by Kate Briggs
‘For the other’s work to pass in me,’ says Barthes, ‘I have to define it as written for me and at the same time to deform it, to make it Other by force of love.’ He offers a comparison: listening to the radio, France Musique, hearing by chance a Bach piece being played on the harpsichord. It is a movement that Barthes liked a lot, one that he would often play himself on his own piano, but more slowly. An amateur piano player, he would play it slowly, he says, for good reason. But as well as this, to his ear the movement was supposed to be sensual, lyrical, tender. And yet here it is on the radio being played fast. That is, three or four times faster (by the professional harpsichordist Blandine Verlet). So fast, in fact, that it takes Barthes a moment to even recognize it. The difference, he notes, was only one of tempo. But that was enough to cause something essential to be lost: the much-loved movement, now accelerated: all the characteristics he had come to associate with the piece had disappeared. They were lost, vanished, as if down a trapdoor. It’s not that the professional musician was wrong, notes Barthes. On the contrary, historically speaking, her tempo was the right one. But the piece was no longer being played for him. He writes: ‘The movement was being played in itself, but not for me: it had no meaning for me.’ It was no longer the work he loved, the movement he had been playing, lovingly and mistakenly, to himself. And so, hearing it, nothing happened. Which is to say, ‘nothing was created; nothing was transformed’.
‘Let’s dance!’ shouts the goat-man. Or does he sing? He half-sings, half-shouts – emphatically. For me, before it was Bowie, in whose memory the Saturday morning exercisers now offer up our unlikely collective dance. Before it was Prince (it is still and will always be Prince), first it was Madonna. The True Blue album. With its Warhol-ish cover: all pastels, all throat. It was, very specifically, the track with a violin intro: that long sequence of short downward strokes, the musicians in the video with their strangely angled heads, their furrowed concentration. When the violinists finally flourish it still gets me how all of a sudden there’s the groove.
And unfolding now: the narrative.
A story that fascinated me as a nine- or ten-year-old, when full understanding was just beyond my reach: the mini-domestic drama of an unexpected pregnancy as told to a disapproving and disappointed but, it seems, ever-loving father. ‘He said that he’s going to marry me.’
‘And we could raise a little fam-i-ly…’
To the chorus:
‘Poppadum peach!’ shouts my four-year-old from the next room, his mind full – or maybe not? – of the food his dad cooks for him, convinced of his righteous interpretation:
‘Poppadum peach! I’m in trouble deep.’
‘Popp-a-dum peach! Mmmm. Ooooh.’
That is genius, I think, listening through the wall. My son, that is solid gold.
kissthisguy.com, the archive of misheard song lyrics, had 118,399 entries on the day I was thus inspired to access it. Of its list of the hundred funniest, number two was Robert Palmer, Addicted to Love:
‘You might as well face it you’re a dick with a glove.’
Then a bit further down the list, Prince:
‘I just wanna extradite your kids and – uh uh uh uh uh – kiss!’
And Madonna again, Into the Groove:
‘I’m tired of dancing in Obama’s self.’
I have no way of knowing if these mondegreens – that’s the official word for them – work for you, whether they work upon you in the way they work for and upon me (they require some familiarity with late eighties pop music). But they are good ones, honestly. They make me laugh out loud.
I know that writing a translation is very different from copying or acting out a line from a book, not least because the translator, in my sense of her work, is a maker of wholes. It is different from misplaying Bach. I know that writing a translation is very much not like a four-year-old singing back to a Madonna track. Here is desire without responsibility, here are actions that make no promise of anything to anyone else, of making anything for anyone else, certainly not the promise of zero distortion (I don’t think this is a promise that the translator makes – that any translator would ever make, actually – but it is often the strange expectation that gets weighted on her work). Desire, acting on desire, but without consequences, arguably. Like speaking in a dream. And yet still I want to insist on the common ground of enthusiasm that these activities (can sometimes) share. A spur which might also be framed as a curiosity, something like a personal experiment: to see what it might be like, what would happen, whether or not it is even possible for me to write this line, this work, in my own language, again. I don’t see why situating translation in conversation with these other actions – copying, mis-singing, misplaying – should necessarily contravene the cautions, the particular attentions of translation in the narrow sense. Perhaps it’s what invites them in. The translator knows that the work she is translating is not hers: she knows that it didn’t originate with her; it is not something that she has already written or said. Indeed, she is not sure if she would be capable of writing or saying it herself, and perhaps this is precisely part of its appeal, of how it is appealing. Responding actively to its address is a way of opening her own writing up to its difference, its independence: to the instruction of its different energy, its unfamiliar thinking, its other rhythms. This, I think, is why so many writers translate, or have translated, and speak of translation as a special kind of negotiation of the passage from reading to writing, as its own way into other forms of writing, as a way to move their writing elsewhere. In the lecture course on the novel, in a section on the way writers learn from one another, Barthes cites Julio Cortázar, English and French to Spanish translator of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, of works by G. H. Chesterton and André Gide among many others: ‘I would advise a young writer who is having difficulty writing – if it’s friendly to offer advice – that he should stop writing for himself for a while and do translations, that he should translate good literature, and one day he will discover that he is writing with an ease he didn’t have before.’ I think also of a more recent interview with Javier Marías, novelist and English to Spanish translator (of Sterne, Nabokov, Conrad, Hardy and Stevenson among many others). When asked about teaching creative writing, Marías replied: ‘I’ve not got involved with the creative writing industry, but if I ever had my own creative writing school I would only admit people who could translate. And I would make them do it over and over again.’
Too fast, says Barthes, of the Bach piece on the radio.
She’s playing it too fast, he thinks.
Really, far too fast.
I find I am always quarrelling with the tempo of works, he says; whether or not I agree with an interpretation so often seems to hang on that.
In the lecture course titled How to Live Together, the fact that we can go too fast, or indeed too slow, for other people, for the person we are supposed to be accompanying, or is supposed to be keeping company with us, the person you are hoping will stay with you, your listener, your reader, the child you are trying to walk to school, is the central issue: the lecture course’s crystallizing theme. A theme embodied by the sight of a mother glimpsed from Barthes’s window, walking out of step with her son. Too fast. Dragging him along by the hand (so that he is forced to run to keep up). This fact and lived theme of what Barthes calls disrhythmy, and the power dynamics that are in play, and the disturbances it can cause. The question of the lectures, then, will be how to find a way of walking (being, living, also reading, writing and thinking) together that might somehow take account of our different rhythms, not through enforced synchronicity, but allowing for them: you read faster than I do, you get up earlier than I do, and eat later, you race ahead while I walk more slowly, and yet still (in this fantasy that Barthes is hoping to simulate in life) we’ll find ways of coming together, points in the day for companionship, offsetting, modulating, interrupting our competing desire for solitude.
Too fast. And he doesn’t like the harpsichor
d. Did he switch the radio off?
Too fast. Jen Hofer, poet, translator, and co-author of Antena’s ‘Manifesto for Ultratranslation’: ‘Translation stops me in my tracks. I might be going along (or in the case of how life feels lately, hurtling along) como si nada and then a word or phrase or image suddenly falters me, stumbling in my path, its body looming, an obstacle or blockage or snag or vortex that stops time and distends space como si nadara en un agua espesa y borrosa. A bang. Something inserts itself where it does not belong. That’s the poem, the snag. The snag is a call to attention, a reminder not to take language – or anything – for granted.’
Too fast. The suggestion that written translations are (have sometimes been and are still now often) produced from a reader’s felt relationship to a piece of writing, her enthusiasm for it – in the old sense of the word – that translation as a practice is a way for such a reader to add, attach, append herself (actively, ongoingly) to that writing by writing it herself and, in so doing, for her to change it, distort it precisely because what she has made is not it but something else (something new) that is now set in relation to it but might very well come to be read as it. The suggestion that mistakes can be productive, too, as well as regrettable, and are part of ensuring the diversity of literature, which in turn makes it difficult, perhaps, to decide once and for all what counts, really, as a mistake – say it all too fast and it gets lost.
It vanishes, like down a trapdoor.
Say it too fast and it sounds like a platitude: exactly the kind of reductive, crushing generality I want to try to avoid.
Books have their sources in, are made from readers (would-be writers) reading other people’s books. Yes.
All books are made from other books and so, in their way, all books are translations in one way or another.
In fact all things are made from other things, and all things, and all people, have precedents, and so we are all translations – aren’t we? – in one way or another.
Yes, okay.
No. Hold on.
Say it all too fast and we’re already at some all-purpose consensus. (Because who, really, could dispute the fact that books come from other books, that we all, indeed, have precedents?) Say it too fast and then: What else is there to say? We – you, I – switch off.
A friend who translates academic articles for a living once listened very patiently to my account of how translation begins before saying: You know? For me, on the other hand. It is really not. Like that at all.
There are very obvious practical – physical, attentive – as well as intentional and political differences between the actions of copying for one’s own purposes and translating, as well as between singing back – singing back and then holding inflexibly to one’s own mishearing – and translating. Translation cannot dispense with – does it ever simply or deliberately dispense with? – the effort to get it right: a translation emerges in the relay between an existing sentence and the translator’s first ventured rephrasing, the process involving a sometimes long drawn-out to and fro between what the translator might want to write and what the original sentence is instructing her to write, between what seems to work in English, and what the French is saying and doing, between a certain aesthetic of the sentence that the translator may well want to bring to bear on the French, her own ideas of what counts as a good idea, or good writing, and the sentence’s own thinking, its own aesthetic, which is different, often very different, and serves as a repeated and necessary reminder – because it’s true that in her quest for a sentence that works in English, for the phrasing of an idea that she is capable of thinking, she might be in danger of forgetting – that its difference is part of her motivation for undertaking to translate it in the first place. A to and fro, a relay: a venturing of something new on the very close basis of something that already and persistently exists. A new thing that is then sounded out loud in the new time and place of the translation before being set back into relation, repeatedly set back into relation and read and revised and reread against the original sentence and the translator’s sense of its time and place, before being sounded out loud again, and again, and so on. It is in this space of close action, I think, that the translator begins to work out what on earth, what really on earth, in this very particular case, right might possibly mean.
My friend’s translation experience is an important corrective: having to translate fast, faster than she would like; having to translate articles that are hugely challenging intellectually, but that she doesn’t have the time to get interested or invested in; accepting work that she doesn’t care for at all; solicited by authors who require her skills only to quibble and dispute her decisions. It’s true that translators commonly accept – or pitch for – commissions to translate books that they haven’t yet read. Translators speak publicly of deliberately not reading the books they are in the process of translating so as to hold the adventure open, to keep it interesting, discovering the book in the process of translating it. What’s more, translators translate works they don’t like all the time. For the instruction of it, or for the broader sense of purpose (the world needs it), the opportunity, or indeed for the sums of money, the fragile livelihood of it. In an interview upon the publication of her new translation of Madame Bovary, Lydia Davis explains: ‘I was asked to do the Flaubert, and it was hard to say no to another great book – so-called. I didn’t actually like Madame Bovary … I find what he does with the language really interesting; but I wouldn’t say that I warm to it as a book … And I like a heroine who thinks and feels … well, I don’t find Emma Bovary admirable or likeable – but Flaubert didn’t either. I do a lot of things that people don’t think a translator does. They think: “She loves Madame Bovary, she’s read it three times in French, she’s always wanted to translate it and she’s urging publishers to do another translation, and she’s done all the background reading…” but none of that is true.’ They think: she ‘loves Madame Bovary’. She must love it. Why else would she devote years to writing a new English translation of it – the nineteenth?
It is unhelpful, arguably, this insistence on sentiment, on emotion. What’s more, it is a caricature: the translator as would-be writer. Like the caricature of the frustrated critic or editor: someone unhappily in service to literature, touching at its edges, jealous of its centre.
I too have translated articles by academics whose arguments don’t concern me, press releases for art exhibitions that don’t move me. I have translated the text for a suite of industrial clothing websites. I could tell you that they all had their moments of interest, actually, insofar as the puzzle of how to phrase a sentence – any kind of sentence – again in a new language is always to some degree fascinating, and productively taxing, in terms of the questions it produces, its invitation to think and make the contained – the productively constrained – writing task that it sets up:
Quelle que soit votre spécialité, vous préférez les habits professionnels extensibles, permettant une liberté de mouvement.
Whatever your speciality? your area of expertise might be? you prefer extendable professional garments, allowing freedom of movement. (Do you? Who am I addressing? Extendable? What exactly does that mean? Garments? Clothes?)
Which is something that Davis also says, in her recent inventory of the pleasures of translating. Pleasure no.2, she writes, ‘is the pleasure of always solving a problem’. She writes: ‘It is a word problem, an ingenious, complicated word problem that requires not only a good deal of craft but some art or artfulness in its solution. And yet the problem, however complicated, always retains some of the same appeal as those problems posed by much simpler or more intellectually limited word puzzles – a crossword, a Jumble, a code’. I could tell you all this as part of my project to insist – whatever my embrace of the position of would-be writer might otherwise suggest – that translation is not, in fact, a prelude to writing; a kind of fore- or under-writing, a preparing that is only ever on this side of where the real literary writing happ
ens, but already and from the outset its own means of engaging with and of doing it. I could tell you all this, with the conviction that I am telling the truth. But the point, of course, and the source of my friend’s eventual exasperation, is that the stakes here, for the website, for the unloved academic article, for the crossword are very different. Very different to those that were in play when translating Barthes’s lecture and seminar notes. For a number of evident reasons: the visibility of the Barthes translations, my attendant anxiety around getting it right, but also, massively in the mix: my felt relation to his late work. I know that a feeling for the work – responding to an appeal from the work, acting out this desire to want to write it yourself – is not and cannot be the motivating spur for all translators everywhere. The story I have been telling pertains only to a small, privileged group. Let’s call them lady translators, irrespective of their gender: those translators apparently at liberty to pick their projects, to follow their inclinations, thinking of Gide’s Lady Rothermere, making translations for her own amusement, where the fact of her feeling for his work is clearly no guarantee (how could it be a guarantee?) of the quality of her translations. It pertains only to those translators who are materially enabled to spend their time writing literary translations. The phrase is old-fashioned and unlikeable and deeply condescending; I think it speaks directly to the irreducible ambivalence of her (of my) position.
We need translations. We do, of course we do. The world needs them. And translation is work undertaken in response – in direct or indirect response – to that demand. But the nature of the work involved, the time that writing a translation takes, together with its lack of material support, its little pay and uneven appreciation, will inevitably narrow the pool of people actually capable of answering it. Translation is necessary, vital work. It is also deeply pleasurable and instructive and intensely time-consuming work. Approaching a kind of leisure activity, then, but one with its own precarious economy: its per-word fees (as if translating one word, one sequence of words, one book made of words, were ever equivalent to translating another); its occasional prizes. It is not my aim to celebrate these conditions, exactly; it’s rather to recognize them in order for there to be a chance of varying them. As well as to point out – no doubt too fast – that even these conditions (these apparently ideal conditions? The lady translator translating what she loves, working from home, grateful for but not entirely reliant on what Helen Lowe-Porter calls ‘the dribble of money’, or otherwise secure enough to risk trying to make the various dribbles of money work) are complicated.
