This Little Art

by Kate Briggs

  In the lecture delivered on 13 January 1979 – a week after worrying over its loss, Barthes announces the good news: the sought-after book has been found. Some unknown persons have been kind enough to find the book for me as well as the reference and they managed to do so exactly one hour after me speaking of it here, he says, which is prodigious for an unfindable book. So: thank you. Here’s the reference: it’s by an Englishman named Blyth (he adds: I’m not sure if I’m pronouncing that correctly), first name: Reginald Horace. Title: A History of Haiku. Thank you. Thank you all for your help.

  In the library, meanwhile, late in the summer – a hot summer, and a new effort.

  (Could I not just make it up? Just do what I want and make something up?)

  I paged through the book again, feeling that I really should find the ‘original’ poem in English, but without any clear idea of what to do with it should I find it. Copy out Blyth’s translation and offer it to readers of the lectures in English – as the ‘original’ poem, the original translation that Barthes once read and selected to translate into French? Perhaps that would make the most sense.

  But there are no carnations here.

  And still no rain – not even any rain.

  I closed the book hard. Left the desk to do a short tour of the reading room. Remonstrated with myself and returned. I sat down heavily and let the book fall open. And then, of course, all of a sudden it was there:

  The summer shower

  falls on the pinks

  so roughly

  Ha! Feeling triumphant now!

  Ha! Ha! (Rhymes with Bah!)

  Then, aware of the readers and researchers around me raising their heads in alarm, under my breath and to no one in particular:

  So, no carnations, then.

  At no time carnations. Pinks. Pinks!

  And no rain. Of course no rain. A shower.

  That abrupt and heavy falling.

  On the frilly flowers. So roughly.

  One small poem found. But there were thirty or so more to go and a decision still to make. Should I offer the English exactly as it is here, in Blyth’s translation? Blyth, after all, ‘was a brilliant translator’ according to Adrian James Pinnington. A proponent of what Pinnington calls the ‘minimalist’ approach: translating the haiku ‘as literally as possible’, even abbreviating it, while at the same time bringing his translations ‘at times close to a kind of concrete poetry’.

  But the sequence of Barthes’s translation is entirely different from Blyth’s. He has inverted it: in his poem, the roughly falling comes first (si rudement tombe), then the pinks (sur les oeillets), and only then the summer shower (l’averse d’été).

  Would it not be better, then, to work the difference of Barthes’s decisions back into the English? As a way of registering the touch of his hands, his reading and thinking, the further process that the poems were put through, his own local writing out of them, as part of the thinking, the argument, which this printed-out selection of poems was intended to illustrate?

  In its attention to detail, taking note of the smallest differences, the haiku, says Barthes, makes these very fine distinctions. Haiku-writing is conceived in the lectures as an effort of dividing the real: of making ever finer, ever subtler divisions and distinctions within the real. Pinks, then, as discretely quite different from carnations. (I find an article on the internet by Caroline Whetman titled ‘A UK view of Pinks vs. Carnations’: as well the genetic variance, I learn, the former are so much older: ‘Their history is impressive, having been cultivated for hundreds of years with much evidence of wild forms abounding on the mountains, hills and valleys of ancient Greece.’) Pinks, not carnations. The quality of this rain. The times of the day: from one minute to the next and the way the light changes. It is possible, says Barthes, to go on dividing like this forever. Like the physicists, whose work is to make these ever tinier and ever finer divisions in matter (descending infinitely, or almost infinitely: infinite divisibility). But with the difference that the writer of haiku must at some point stop. At some given moment in the making of these ever more subtle distinctions, the haiku-writer – or rather the poem he makes – says: I have set down language, I have stopped language; I have set it down in the sense of deposited it. To deposit: to put down or place in a specific place, sometimes for safe-keeping; also, (of water, the wind, or other natural agency) to lay down (matter) gradually as a layer or covering). When I reached the rough manner of this rain, the scrunched petals of these flowers, their fraying edges, I stopped and set down language. At this given moment in the ever more subtle, potentially infinite, shading of differences among things, the process was (provisionally) stopped.

  Which pertains, I think, to translating: the worry worry worry over the difference between this word and that, the weight and angle and sound and even the taste of this word over that; the divisions of the real this effects and the degree to which these overlap with or fail to overlap with the divisions I sense in French. And the point at which it has to stop. A decision has to be made. Language is set down. Reminding me of a different image from the same lecture course, one that comes much later, long after the first half on the haiku. Where the question, now, is how to move from an Imaginary of writing, a fantasy of the novel (which is of the order of the potential, the preparatory, and so the potentially infinite) to the actuality of writing one (which is of the order of a decision, a sequence of decisions, and the material setting down of language). Barthes offers another image of feminized labour, but not the dressmaker this time, instead: the novel-writer as stoppeuse. In a lecture delivered on 2 February 1980, he says this: when I was a child, I would see around me – it’s a very familiar image from my childhood, especially since I had a childhood surrounded by women, my grandmother, my aunt, my mother – women obsessed with the risk of getting a hole in their stockings, stockings that were knitted (there was no nylon at that time), I don’t know how stockings are made nowadays but at that time … the hole would suddenly make a ladder down the stocking and I can still see the gesture, a bit familiar, a bit trivial, but necessary, whereby a woman would wet a finger in her mouth and apply it to the weave, cementing it with saliva, and in this way she would stop it (what’s more, I remember there used to be, close by to our apartment on the rue de Seine, near the rue Jacques-Calot, a very tiny stall of stoppeuses, that is, of workers whose working lives were spent ‘stopping’ stockings and sometimes other items of clothing).

  This is what writing is, says Barthes. I would say: this is what writing is. This is what the actual setting down of writing as distinct from the fantasy of writing is: a kind of catch or halt or temporary immobilization in the run of culture.

  Likewise, to my mind, if I can venture this: the translator wets her finger, she presses it down on the run of alternatives, the run of endless translation possibilities, each one with its own particular shades of meaning. And right now, in this moment, if only for her moment, familiarly and necessarily, and with all the delicate immobilizing power of saliva on wool, she makes it stop.

  Still in the library, in the small arena of translation, I remember sitting for a long time with the found poem, the book hinged between summer and autumn, looking around at all the quiet readers (finger still in my mouth), not yet quite ready to make up my mind.

  AMATEUR TRANSLATOR

  The Saturday morning exerciser likes dancing a lot. She goes every week. She doesn’t exactly have an end in sight – a goal, that is. No one comes to watch her (she would probably hate it if they did). She appreciates the scale of the class: it is too large for anything like individual attention; the instructor doesn’t correct or evaluate her. She is getting marginally better at following the steps, possibly, because she goes every week. But the point has never been to impress, to instruct or to entertain anyone else. She’s clearly not a professional; her aim is not to professionalize her activity. Not only because she’s not especially good at it but because to do so would bring the expectations of others, like a weight
. She is practising for no obvious purpose other than the repeated pleasure of it (‘amator: one who loves and loves again,’ writes Barthes in Richard Howard’s translation). Insofar as she is content to practise indefinitely, she is very unlike the writer, the artist video-maker or indeed the translator, who might one day publish her translation, attach her name to it and help publicize the new commodity she has played her part in making (which, in this time of boom, is a bit more likely to be asked of her). And yet, what connects this space of exercise to the practice of translation – in my own head, at least – is something like the open invitation of it. The idea that, in principle, and unlike the more exclusive dance classes I have tried out and suffered in before: here, anyone can come along and join in.

  This is of the order of a fantasy, clearly. There may well be a range of bodies in the gym above the swimming pool – mostly women, a wide-ish range of the ages, shapes, ethnicities commensurate with the diversity of Paris’s thirteenth arrondissement. But the range is limited: by no means all bodies and experiences are represented. It’s a fantasy: an image of shared and open access to an energetic practice – bodies working out, repeating, in our individual ways, the moves that we receive delightedly from someone else – that I offer for translation. It’s a fantasy, I know: my own beautiful heterotopia. But I set it down here nonetheless.

  I am a translator and a writer, or so I claim, when asked what I do, professionally speaking. As a way of making the writing part clear – in case it were not already obvious. In recognition of the fact that it is very often not already obvious. When I teach translation (I am a translator and a writer and a tutor), I am often surprised by how often students are surprised to discover that translating involves writing, that its most vital prerequisite is an interest in writing, for the reason that written translations have to be written. Where the would-be of it is wholly appropriate because how to do this and indeed whether or not I am capable of doing this are questions whose answers are in no way given in advance. ‘Hundreds of times I have sat, for hours on end, before passages whose meaning I understood perfectly, without seeing how to render them into English,’ wrote Arthur Waley, ‘a genius of translation’, whose line is quoted by Simon Leys in an essay on literary translation translated by Dan Gunn. In other words, it is possible to be a highly experienced and acclaimed translator and yet still be altogether incapable of predicting the kinds of writing questions (the troubles and challenges) that a given sentence will present. Or to know from the outset how to resolve them. But then I remember that I too once thought of translation as essentially a test of linguistic and cultural competence: a live audit undertaken for the purposes of establishing what I knew – what I should, by then, have already known – about the French language and culture. This was how it was presented to me, to a line of us hating our translation class on our year abroad: as an on-the-spot diagnostic, an occasion to show up, with reference to a pre-prepared model-answer, how much we were getting wrong.

  A little art, is how Helen Lowe-Porter described it in the 1950s. A little art, as distinct from the big ones. Neither very important nor very serious. But limited, modest. Something young (as if translating were not as old as speaking itself) and therefore easy to patronize. We could argue at length about how unhelpful this characterization is, and how retrograde. You could point out all the ways and I would listen and I would agree. I would wholeheartedly agree. One way of countering the still widespread undervaluing of the work of translation might be to stress the extent of the translator’s skill and expertise. I thought of this recently, reading an essay titled ‘Translation as Scholarship’ by Catherine Porter. An academic, translator and President of the Modern Languages Association, Porter makes a powerful case for ‘scholarly and literary translations’ being ‘accepted and evaluated on the same basis as scholarly monographs in decisions about hiring, promotion and tenure’ in an academic career. The ‘skilled translator-scholar’ described in Porter’s essay is – crucially – already skilled (and already a translator and already a scholar) before she begins: this is what helps her to determine what is ‘deemed worthy of translation’ in the first place, before bringing her ‘prior knowledge of the field, and thoroughgoing mastery of at least two languages and cultures, plus highly developed research skills and a healthy measure of critical acumen’ to bear on the process itself. Porter concludes her essay thus: ‘Unless we believe that the only literature worth reading and the only scholarship of value are produced in English and perhaps in the handful of other languages that we happen to know, we need to acknowledge that reliable translations produced by accomplished scholar-translators are crucial to the continuing development of our fields. Once we have done that, we should be ready to rewrite our personnel policies so as to recognize these scholar-translators as full-fledged colleagues and evaluate their work accordingly.’

  I read the same kinds of arguments being made for literary translation, too. In an article dealing in part with the responses to Janet Malcolm’s controversial New York Review of Books essay ‘Socks’, in which she writes in praise of Constance Garnett’s Tolstoy translations (and is deeply critical of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s retranslations), the scholar Caryl Emerson quotes a letter to the NYRB from Judson Rosengrant, ‘a professional translator of Tolstoy’. Rosengrant had offered a detailed case study of a single word as it appears in Anna Karenina – a verb favoured by Stivia Oblonsky (obrazuetsia – ‘it will come right’). Reading Rosengrant’s ‘tour de force’ account of the morphology and semantics of the verb ‘reminded me,’ writes Emerson, ‘of how much we need to know, especially with a fastidious craftsman like Tolstoy, in order to translate the simplest utterance appropriate to the psychology of the fictive person who utters it’.

  How much we need to know,

  in order to.

  ‘It is a pleasure,’ writes Dorothy Bussy to Gide in a letter from November 1931, ‘to have even the smallest thing to do for you.’ (Gide had asked for her assessment of a draft translation he’d received of his Corydon.) But the fact is, this translation is terrible: it is ‘utterly, hopelessly, impossibly bad’. She lists the ways:

  ‘The translator doesn’t know the rudiments of either French or English.

  He doesn’t understand the commonest French idioms: on a beau, tout au plus, il y a de quoi, faire le jeu de, faire grâce de, savoir gré à qq., tenir à qq., etc. etc.

  He confuses: se tuer and se taire, atteindre à and attendre, jouir and jouer, réseau and réserve, rétaquer and réfuter with disastrous results to the sense.

  Translates factice several times over by facetious.

  He fails utterly to follow the argument and constantly puts the vital clause in the negative when it ought to be in the affirmative and vice versa.

  He has no idea of the value and very little of the meaning of particles and conjunctions such as en effet, pourtant, enfin, etc. etc.

  Dozens of his sentences mean either the contrary of the French, or have no meaning at all, or are incomprehensible unless compared with the original.

  His English is no better.

  His use of auxiliaries is the strangest I have ever seen.

  Will, shall, can, may used as in no English or American I have ever met.

  His prepositions are fantastic.

  As for elegance, subtlety, distinction, Heavens!’

  A little later on in the letter she writes: ‘[I]t is incomprehensible to me why a man who understands a book so little should want to translate it or how a man who knows so little of a language should think he is capable of translating it. Mysteries!’

  First, there is established and wide-ranging linguistic and cultural competence, so the argument goes. There is bilingualism, or what is sometimes called ‘near-native-competence’, and in-depth knowledge of both cultures. There must also be, for Porter, reading and writing and research skills, plus critical acumen. Then, and only then, can there be something like translation. If, that is, we want to avoid the kind of trans
lation-disaster, the failure that Bussy describes (the quality of any eventual translation attesting to – offering a kind of diagnostic of – the degree to which this knowledge foundation was already in place). I can see the logic and necessity of these arguments. But still I am wondering: is this always how things are? How they should be?