it about this activity, in its difference from single-handed original authorship – the way it complicates the authorial position: sharing it, usurping it, sort of dislocating it. But the way it gets things said and written, heard and read nonetheless, by these other, more distributed means. What is it about the practice of writing translations? And how (in whose terms exactly?) do you propose to properly register what’s going on with this – with your – work?

  The American-born Helen Lowe-Porter began her translation career in the early 1920s. She was living in Oxford, married to a university professor and the mother of three daughters. As John C. Thirlwall describes it in his account of her relations with Thomas Mann (In Another Language. A Record of the Thirty-Year Relationship between Thomas Mann and His English Translator, Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter, published in 1966) ‘she did not want to vegetate intellectually’, and so had ‘let it be known that she was available as a translator from Italian, French or German’. She was sent a copy of the German edition of Mann’s Buddenbrooks; she read it and liked it. In her own article, ‘On Translating Thomas Mann’, published in 1950, she writes: ‘to me personally Buddenbrooks was a welcome and delightful phenomenon’. Not at all sentimental; unlike so much of the work published in the wake of German Romanticism, here was ‘emotion cooled off and served up on ice’. She began work on a translation and ‘greatly enjoyed translating it’.

  Early in 1924, Mann read parts of her work in progress and wrote in praise of her skill and sensitivity. He suggested that they meet. Perhaps he and Frau Mann could drop in to see her in Oxford? But they didn’t specify a date. As a result, when they did turn up, no one was at home; the Manns had to wait. Lowe-Porter imagines them passing the time: ‘I feel sure T. Mann looked over all the books in our scanty library … and did his best to size up this unknown instrument which – due to the vicissitudes of those war and postwar years – must willy-nilly (and of course unless he could find a better one) serve him to change the garment of his art into a better one which might clothe her for the market place until times changed.’ The translator as an unknown instrument: a tool to be used, a service provider, engaged in undressing and carefully re-dressing the literary work of art for the purposes of a new market. Like a lady’s maid. I know nothing, really, about lady’s maids, other than what I’ve seen in period dramas on the TV, but this is the first image that springs to mind. Like a lady’s maid who corresponded with Albert Einstein, Herman Broch and Theodor Adorno. An unknown instrument who was ‘known throughout her life for her passionate interest in literature and her outspoken liberal views’, as David Horton describes her in his recent book Thomas Mann in English. A stay-at-home mother of three who deliberately sought out complex translation work as a means to challenge herself intellectually. Only apparently to downplay its complexity, its intellectual challenge, in a published account of her work (let me just change the garment of your art…).

  Then aged forty-four, Helen Lowe-Porter would continue work on the translations of Mann’s books for the next twenty or so years, stopping only in her late sixties, partly because of ill health and partly to pursue, and to resume, her own literary projects: poems, a play. Her translations would be extraordinarily successful in the new marketplace: fast-selling, popular with the reading public and the means by which Thomas Mann would secure his reputation as ‘one of the leading German novelists of the twentieth century’, which is how Todd Kontje puts it in the preface to the Cambridge Introduction to Thomas Mann, as well as ‘one of the few to transcend national and language boundaries to achieve major stature in the English-speaking world’. A line quoted by David Horton, who makes the point that this ‘major stature is to a very large extent the direct result of the efforts of his authorized translator’. New versions of Mann’s works have appeared in the years since Knopf’s claim on the rights expired in the 1970s
, but Lowe-Porter’s work is still everywhere in print.

  I read The Magic Mountain in Lowe-Porter’s translation, as part of the project of translating Barthes’s Comment vivre ensemble, the lecture course he began a week after the inaugural lecture, which in English is titled How to Live Together. My copy of the novel is a bit battered now – the cover is creased. One long crease runs up the front of it like a life-line, past the bright cluster of buildings foregrounded at the base of a mountain, through the black fir forest above them, scaling the greyer, more distant peak beyond it and then up and out into the white sky and off the uppermost edge of the book. The Magic Mountain, with its structured sanatorium-living, is a key text for Barthes in the lecture course, one of a small selection of tutor texts – or textes d’appui as he calls them. Supporting texts: the texts that brace us, the ones we lean on, testing them to see if they’ll support our weight; the texts we always seem to be in conversation with, whether directly or indirectly; the texts that enable us to say or write anything at all. Every discourse, says Barthes, is generated and sustained by its own more or less idiosyncratic, imperfectly remembered selection. This is not so much a comment as a principle. ‘There is an age at which we teach what we know,’ he’d said in the inaugural lecture. ‘Then comes another age at which we teach what we do not know; this is called research.’ In this digressive, excursive teaching (‘research, not a lecture,’ he’ll stress at the end of the first session), the practice was never to be exhaustive, or systematic: to work or walk in a straight line toward some generalizing theory, an ultimate grand idea. Instead, to set down a fantasy. And then to induce from the fantasy, a research project. The fantasy for this year of a form of living together that would accommodate rather than dictate the individual rhythms of its small-scale community. Allowing for something like solitude, as Barthes puts it, with regular interruptions. What kinds of structures, spatial or temporal, would enable this? Where to look for suggestion and detail, for models and counter-models that could be simulated, or already find their part-equivalents, in life? As materials to think with, Barthes compiles this unlikely corpus – an unexpected collection of writings and novels: The Magic Mountain, Robinson Crusoe, the texts of the Desert Fathers, Zola’s novel set in an apartment building, André Gide’s account of the real-life sequestered woman of Poitiers. The inquiry will proceed sketchily, says Barthes. Each lecture will offer just a few lines of approach; open a few possible dossiers. I’ll only be marking out the contours of these zones of interest. Like the squares on a chequerboard, he says, which perhaps one day I’ll fill in. Marking out the spaces, setting the places. A place for animals. Also for bureaucracy, for flowers and for food. I see it like a table: seating you next to you and you next to you, anticipating the conversations between topics, the arguments. The invitation to his audience was to collaborate actively in the inquiry. To fill in the suggested squares themselves, or to propose new ones. And they did: they spoke with Barthes between the sessions, or left notes, and wrote letters, asking questions, making corrections, providing alternative references, redirecting the path of the research toward their own different concerns, which might be one way of describing to myself what I think I am doing here.