by Kate Briggs
I –
Which I now? Barthes, or me?
me: the translator, testing out and writing into a new translation of the recording of this lecture all these decades later, heartbeat racing in an effort to get this right: Barthes waiting by the telephone. Or not. No, and this is the thing: he’s somewhere else, interested and investing in something else. I think of Renee Gladman, poet, novelist and translator, asking her interviewer in an interview: ‘When you’re reading translations, don’t you sometimes feel the racing heartbeat of the translator trying to get shit right?’ Trying, in my case, to arrive at a new phrasing for Barthes’s beautifully unlaboured sentence: on pense toujours aux autres à disposition. For what Jonathan Culler calls his ‘preference for loose and evasive appositional syntax’, especially in the later work. Whereby, as Elizabeth W. Bruss explains, the emphasis would so often be made to ‘fall more heavily on the individual word’. And ‘especially on its shimmering capacity to mean many different and inconsistent things at once, once syntax no longer constrains it to a single value’. Trying to find – Why not? (I know why, but just for the moment): Why not? – something like a new dress for it, a new thing for it to wear, to appear publicly in: we always think of others as available, on hand, to hand, at our service and disposal. Trying to get it right. While at the same time having to elaborate my own provisional and for the moment personal understanding of what right means in this case, in the particular scenario of this sentence, which might very well be different from the one that came before. And the question is: Well, do you? Do I? Reading translations, is this the kind of heat that you – or indeed I – want to feel? Or no, not really, not at all? It’s easy not to think about translation and translators. It’s easy not to bear the translator in mind, to hold the thought of her, the history of her work, in the head, while reading. She might have a great deal of investment in enabling your close relation with some idea of the writer whose sentences she too has written, only this time in a language you can read; she might have a great deal of investment in you investing in the ventured rightness of her new phrasing, and this in itself – the pull of the sentences she has written, and what they call forth – can serve to distract you from her. But then again, without this sometime effort (perhaps no more effortful than thinking of two things at once, or flickering intermittently between the two?), how else to make the interest of her practice, its racing heartbeat, the very case for doing it, appear?
Don’t do translations. It’s not really such a great idea to, the professor said. Although I like to think that the advice would be different now. Now that Translation Studies is an established field, and the practice of translation is taught as part of its many university programmes; now that academics have the possibility, at least in theory, of submitting translations as evidence of their research. And there are independent presses dedicated to publishing translations, and literary journals, in print and online, likewise committed to the dissemination of work in translation. Now that we can read articles in the book pages of the paper pointing to the extraordinary recent success of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s novels, translated into English by Don Bartlett, and of Elena Ferrante’s body of work in Goldstein’s translations. Now that we can apply for translator’s grants and residencies, even share writers’ prizes. There is still the pressing question of how to make a living as a literary translator, and the fact that translations still make up only the smallest percentages of the books that get published in English each year (what Chad W. Post has termed ‘the three per cent problem’). But still. Let’s agree that, relatively speaking: ‘it’s boom-time for translated fiction,’ as Rachel Cooke announced in the Observer.
It’s also, I don’t know, boom-time. Cooke’s article celebrating the ‘subtle art of translating foreign fiction’ was published on 24 July 2016. Exactly a month and a day after the UK vote to leave the European Union; what sounded, to my ear, as to so many others, like a great big boom.
It was a huge deal, on the scale of my life, to move, at nineteen, to a city in another country. Not very far away, only to France, a place I’d been going on holiday since I was a child. But even so: this time to the south of it. It was massive, formatively speaking, to take a train with my dad up to London, then to Paris, a metro across the city with all my things, and then down the length of the country from Montparnasse. For Dad to figure out the door-code, buy me a new duvet, some food for the fridge, all those simple loving things, and then say goodbye in the flat on the Rue Gambetta, setting me off on my Erasmus year abroad, before doing the same journey again in reverse. For me to venture out onto the place du Capitole. Find a seat in the pink brickwork, and feel the heat still in the walls. In October! In late November, even! I’d still be sitting out, my head thick with the peculiar kind of head-buzz that you only get from operating all day for the first time in another language, marvelling at how already it seemed to be creeping into my dreams. There was lots of that: trying to talk in new ways to new people. But never – not once – did it occur to me, nor, I don’t think, to any of us in Toulouse, in Montpellier or Paris, in Rome, Munich or Madrid that what we were doing was especially special; or, let’s say, provisional. We took it – our British middle-class mobility, the passage-rite of a year abroad, the very basically motivating idea that there might be some point, some personal and common interest, in learning and living and moving for a while in another language – for granted. There was no thought, then, for us in our privilege, that these conditions might turn out to be revocable: from normal to some erstwhile normality that I don’t want to be – that I refuse to already be – reminiscing about.
Do translations! This is the invitation I want to make, relaying and rephrasing – deliberately countering – the advice I once received. Yes, yes and absolutely. Do translations, for the simple reason that we need them. We need translations, urgently: it is through translation that we are able to reach the literatures written in the languages we don’t or can’t read, from the places where we don’t or can’t live, offering us the chance of understanding as well as the necessary and instructive experience of failing to understand them, of being confused and challenged by them. We receive these books newly made by the hands of translators, and the small contacts that those hands make, between translator and writer, reader and translator, language and language, culture and culture, experience and experience are, as Edith Grossman puts it, as vital to our continued reading and writing, to the vitality of our languages, our cultures and experiences as the books themselves.
I look about me for all the small contacts translation makes: putting one book literally in touch with another, their faces smashed against each other in the pile by my bed. Or on my desk. Or, with less pressure: the one leaning into the other, supporting the other, on my shelves.
Contacts that fray pathways: there is a character in The Magic Mountain, a Mexican woman called Tous-les-deux. She is called Tous-les-deux in the German, too. One of her sons is dying of tuberculosis and now the other, who’d come to the sanatorium only for a short stay, has fallen ill as well. Both of them. Can you believe it? Both of them. She wanders the corridors of the novel, wondering at it, despairing at it, muttering it to herself: tous les deux… What sad sadness. Hence her name. A nickname, a pet name that the patients of the sanatorium make up for her, a borrowed new name that passes untouched from the German, where it first appears in 1924, into the French translation in 1931; a name that, following a different route, makes its way intact into the English translation in 1927. A pet name that is picked up, turned over, and held up to the light by Roland Barthes at the close of a lecture on names in 1977. Barthes read the novel in Maurice Betz’s translation, and I’m told that in French the midway scene is this most extraordinary thing: the abrupt decision to switch into speaking French in the context of what is already a French translation, the uneasy, hesitant and a little bit mistaken French that Mann had written for Hans Castorp appearing italicized and intact (‘reproduced without modifications’, writes Bet
z in his translator’s note) amidst all the other French. And ‘the fascinating thing is,’ writes Antoine Berman, in a piece translated by Lawrence Venuti, ‘the young German’s French is not the same as the young Russian woman’s. In the translation, the two varieties of French are in turn framed by the translator’s French. Maurice Betz let Thomas Mann’s German resonate in his translation to such an extent that three kinds of French can be distinguished, and each possesses its specific foreignness.’ Tous-les-deux: in spring 2013 the name reappears as the subject heading of an email exchange between this translator and the copy-editor of her translations: should we leave it French? In this English translation of Barthes’s lecture notes, should we leave the name in French as Lowe-Porter did, and as Betz necessarily did? As a way of briefly telescoping the distances and making visible the paths between his work, her work, his work and our own?
We need translations. 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, I wonder: is it really for the world that the translator translates?
Primarily, I mean? Straightforwardly?
The translator takes the world by the back of the head. She leans in, pulling the English-speaking world in with her. She goes brow to brow with the world. And with breath hot and earnest against its face she says: Look, world, I am doing this for you.
Is that how it goes?
Well and why not?
Writing a translation can be a means to interrupt, to stall and expose the small-mindedness of the move I just made: the English-speaking world is not the world. It doesn’t stand in for and is not equal to the world; its literature is not literature, its philosophy is not philosophy. The translations we do read are their own necessary reminder of this – of everything we are not reading, and yet has been written and is being read by so many others, vast populations of other writers and readers, all the time and everywhere else. I don’t mean to suggest that translating for others, for the sake of the author or for future readers can’t be motivation enough. But rather to ask, at a time when translation is still so broadly considered to be the most ‘selfless’ art, the most uncomplicatedly generous and self-sacrificing of all the arts, involving, apparently, the least of the practitioner’s own self (except, perhaps, when it’s thought to have been done badly) and therefore, also, so the thinking seems to go, the least ‘art’: What is it that makes this activity interesting for the translator? What are the features of this practice of translating that invite and challenge and sustain her? Before the translation reaches the world – and for the short time, or the long time, the days or years of time, it can take to write one?
There’s a book on the table by the window. Let’s say it’s my table, by my window, the one I work on at home. Outside, there are trees, a café at the crossroads, the blue neon of King Kebab. There’s the sound of traffic, buses and road-sweepers; schoolchildren walking in a crocodile on their way back from the swimming pool. Sometimes, on warm days, there are teenagers: small groups of mostly young men, late teens, early twenties. They gather on the concrete walls on either side of the steps leading up to the raised shopping area that my thirty-one-storey block sort of floats on – that it was designed to float on. A brutalist housing experiment completed in 1974, the cars pass around and underneath us on a lower-level road, turning the raised precinct, with its towers, its concrete planters, its school and its shops into an island for pedestrians. I am on the second floor, and from my table I can see them clearly: they pace along the lengths of the tops of the walls, or stand balanced on the edge. They wear headphones: music for focus and concentration. They pace the lengths of the tops of the walls to either side of the gap, or stand balanced on the edge, eyeing the one opposite. They pause, ready up, lean into their toes. But no. Not now, not quite. And then every so often they’ll leap. Leap clean across the steps falling beneath them and land softly – always soft and easy like the clothes they wear – on the concrete shelf on the other side. If you happened to be walking up the steps at that moment, you might look up to see a boy fly – literally, for a moment, fly – over your head. Parkour practice, the ordinary outdoor breathtaking spectacle of it; meanwhile, on the table, there is this book. Or, not exactly a book. Not accurately a book – in the sense that Barthes’s lectures were never intended to be published as books. In the last lecture course he speaks briefly about publishing the notes from the previous year. How he had considered it, but in the end decided not to. Why? Partly, he says, because to do so would have been to manage and market the past. To repeat what had already been said (‘I wrote Mythologies twenty years ago and I’m always asked for more mythologies. I wrote The Pleasure of the Text and what I still get asked is to say something about the pleasure of the text’). When the desire was very urgently to go forward, to press ahead, into a new activity, ‘to work while there is still light’. But partly also because in a life’s work ‘there must always be a share for the ephemeral: for what happened once and fades’. A lecture, he says, is a specific kind of production: ‘to my mind, neither wholly writing nor wholly speech but marked by an implicit interlocution (a silent complicity)’. 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. Like a flower, he says. Le cours c’est comme une fleur, vous permettez, mais qui va passer. This is the sentence that Barthes wrote down in preparation for the lecture – I can read it now, published and eternal in French, in the book of lecture notes resting on my table. I would like to offer a translation of it. I am poised on the point of attempting a new translation of it.
And I realize that there’s no obvious or necessary connection between my own activity and the boys outside.
It’s simply, haphazardly, one of circumstance.
I want, however, to make something out of it: to link their stillness, their concentration, to the way the task of translation effects a similar slowing down. The translator, with her face in a funnel, her focus trained on this one book, and for the moment just this one sentence of the book, to the short-term exclusion of all the others. How, for this reason, the writing of a translation has its own particular duration which can’t be accelerated – and that is different from the tempos of productivity we find elsewhere. I think this is important. Translation demands a certain, un-condensable, time with a work and therefore, also, with the questions animating that work, the questions the translator brings to it and the further questions that will inevitably arise from the gestures of translating it.
I sense and would like to venture some connection between the outdoor leaping (and fathoming out how to land) and my own anxiety over where and how to set down this vous permettez in English. (Le cours c’est comme une fleur, vous permettez, mais qui va passer). Because this, too, seems to me to be important: contributing to the particular tone and manner of Barthes’s address, its warmth, its invitation to complicity, its quality of what he’ll call ‘non-arrogance’: a form of discourse that puts no pressure on anyone else. And yet none of the options I can think of at the moment – if you will, or if you’ll allow me, or if I may or indulge me on this or as it were or so to speak, with their varying degrees of self-conscious and knowing self-awareness – feel quite open or inviting enough, quite unaffected or non-arrogant enough.
Or, indeed, later on – what already feels like much later on in this short sentence – the matter of the final verb. People can pass in English, I know, as a manner of dying. But can flowers? They wilt, they fade; they can droop, wither and die. But can they pass? I don’t know. I don’t think so.
And it is here, with this not-knowing – not, for the moment, having any real idea of what to do, of how to proceed – that the temporary connection I’m trying to make disengages entirely. Because the fact is, I’ve watched the parkour boys a lot, catching sight of them bobbing on their ledge, getting shouted at and dispersed like pigeons, sometimes, by a shouty pa
sserby. And it strikes me that they know exactly what they’re doing: they’ve measured (pacing them out), the gaps they plan to jump. They’ve practised on the ground, with no steps falling beneath them; they’ve done this any number of times, as a way of ensuring that when it comes to it they’ll make it. This sentence, on the other hand: I am able to read it, I feel fairly sure that I understand it. But until I start translating it, I’m not yet in a position to tell you exactly where, of what order or of what combination of orders (lexical, syntactical, atmospheric, psychological, ethical…), its difficulties will turn out to be. In this sense, I’m not sure I could practise for them. This not knowing – this not knowing ahead of time, ahead of engaging with the actual doing of it – is a source of – what? Excitement, I’d call it. Great nervous excited excitement. I feel this is important too. Because it is this process of discovery, this adventuring into the writing of a sentence, with no clear idea of what will happen when I start to try, that makes for the real, lived-out difference between reading a sentence – even reading a sentence and speculating in advance how I might go about translating it – and the concrete task of writing it in my own language, again.
