This Little Art

by Kate Briggs

  The course is like a flower

  There is the tight focus of the translator’s attention, her face deep in the open-end of a funnel, trained at such narrow length on this one book, and for the moment on just this one line of the book, to the exclusion of all the others.

  A lecture course, it is like a

  The lecture course, it’s like a flower,

  There is the sentence that she is focused on, and the way the action of translating it, of touching it in this way, makes it start to unfold, to open out into a series of discrete or connected questions and challenges, in ways I don’t believe it’s possible for anyone to altogether foresee.

  The course, if I may, is like a flower, but that will fade away.

  A lecture course is will die away.

  And then there’s the fact that the sentence won’t refold – it won’t re-compact, won’t return to anything like its original tight or very lightly gathered economy – until she has found a way to answer each of them. Answers slowly elaborated over here, in the form of a new sentence.

  Then, a great sequence of sentences.

  That said, if I can propose directing the focus into the room in this way, onto the table and the activity it supports. If I can think of relating the world to the translator’s work, rather than intend her work for the world. If I can think of holding the world and whatever it might want or need at bay for a while, ignoring it, at least for the time it takes to write my translations, to engage in the more private practice of it, with all the dailyness and exercise and ongoingness that the word implies, it is likely to be because my window gives on to one of the world’s richest cities. It is surely because I translate from French into English, two world-dominant languages. It is because I am translating a much-read European theorist, critic, writer whose value is already assured, from a cultural tradition whose value is already assured, whose work had already been translated by very respected others, and for whom there were and still are readers waiting. ‘Who we choose to translate is political,’ write Antena in their ‘Manifesto for Ultratranslation’. ‘How we choose to translate is political.’ Translation, then, as a form of activism: we need to vary our choices, argues John Keene in an essay titled ‘Translating Poetry, Translating Blackness’, we need ‘more translation of literary works by non-Anglophone black diasporic authors into English’ to be published in America. He writes: ‘I believe too that we should have far more translations in general of work from outside the European and European-language sphere, more translations of work by women, by LGBTQ peoples, by Indigenous writers, by working class and poor writers, by writers with disabilities, and so on.’ Doing such varied work is its own powerful way of doing politics.

  It might also be because I have misunderstood where the world is. ‘Imagine,’ says Barthes, in the inaugural lecture, ‘if by some unimaginable excess of socialism or barbarism, all but one of our disciplines were to be expelled by our educational system, it is the discipline of literature which would have to be saved, for all knowledge, all the sciences are present in the literary monument’. Think, he says, of a novel like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and of what it knows, all the fields of knowledge it accommodates in its pages: historical, geographical, social (violent and colonial), technological, botanical, anthropological. Now think of how the novel knows what it knows: not directly, not explicitly. ‘Literature does not say that it knows something, but that it knows of something, that it knows about something,’ where the term literature is understood to refer not to a ‘body or a series of works, nor even a branch of commerce or teaching, but the complex graph of the traces of a practice, the practice of writing’. The consequences of this of, of this about – what Barthes also calls literature’s ‘precious indirection’ – are that in addition to what is already known, literature can also tell us of what is not yet known, it can gesture toward further, possible areas of knowledge, to what is unsuspected, unidentified, unknown. The knowledge that is held and released, that is staged in and by a novel, for example – each one its own singular and variously detailed encyclopedia of the possible and the impossible – is therefore never complete or final. And yet, what literature knows a great deal about, what it knows very expansively and the most about (more, indeed, than any other discipline) is ‘the great mess of language, upon which men work and which works upon them’. It knows about words, and of their flavour. It matters to Barthes that the French words for flavour (saveur) and for knowledge (savoir) should share the same Latin root. He goes on: ‘Curnonski [a celebrated writer on gastronomy] used to say that in cooking “things should have the taste of what they are”. Where knowledge is concerned, things must, if they are to become what they are, what they have been, have that ingredient, the salt of words. It is this taste of words which makes knowledge profound, fecund.’ Working with the taste of words – with how different words in different languages taste differently – the translator is dealing, always then, with knowledge, with the mess of different and potential knowledges of the world, upon which we work and act and which act and work upon us. In this sense, I realize, she is not altogether apart from – she hasn’t delayed her involvement with – the world. On the contrary, the project of translating a book written by someone else, somewhere else, in a different language (this book right now over any other, never a neutral, but, as Lawrence Venuti puts it, always ‘a very selective, densely motivated choice’) is already and in and of itself a means, a close and detailed and practical means, to register, as well as a chance to renew, to vary the terms – the flavour – of her engagement with it.

  I think of all the specialists whom Lowe-Porter is careful to thank in her brief translator’s note: ‘the number of scholars, authorities in the various special fields entered by The Magic Mountain’. The project of translation causing her to learn something more and new about lung disease, frocks made of silk, X-ray technology, philosophy, blankets, snow. I think also of Lydia Davis’s ongoing translation diary, part of which is published as an alphabet of the problems encountered in the translation of Proust. The detail of the conversations her work led her to initiate: her ‘correspondence with an old man in Oxford over the umbrels and titmice in the meadow outside his window’. Her debate with a ‘horticulturalist friend over just what sort of ivy was turning colour in the Bois de Boulogne at the close of Swann’s Way’. Katy Derbyshire researching the finely differentiated abbreviations used to refer to sex acts in the small ads, rewatching the TV series Band of Gold for vocabulary – all part of translating Clemens Meyer’s Bricks and Mortar. My question about flowers and how plants and people die.

  In November 1995 the scholar Timothy Buck published an article in the Times Literary Supplement – a shorter version of the arguments he would also publish elsewhere in the Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann and the Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English. It would be a devastating and, in the field of translation scholarship, now notorious indictment of the quality of Lowe-Porter’s translations. Comparing a random sample of passages from Buddenbrooks in the original German with her English, Buck lists mistake after mistake after mistake. Errors of lexis, syntax and tense; unexplained omissions; unjustified rephrasings. At times, says Buck, Lowe-Porter seems like a bungling amateur, with a strikingly inadequate knowledge of the German language. Worse, an amateur with an inflated sense of her own importance – either wholly ignorant of or unwilling to accept her own limitations. Lowe-Porter was not Mann’s chosen translator, Buck tells us. He had misgivings. He had wanted someone with better German. For The Magic Mountain, he specifically wanted a man – an absurd request, Buck concedes, but worth noting even so. (David Horton’s more recent study of the English translations of Thomas Mann confirms that between March and June 1925 Thomas Mann had made concerted efforts to secure H. G. Scheffauer as the translator for Der Zauberberg – that is, to find himself ‘a better instrument’; the American publisher, however, delighted by the success of Lowe-Porter’s Buddenbrooks translation, disagreed.) Moreover, Buck goes
on, not only was her German poor, look at her English: ‘ungainly, unidiomatic, and at times incomprehensible’. She ‘pressed’ for the ‘honour’ of translating Mann; not relenting until ‘the prize of being Mann’s translator was hers’. She was ‘hungry’ for the fame that Buck seems to feel sure (that she felt sure) would come her way via the long-term association of her name with his. How could this have happened? Ultimately, the main complaint in this and Buck’s other articles seems to come down to this: Was no one checking? Was no one in charge? How is it possible that the English Mann and, by implication, the whole great machine of literary history, should have been determined in this way – so contingently, so unthinkingly, by the vagaries of one woman’s attachment, her presumption, her intellectual curiosity, her unfortunate and powerful writing desire?

  When I was in my early twenties I worked as a part-time nanny for the family that lived around the corner: every weekday morning I’d get there at 7 a.m., wake the little boy up, get him dressed and breakfasted (his older sister could already do this for herself), walk them both to school and then, for the day, my job would be done. They lived on a street with a very sharp incline. Every morning the little one would race down the hill, zooming directly towards the road, while I’d call after him, terrified that today would be the day he’d fail to pull off his emergency curb-stop, for some reason incapable of persuading him to just walk with me, to simply hold my hand, while his sister, oblivious, stayed close to my elbow, updating me in her brilliant rambling way on the plot of the book she’d read the night before. Their mum was a French teacher in a secondary school, and as a student had been invited by one of her lecturers to do or collaborate on a translation: there was this text her lecturer was especially interested in, by a relatively unknown French critic. It might have been Writing Degree Zero, or possibly the opening essay to Mythologies. She didn’t do it. She thought about it, but said no in the end. Though I can’t remember the reason she gave, or even if there was one.

  In a recent interview in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Gayatri Spivak, ‘academic superstar’ (as the interviewer describes her), recounts how she came to translate Jacques Derrida’s De la Grammatologie. It was 1967, the book had just been published in France; she was twenty-five years old and an assistant professor at the University of Iowa. She didn’t know Derrida at that time, nor anything at all about his work. She had been trying to keep herself intellectually clued in, she explains. And to that end would order whatever books from the catalogue that looked unusual enough for her to feel she should read them. She ordered Derrida’s book, just published in French, and found it extraordinary. Her first thought, though, was not that she should do an English translation. She wanted to write a book – her own book – about it: a book in response to Derrida’s. But then, she thought: ‘Well, I’m a smart young foreign woman, and here’s an unknown author. Nobody’s going to give me a contract for a book on him, so why don’t I try to translate him?’ She had heard at a cocktail party that the University of Massachusetts Press were doing translations; she wrote to them and they said they’d give her a chance. It’s really ridiculous, she laughs. But there it was.

  In July 1918, André Gide went to Cambridge, in the company of his lover Marc Allégret, for a three-month stay. He carried with him a letter of introduction to Simon Bussy, a painter who made delicate compositions of the plants and animals he would sketch at the London Zoo. ‘Among the chameleons, the owls and the parakeets, a few humans sat for him, too,’ writes Jean Lambert in the introduction to the Selected Letters of André Gide and Dorothy Bussy, edited and translated by Richard Tedeschi. One was his wife: Dorothy, née Strachey, sister of Lytton and James. His portrait of her as a young woman hangs in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and is reproduced on the cover of the Selected Letters. It shows her seated deep in a gauzy armchair, looking out of the frame from behind her pince-nez. Her wrists are relaxed and loose, her hands half-open; she appears to be thinking. The wall behind her is this luminous pale, almost florescent pastel green. Lady Strachey had rented a house in Cambridge that summer, and her daughter, visiting from France, happened to be staying with her. Gide wanted to improve his English and Dorothy Bussy offered to give him lessons. In the middle of their lives – Gide was fifty years old, Bussy fifty-two – they became friends and correspondents, meeting rarely but writing often. Gide almost always writing to Bussy in French. ‘Chère amie,’ is how he addressed her. ‘Très chère amie.’ Bussy writing to Gide in English: ‘Dear Gide,’ is how she’d reply.

  ‘Dearest Gide,’

  ‘Dearest,’

  ‘Dear and beloved,’

  ‘Beloved Gide,’

  ‘Beloved,’

  Bussy was Gide’s dear friend.

  Gide was Bussy’s dear friend, and the admired writer she translated; as well as this, she loved him. She loved him, as Lambert describes it, with a passion that burned as ardently at the very end of her life as it did in those early years; she loved him in a relation, ‘a meeting of equals’, Lambert says, that was in this one sense unbalanced, because her love was clearly unrequited.

  Following that chance summer meeting, Bussy became the main translator for Gide’s works (in November of that same year, Gide wrote asking her to look over and if necessary to revise a translation that Lady Rothermere had made of his Prometheus: the publishers, Chatto & Windus, he said, were concerned that it was more ‘“literal” than … good’). She would also write a novel, a love-story, the anonymously published Olivia. A ‘little masterpiece’, Gide would call it, when he came around to reading it.

  In September 2007 I wrote an email to Columbia University Press. I’d read The Neutral – Rosalind Krauss’s and Denis Hollier’s translation of Barthes’s middle lecture course, published in 2005 – and was wondering about La Préparation du roman, the last one: did they have, might they be seeking a translator? The day before my email arrived their intended translator had confirmed his unavailability; I submitted a translation sample and (it’s really ridiculous but) there it was.

  When asked how she came to translate from the Italian, Ann Goldstein, translator of Elena Ferrante and Primo Levi among many others, often says some elegant variation on the same thing: it was an accident.

  In 1927, Mann’s preferred translator for The Magic Mountain either fell or jumped out of a window. Soon after that, David Horton reports, the publisher Alfred A. Knopf moved to confirm his agreement with Helen Lowe-Porter.

  Following the publication of Buck’s article in the TLS came a small rush of letters to the editor. Lawrence Venuti wrote in, strongly objecting to the ‘typical academic condescension’ toward translators and translation he detected in Buck’s piece, defending Lowe-Porter’s mistakes on the basis that standards for what makes a good translation change. There exists a tacit aesthetics of translation, he wrote; one that, like all aesthetic traditions, is necessarily of its time. David Luke, whose 1988 translation of Mann’s ‘Death in Venice’ Buck had praised (‘a model translation: faithful to the original, yet fluent’) replied with new evidence of still more mistakes, and still more condescension. You can’t blame Mann’s complex sentences for this, he argued, or changing norms and standards. No, what we are dealing with here is ‘failure’. Just look at her ‘schoolboy howlers’!

  Venuti came back with another letter; Luke replied again.

  Eventually, Lowe-Porter’s daughters wrote in, quoting a letter their late mother had once sent to her publisher, describing her own sense of her work.

  I consider the letter, and the further lines from her correspondence that Buck quotes to build his case against her:

  A perverse pleasure, she called it.

  Offering its own experience of creative authorship.

  Look to the whole, the letter asks.

  And note the promise she lived by: she refused to send a translation to the publisher until she felt as though she had written the book herself.

  I can see, with no German, but from reading Buck’s article, tha
t Lowe-Porter’s translations contain many mistakes. (If you don’t want to make mistakes, don’t do translations, I was once told – an enabling dictum that I keep close to my heart.) I’ve since read Horton’s recent, more generous assessment of her work and he, too, shows me that there are many mistakes. The fierceness of Buck’s article speaks to the intense frustration, the profound sense of indignation provoked by what is considered a bad translation, with all its misleading, enduringly misleading, unfortunate, disastrous reading effects. I don’t want to downplay this: the powerful and determining consequences of one person’s translation decision, or sequence of decisions, or – in the absence of conscious decision-making – misreadings and omissions. The fierceness comes also, no doubt, from an awareness of how difficult it is to get a translation done, and how rare the opportunities can be, due to copyright, and funds and publishers’ interests and circumstance, to get it done again. In a recent exasperated critical review of Spivak’s Of Grammatology translation, newly published in an extensively revised version for a 40th anniversary edition, Geoffrey Bennington makes a case for what he calls ‘the laborious and painstaking job’ of translation. That is, for doing the work: for doing the thinking-work and the writing-work, for paying the attention that translating requires. There is no reason why asking for this, hoping for this, Bennington argues, should be conflated with policing (as Judith Butler suggests in her introduction to the new edition). He writes: ‘doing the work and wanting the work to be done as well as it can be done are not, intrinsically, “police functions” at all, nor do they intrinsically constitute “quarrelling”’. A translation may always and from the outset be wrong, for the simple-complicated reason that the translator cannot simply present us with the original French, the right words in the right order – or not, at least, if she wants to write an English translation. But it can’t follow from this, from what Derrida would call translation’s ‘principle of ruin,’ that, as Bennington puts it, all translations ‘are equivalently unsatisfactory, or that mistakes cannot often be identified and corrected’.