This Little Art

by Kate Briggs

  It is easy not to think about translation. This has to do, of course, with the way translations typically get presented to readers: the name of the original author in full caps and bold; the translator’s name smaller or left off the cover altogether; reviewers failing to register the fact of reading in and the creative labour of translation. But perhaps it also has to do with the way we tend to talk about – and so also experience? – prose translations. That is, prose translations, as provisionally distinct from all the other ways an existing work of art can be reproduced, remediated or re-versioned. From all the many other practices of redoing, rewriting and remaking – of working with extant material – with which the writing of translations in the so-called ‘standard’ sense is always proximate and talking to, sharing gestures and problematics, but with which it is not, I don’t think, wholly interchangeable. The point is this: unlike those other re-mediations, which might require us to acknowledge the difference of their new materials as well as the intervention, the new gesture, of their reproducer, translations seem to give us the permission to say, quite unworriedly: that book? Yeah, I’ve read it. They give us the permission, or we take it. I’ve read Mann’s novels. I’ve read Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain, but not Doctor Faustus, or the Joseph books. I’ve read most of Flaubert. I’ve read Ferrante. And I really like her work a lot. I’ve read Barthes. It’s true that I might sometimes qualify this. I might say (or hear other people say): actually, no. You haven’t. You haven’t really read Barthes, for example, until you’ve read his work in French. But more often than not the possibility of reading in French is offered as a kind of surplus value. As in: there is reading. Yes, agreed. Let’s hold to that: there is something like the baseline of reading that is made possible by translation. And then, added to that, there is the additional value of reading in the original. Does the first assertion, the first reading experience, always have the other somewhere in mind? This is the question that Gérard Genette asks, briefly, in a book called The Work of Art, translated by G. M. Goshgarian. Or, to put the question another way: imagine I were to tell you that The Magic Mountain is in the living room. Imagine. The reason why you’re not a bit bewildered by this is because we both know – we both seem to already know – that what I really mean to say (what the work of metonymy is enabling me to say) is the novel is in the living room: my copy, our copy or someone else’s copy of the novel is in the living room. Does something of the same order happen when talking about the books I’ve read? When I tell you that I have read The Magic Mountain is this a quick small-part-for-the-whole way for me to tell you that I’ve read The Magic Mountain in English translation? The title here standing in for the translation which, in its own complicated way, is standing in for the original – each slightly smaller, reduced part (the title, the translation) pointing to some further, just out of reach and more expansive aesthetic experience (the real one this time, the authentic one)? Talking with you about the books I’ve read, and affirming that I have read them, is this what I mean?

  Possibly. Or, no. That is, I don’t think so.

  Unlike me, you may have read Mann’s novel in the German, and I’m very interested to know what that’s like. I’m also very inclined to agree that there’s great value in reading in the original. Perhaps something like the value we recognize and invest in literature. The right words in the right order, as Virginia Woolf puts it so simply in her talk on craftsmanship, delivered over the radio in 1937. These necessary words, in this necessary order. There is literature, arguably, or what we call the literary, when this matters: when we feel like something would be wrong should ever these words or their ordering be changed (if Clarissa Dalloway were to buy gloves and not the flowers herself, for example, as she does in an early draft of the novel). In this sense, literary translation, as a labour of changing words, and changing the orders of words, is always and from the outset wrong: its wrongness is a way of indirectly stressing and restressing the rightness of the original words in their right and original order. Translation operates, then, as a kind of vital test: an ever-renewable demonstration of the literary value of the novel in German. Which is one way of saying that literature, that quality we call the literary, simply cannot do without translation as a means of repeatedly reaffirming it (and when the words of a translation matter in turn, when we feel, in a translation, that it must indeed be these necessary words in this necessary order, the translation has become literature too). The theorist and critic Derek Attridge has written at length about the complex ways our sense of the identity of a work of literature requires, on the one hand, repetition (the repetition of what he calls ‘these specific words in this specific arrangement’ across all material supports: whether the book is read online or on paper or out loud, whether it is printed in this font or that, we are still able to identify it as the same work) and, on the other, an openness to just how non-identical the different manifestations of (and the forms of my engagement with) apparently the same work can be. How, in fact, the font does matter, or it can – likewise the timing and circumstances of my reading, the books I am reading the book with, the people I am talking to about it, who might make me think differently; the difference between reading a book for the first time and for the third. ‘Literary identity,’ he writes, ‘involves both repetition of what is recognized as ‘the same’ and openness to new contexts and hence to change’. In other words, to translation. Which might go some way towards explaining why, even with my keen interest in the original, I still believe – I still feel reluctant to qualify my basic conviction – that when it comes to this novel I, too, have read it. A belief that would appear to get stronger, and even more solid in its foundation, the further away from the original language I feel. Perhaps you’ll hear me say that there are works in French I haven’t truly? or fully? or properly? read because I have only? read them in translation, but that’s surely premised on the chance, the plausibility, of one day reading the originals. Mann on the other hand? Tolstoy? Ferrante? Kang? All those books? Yes, I’ve read them. Or, let me maintain that I have read them. Let me believe that what I have read in English partakes, in all its difference, of what you have read in German, in Russian, in Italian, in Korean. This, after all, has been the form of my aesthetic experience, my own expansive and authentic aesthetic experience. I notice that the more remote the languages seem from my own capacity to learn them, the more assertive I feel. Why is this? I am more willing to register and be troubled by the closer, familiar differences than the more distant ones, I realize, and perhaps this is complicatedly true of all of us: when we are presented with a version of something that we know we can’t know, or not without some great, unlikely effort on our part, we are more prepared to accept how it comes, and to grow attached to the only form in which we are able to receive it. An English-speaking friend tells me about reading Calvino, a writer whom he loves, Cosmicomics in particular, and how often he goes back to read the stories that make up that book, and how badly he wants to believe – and, in fact, the degree to which he does believe, despite the translator’s name on the frontispiece – that it was Italo Calvino who handled the words that he is now reading, who wrote them for him. A naïve misconception (or an active self-deception?) on many levels, you might say: this Romantic attachment to monographic, single-handed authorship, this fantasy of unmediated address, and with it – underlying it and enabling it – my friend’s serene failure to notice, let alone to name the translator. One that he could easily think his way out of, if he wanted to (I look it up for him: Cosmicomics was translated by William Weaver in 1968). But worth taking seriously. A common reading experience enabled by translation that I think it’s very important to take seriously. If only because, well, there he is, my reading friend: sitting on his own in a chair with a book. Reading, alone and for the moment uninterruptedly, for some hours at a time. There he is, and this is what he’s thinking, and this is how he feels.

  The translator: writer of new sentences on the close basis of others, producer of rel
ations. In the first instance, of her own personal relation with the books she reads and undertakes to translate. As well as with the writer she often thinks of – even, with whom she corresponds, if correspondence is possible – as she works. Then, the complex relations between the writing she has written and the extant writing that was the condition of her producing it. The translation theorist and scholar Theo Hermans has recently argued for the performative power of the speech act that declares this is a translation, thus bringing with it – or right here and now making – a complicated ‘promise of representation’. A translation becomes a translation only when someone (the translator, the publisher, the reader, an institution) declares it to be one; up until that point, writes Hermans, the status of her writing is ‘merely another text’. I like this argument a lot. Not because I think the person writing a translation is likely to think of what she is writing as ‘merely another text’. (Certainly, in my own case, I am always and from the outset privately declaring – if only to an audience of myself – the sentences I am writing to be translations: it is this understanding and framing of what I am doing that shapes the kinds of sentences I am able to write.) But because Hermans’s argument leaves the door wide open for the later – the later, or at least differently timed – declaration that says, retroactively or projectively: this is actually a translation of that. And in this way works as invitation to think further about how, in the wake of such a declaration – should indeed the declaration be heard, should indeed it be registered at all (think of my reading friend, communing directly with Calvino) – so many things change: our manners of reading change, our whole orientation towards what we’re reading changes, as in a brilliantly simple and provocative exercise I once observed a student set our translation class. She gave the group an original piece of writing and its translation, but had privately made them swap places. So what we read was an excerpt from a novel originally published in English but presented to us as if it were a translation from the French. Everyone was predictably critical of the English (in other words the original), finding it to be in different ways poorly written, misjudged, mistaken with regards to the rightness of the French (which was actually the translation). Everyone was a bit flushed and affronted, quickly backtracking when the trick of the exercise was revealed. Which suggests that rather than testifying to any identifiable quality of the prose itself, the categories of ‘original’ and ‘translation’ act more like placeholders: ‘original’ and ‘translation’ are the names for the positions we put writing in, and for the histories of writing labour we then assign to them (first-time writing, second-time writing). Positions which can then orientate and determine, in quite striking ways, the way the writing gets read. As in the sequence which closes Anne Carson’s Nay Rather, an essay on translation, where the familiar stops and signs from the London Underground, collected and sequenced, are thereby pronounced a translation of the Greek poet Ibykos’s fragment 286; and, on the facing page, the lines taken and set out from pages 136-7 of Conversations with Kafka by Gustav Janouch are likewise thereby pronounced a translation of that same fragment; and, turning the page again, so too are the words lifted from pages 17-18 of The Owner’s Manual of her new Emerson 1000w microwave oven. Carson calls this – the project of ‘translating a small fragment of ancient Greek lyric poetry over and over again using the wrong words’ – not exactly an exercise in translating, nor even an exercise in untranslating, but more like a ‘catastrophizing of translation’. She also calls it ‘a sort of stammering’.

  This is a translation!

  Is it? 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.

  Declaring her work to be a translation, and in this way inviting the world to read her writing as a translation, the translator instates a particular – certainly temporal, and for this reason very often hierarchical – relation between two writings (one then two, first then second, that absent work which gave direct and close rise to this), one of which she may think of as hers. In this way, she gets involved with you. The translator collaborates with the prose she is translating, with the publisher, and let’s say, also, with time, with the moment of her work and the new circumstances in which it appears, to enable your relation to the book, your sense of what it is, and of how it was written, and the person or people who wrote it. As a part of this, you might form a relation with her, with me. In the way that the more I think about the midway scene in The Magic Mountain (the more I wonder about the problematics of translating this scene), my relation feels increasingly to be with Lowe-Porter. Typically, though, the relation you’ll form is with the writer – your sense of the writer – who wrote the book first. If my friend feels the way he does about Calvino (about Calvino and not Weaver), it is because translation makes this possible: it is precisely this chance of forming a reading relation with a writer writing in another language that a translation, making no official claim to original authorship, also produces. You might form a relation with her, with me, as you read and depend on or query my translations. Though typically it is more likely to be with him. But what is most difficult, it seems, is both. Not either/or, but holding and maintaining a relation with both writers, a sense of both writing practices, in their shared project and in all the important ways those projects differ, in the head, and somehow together.

  There’s a moment in Barthes’s last lecture course – the last two-part course he would give at the Collège de France, beginning in 1978. The course on the novel, in which Barthes makes a two-year series of public lectures out of a private writing project, turning the space of the lecture into a kind of performed working-out of his sudden late-in-life desire for a new life, which for him, he says, could only take the form of a new writing practice: this fantasy of writing a novel, prompted directly by the recent and devastating death of his mother. The last course he gave, but the first one I read, in lecture note-form, when the notes were published in French in 2003. The one I pitched to translate, feeling so caught up in my own relation to the course, to Barthes’s slow setting out of the circumstances under which a novel might get written (by him, in the late 1970s, but also, in principle, by any one of those young bodies listening at the time, any one of us who might today, in our own present bodies, share something of that desire), and thinking of – fantasizing – the process of translating the course as one way – one drawn-out, especially attentive way – of taking it such a long time after the fact. There’s a section of the course that was drafted, but when it came to it never delivered. Perhaps because Barthes’s microphone had not been working the week before? And so when it came to lecturing from his notes on this section he needed to go a bit faster. In this skipped bit of the course, Barthes had prepared to talk about his renewed interest in the author, in the life lived by the author, in his or her biographical circumstances. In other words: in what kind of person, in what kind of body and in what kind of context the author was writing and how they might have been thinking about what they were trying to do. Which is funny, and perhaps surprising, given how famous his ‘Death of the Author’ essay still is. There was this whole period in the 1960s, notes Barthes, marked by a kind of incuriosity with regard to the life, the circumstances of the author, and the article I wrote was a part of that. But now? Now I feel a bit differently. Now things have changed. In fact, he writes, I feel this curiosity developing freely in me. No doubt this comes as part of the project of writing a novel, conceived here in the form of a lecture course, where the question is also, and for Barthes really has to be: what kind of life would enable a person to write such a long stretch of continuous prose? And indeed how to live it? What settings, what relations, what personal circumstances? Even: what writing tools (what pens, what paper?), what kind of desk orientation and organization would enable the living of it? Barthes describes a newfound preference for reading about the lives of certain writers over the works they produced (I know Janouc
h’s Conversations with Kafka better than Kafka’s work, he notes; Tolstoy’s Carnets better than the rest of Tolstoy). How inconsistent: this about-turn. This late change of position. Yes, notes Barthes, indirectly, a bit later on in the same session. Yes and true. But this precisely is the point: I’m not immobile (which might be one way of restating the point of the ‘Death of the Author’ essay, too). Neither I nor the writing I have published is immobile. And yet it’s something people seem to find very hard to accept. I’ve noticed how some people, PhD students especially, will fall out of contact for a few years – which is of course to be expected. Only to all of a sudden call you up: out of nowhere, they want you to be on their jury, engage with their work. They have no real interest in you, of course: in who you might have become. They want you to still be exactly as you were, in the same place, in the position where they left you: talking about the death of the author, about myth, about the language of fashion. But I no longer have anything whatsoever to say about fashion! There’s an aggressiveness to this attitude, in this assumption that I haven’t – that surely I can’t have – moved. They’ll lose touch for five years and then expect to find me again, whenever they feel like calling me up, in the same chair, waiting by the phone. Which is to say: we all think of the other as available, as always on hand. I do it too, probably. Of course. But in reality, my drive, my fantasy is to change places, to be reborn. Which means: I’m never where you want me to be.