by Kate Briggs
‘You see,’ wrote Helen Lowe-Porter, ‘… the job is to some extent an artist job, and I have always felt, with the more difficult books, that I should work over them without a thought of time-limit. But that is not the market or the publishing house view of translation. If it is not perfect then it is bad. I do not know how to deal with these blacks and whites, for my mind deals in delicate shades of grey. I simply can’t afford to spend another six months on this job [the translation of Mann’s Faustus], much as I should like to.’
I am a lady translator in my turquoise lady’s trainers.
I am among the privileged and powerful: the taste-maker indulging in my tastes, my preferences, translating only the work I feel something for (or varying my projects: translating I am less interested in as a way of opening out the time to translate the work I feel something for, combining it with my other jobs, with an eye to my own instruction and desire for writing). I am the decisive, skewering and ideologically skewed interpreter, laying down in print once and for all (or until the next translation, which may well never come) what, in my terms, this sentence says, what it does; what, in my terms, this work says, what it does.
I am among the hidden masters of our culture, as Maurice Blanchot put it.
I am passed over and profoundly influential; my work is fascinating and derivative and determining and necessary and suspect. It is everywhere taken for granted and then every so often singled out to be piously congratulated. Or taken apart.
I think of Lowe-Porter, translating, as she puts it, ‘in the intervals of rocking the cradle…’
She worked from home, supported by her professor husband.
A ‘ten-year stint of eight hours of work each day on Joseph.’
She had three daughters.
What a privilege: to look after her children, while also doing the work she loved. Work that challenged her intellectually. Living a don’s wife’s life in Oxford, translating, writing out again, with her own hands and for years and years, the books that she admired.
But then – think about it: Can you imagine how difficult it must have been? A baby in the next room; elsewhere, a toddler, and another older child: deep inside the project of remaking the sentences of Der Zauberberg.
But no, that’s not exactly right either: she could afford a little maid, couldn’t she? She paid her £40 a year.
What privilege.
What pleasure: gaining indirect – unwarranted? – access to and simulating, in the comfort of her own home, the gestures of creative authorship.
What thanklessness, though.
What misassigned, regrettable power.
What admirable dedication.
And willing self-effacement.
What quantity of mistakes.
What hubris.
What an extraordinary intellectual adventure.
All of it, all at once.
The story I am telling about my own impulse to translate is sentimental. And difficult, I know. In the way it lays claim to a certain kind of exclusive relation: You do realize that I love this work. As if that changes something. Because: Who cares? Who else really cares?
For translator Dorothy Bussy, translating was clearly a way of spending time with and feeling close to Gide. In a letter dated 27 May 1919 she writes: ‘It makes me very happy to feel you are really pleased I should have translated the Porte étroite – I was afraid you wouldn’t be. I felt I ought to have asked your leave before starting on a journey which was so clearly sacred ground, but I couldn’t, because I didn’t know till I got to the last page whether I should be able to finish it – I spent an odd winter with your book … it was my companion. Day and night your voice, your sweet, excruciating voice, spoke to me. I ruminated your words, and their music and their meaning, and let them sink into me and become part of me – I hardly wanted more of you during the winter. But now that is over. I have nothing to do, and I am here – in Cambridge – without you – without a single hope of you.’ But, as with my own translation relation, the reading and writing, the translating, the listening, the rumination over the length of their correspondence was all entirely on her side. With the exception, perhaps, of the three evenings Gide spent reading Bussy’s novel Olivia: ‘Yes,’ he writes in Richard Tedeschi’s translation, in a letter dated 15 January 1934, ‘it was with a very keen emotion that I read Olivia’s story, in the evening, by the fireside, alone in the large bedroom I have made my study … And constantly, as I read, yours was the voice I heard.’ Or, years later, on 23 June 1949, reading her annotated copy of Tacitus’s History: ‘the numerous indications jotted by you spur me on. I feel I am reading with you; your thought hardly leaves me. It’s also with you that I am reading and rereading your translation of the Nourritures (the Nouvelles nourritures especially), endlessly astonished by your poetic ingenuity – and I feel I have not told you enough how grateful I am to you for having so well triumphed over the traps and pitfalls of that very difficult task.’ For Éric Marty, writing on the correspondence in 1986, ‘asymmetry’ was the key feature of Gide and Bussy’s relationship, and the reason why translation as a practice served not only as one of its drives, but also as its most apt and illustrative metaphor. Because, it’s true, a translator may well feel deeply about a given piece of writing, she may have made friends with it, she may have made a short-term or lifelong companion out of it, she may have fallen in some straightforward or complicated way in love with it, but none of this will have any necessary bearing on whether she – or indeed her work – will be loved back.
The story I’m telling is sentimental, I realize, and not very new. See the Earl of Roscommon’s 1684 ‘Essay on Translated Verse’ (which I find quoted in Peter Cole’s recent essay ‘Making Sense in Translation: Towards an Ethics of the Art’), where the would-be translator is urged to ‘examine how your humour is inclined’ and then ‘seek a poet [to translate] who your way does bend’. Which is all well and good, Cole writes: ‘but what about needing or wanting to translate someone to whom your spirit or humour does not incline? Are there ethical and possibly artistic advantages in that?’
It is not very new. But it does offer one way of accounting for what otherwise looks like the strikingly haphazard history of literature in translation: a factor, along with all the other powerful and determining forces of economics, status, chance and circumstance, that works to determine what gets translated, and when, and by whom.
Helen Lowe-Porter: ‘I cannot enter into the work of other writers unless their themes and techniques and general Lebensauffassung appeal to me … And here, dare I say (aside from the dribble of money…) lies the reason I translated at all.’
Anita Raja, the prolific German to Italian translator of the work of Christa Wolf and Ingeborg Bachmann among others (whose lecture I read in Rebecca Falkoff’s and Stiliana Milkova’s translation): ‘For thirty-five years I have had a secondary but constant side-job as a literary translator from German. I have translated – and continue to translate – essentially for pleasure. Since translation for me has never been a job to pay the bills, I have always been able to choose the texts that interest me, texts of good, even lofty, literary quality, texts requiring an intense involvement.’
And so, by extension, the whole great machine of literary history.
It is also the best explanation I can offer as to why, of the three lecture courses published by Seuil in the 2000s, Rosalind Krauss and Denis Hollier elected to translate the one titled Le Neutre into English over the others, leading to the middle course appearing in English first. Why I pitched to translate La Préparation du roman, the last lecture course, over the earlier Comment vivre ensemble. Why the three lecture courses thus appeared, in translation, out of sequence, the second one first, then the last, then the first, determining the reading order for those readers receiving them for the first time (effecting a kind of disrhythmy or disrhythmia that was arguably not without its effects). Among all the other factors – timing, chance, availability, willingness, power, position, stat
us – there was also this: preference, appeal, attachment. Unsystematic, and sometimes regrettable. Really ridiculous, maybe. But there it is. I like/I don’t like.
I don’t like translations, says Barthes. And indeed, other than the citation from Cortázar, translation as a practice is nowhere especially valued in his work.
I don’t like to read translations of Kafka, he says, for example. I don’t like them, however impressive my friend Marthe Robert’s translations might be. It has to do with me, with my own writing activity: there’s something unsatisfying about it; I take no pleasure in copying passages out. But copying passages from Chateaubriand, on the other hand, is a pleasure…
In an interview published on the occasion of the posthumously published Mourning Diary, Richard Howard narrates an early incident in his experience as Barthes’s long-term translator. They had met when Barthes first visited New York – Barthes had a copy of the recently published Mythologies with him; they immediately liked each other and became friends. Howard translated a few of those short essays on myth, and then: ‘I don’t think he ever again read any of my translations. I don’t think he had any … it isn’t that he didn’t have interest. He would say that he didn’t know English well enough to have it make any difference; it was just his satisfaction that they were in English. At the beginning I think there was some interest in that fact, but I never heard from him again on that subject. I would ask him questions. I remember calling him up once and saying that he had referred to somebody inadequately or incorrectly, as I just knew. Did he want me to silently correct the mistake? He said, “Oh, of course. Do whatever you want. I have no idea.” And then there was some question of some king or even Egyptian pharaoh, and he said, “Well, make it up. Make it up. I don’t remember the case myself. If it’s not correct in the French text, just make up something.” … He was not an anxious author about his translations.’
‘As a general rule, translations present a very serious obstacle to my reading,’ says Barthes, in the context of a lecture on the haiku. ‘Of course I can read the great foreign novels translated into French, like Tolstoy or Dostoevsky or Don Quixote, etc.’ (All those novels? Yes, read them. I’ve read them. I have. Let me insist that I have read them.) But poetry is more difficult. ‘It’s very rare that a poetry translation is human to me,’ he says. ‘I have been reading some Valéry over the last few days and I found this note he made while in Prague, where he writes: “Lost abroad in an unknown language. Everyone understands one another and together are human. But not you, or you…”’ Human, for Barthes, seems to mean this sense of including, of feeling included (addressed?), in contrast to the exclusion that finding yourself suddenly in the midst of an altogether foreign language can produce or represent (an experience which, incidentally, he savours when visiting Japan). Poetry in translation rarely feels human to me, he says. But somehow the haiku is this remarkable exception: a tiny poem, originally composed in a language he cannot understand, in a language very remote from his understanding (even with Czech, he says, I could probably make out a few words), appearing for him only in translation, and yet succeeding nevertheless in touching, concerning, enchanting him; the haiku, says Barthes, is human to me, absolutely human. How is this possible? It’s a kind of miracle. And the whole first part of the lecture course on the novel is – provocatively? counterintuitively? – dedicated to exploring and speculating on how the haiku, as an exemplary notation of the present, produces its effects. How it produces its effects specifically and necessarily in French translation – since this is the form in which the poems are received – and on Barthes as a reader. ‘My haiku’ is how he titles one of the sessions of the lecture course. To accompany his teaching, Barthes distributed a handout: sixty-three haiku in French translation, drawn from two collections, translated by two poet-translators: Maurice Coyaud and Roger Munier.
But as Nathalie Léger, the editor of the French edition of the lecture and seminar notes, observes in a footnote: where the sources of the haiku translations were not indicated, they were in fact Barthes’s own. His own translations from the English – specifically, translations made on the basis of poems taken from a four-volume collection of Japanese-English translations. English: a language he read a bit, but didn’t speak well (‘Why is it that I have such little taste for foreign languages?’ Barthes muses in his autobiography. ‘The English learnt at school: David Copperfield, so boring etc.’). Why does this translation activity matter? Does it even?
In U and I, and thinking about how often, over the past thirteen years, he had discovered himself in the process of thinking of the work of John Updike (‘constant summonings that were at the outset brought on more by sceptical ambition than by simple enjoyment, although the enjoyment and admiration were increasingly there as well’) Nicholson Baker is reminded of the preface to Gilbert Murray’s Ancient Greek Literature, where Murray describes his relation to that body of work. Baker quotes the beautiful passage in his book, making it speak to his one-way relation with Updike: ‘for the past ten years at least, hardly a day has passed on which Greek poetry has not occupied a large part of my thoughts, hardly one deep or valuable emotion has come into my life which has not been caused, or interpreted, or bettered by Greek poetry’. A passage reminding me in turn of an email – a sentimental email – I once composed in French, a few years ago now, to Léger, following up on some questions she’d answered related to translating her edition of the lectures. An email about how often I find myself – discover myself in the act of – thinking of Barthes’s lectures, and of the questions they ask. Questions about how to live, together and alone, about how to act in ways that cause no harm to anyone else, about reading and writing. Thinking especially, to my own surprise really (I had thought my interest was in the novel), of the lectures on the haiku. The haiku as an instance of notation. A means of capturing the present in its smallest – its most minute – details: buying peonies in June, for example, but still feeling the cold; an instance of life at odds with the weather. The haiku conceived as a written form which provisionally grounds even as it draws out these relations between the subject and the surrounding world. How it does so in this very minimal but nevertheless constitutive way: suggesting, as Adrienne Ghaly has proposed, new ways of thinking relationality on a micro-scale; connecting, however fleetingly or long-lastingly, a body to the atmosphere, a body to an idea or to a line from a book and in this way, perhaps, to another reading and writing body, and doing so in a manner that is neither generalizing nor flattening, neither crushing nor reducing. How, in other words, inexhaustible the lectures feel to me.
Yes, I think Léger replied. I feel the same. I’d say they accompany me.
It is complicated, of course, Barthes’s fascination for the haiku, and for Japanese culture more generally, as a number of commentators have pointed out. His fascination for the haiku he receives solely in translation. His claim on them: my haiku. This assertion: ohwowwowwow it touches me, and is – therefore? – human. The way translation is presented as a miracle, for the reason that just this once it doesn’t present an obstacle to Barthes’s reading, which in turn simplifies – and basically denies – both the labour and the powerfully motivated decision-making of the translators.
But when it comes to Barthes’s own discreet translation activity, his unannounced haiku-translating activity, can I tell you, simply, that I enjoy it? I enjoy thinking of it: imagining this private engagement with a practice to which I know, or it seems clear, he was mostly indifferent. Did Roland Barthes ever write poetry? More specifically, did he ever try writing haiku? Did he ever try engaging, amateurishly, practically, with writing the poetic form he loved most? Here is an excerpt from the diary he kept in the summer of 1977 (dated 16 June; he quotes it aloud in the lectures):
De nouveau, après des jours bouchés, une matinée de beau temps, éclat et subtilité de l’atmosphère: une soie fraiche et lumineuse; ce moment vide (aucun signifié) produit une évidence: qu’il vaut la peine de vivre.
&
nbsp; In Richard Howard’s translation:
‘Again, after overcast days, a fine morning: lustre and subtlety of the atmosphere: a cool, luminous silk. This blank moment (no meaning) produces the plenitude of an evidence: that it is worthwhile being alive.’
If I were a haiku-writer, Barthes adds, if I knew how to write haiku, that’s still exactly what I’d want to say, but in a manner that’s ‘more essential, more indirect (less wordy)’.
Did Roland Barthes ever write poetry? No, no. No, I don’t think so. I don’t think any of the articles published in ‘Roland Barthes and Poetry’, a recent volume of the online journal Barthes Studies, refer to Barthes actually writing poetry.
