This Little Art

by Kate Briggs

  I recently met a very lovely woman at a wedding. She was telling me about a family holiday to Normandy – idle days. How in the house they were renting for the week there was a copy of the first Harry Potter novel in French translation, the book that her daughter happened to be reading in the original at the time. Just out of curiosity, and with very little French, she found herself having a go at translating the translation. To see if she could make her way back to the original English, but finding herself very often quite far to one side of it. And it was interesting, she said. In fact, it was totally fascinating – her face alight with it. The casual exercise ended up preoccupying all the quiet moments of her holiday. But of course it really doesn’t count, though, does it? is how she concluded her story, the light leaving her face. I mean, what I was doing – it wasn’t really translating was it? Not in the way you do it or understand it.

  Here is an example of a different form of collective exercise: a Dutch-to-English literary translation group which convenes very irregularly in Rotterdam. Five of us with an interest in reading and writing and a desire to learn more about Dutch literature. One native Dutch-speaker, the rest of us with different kinds of English and beginners’ level Dutch. We work in Leeszaal, sometimes, the community space on Rijnhoutplein, or in the public library or under the trees in the park. We began with the project of translating some of A. L. Snijders’s very short animal stories for the reason that they are very short and so offered us the chance of translating a whole. And for the further reason that Lydia Davis had recently published some of her own translations of these stories in the online journal Asymptote, versions against which we would eventually compare our own. Real-life examples that are problematic in the same ways: the woman at the wedding working on Harry Potter; our group translating short stories that have already been touched and translated – and so in this sense validated – by a celebrated English-language translator. Our choices of what to amateurishly translate have so far been predictable and repetitive. But we are all beginning. In Rotterdam we have moved on, now, to as yet unpublished work that the Dutch speaker finds of interest and scans for us. We work very slowly: translating a sentence can take up all the afternoon.

  My feeling is – this experience tells me – that translation can get started. That translation can start. Not from established competence or experience, always and necessarily, but with, let’s say: a piece of writing written in another language, a dictionary, an online translation tool, a forum where you can post questions, or friends who speak the language whom you can talk to and argue with. I have discovered and tested this – in the translation workshops that I have initiated and taken part in, where we all undertake to translate a piece of writing written in a language no one in the room can speak. As an exercise, an experiment, to see just how close to or how far away we can get from the existing published translations that we may or may not eventually allow into the room. I am perpetually rediscovering and retesting this in the context of our Dutch-to-English translation group. I believe – the very idea of our working group is premised on the shared belief – that it is possible for us to find out what the sentences in the Dutch stories mean. To establish more or less and to be overwhelmed and perplexed by the range of their likely meanings. On the condition, that is, that we spend enough time with them: the length of the time and with the quality of attention that the project of translating demands of us. Which might be fast – there is no reason why translation can’t get done a bit faster –, but in our case happens to be very, very slow.

  The idea of the unschooled (or to borrow Jacques Rancière’s term, the ‘ignorant’) translator, translating work written in a language she makes no real claim to know, by a writer whose culture she has no real lived or extended close experience of, is a difficult one. It is very fraught, this question of who can be trusted with the work of representing the speech, the writing, the work of someone else: who is learned enough, who is experienced enough, who is sensitive and careful enough. The question becomes more difficult still when we consider the uneven dynamics of any translation relation, and especially the English-language translator’s real power. I would be unconvinced by any account of the work of translation that ignores this. Because it’s true: undertaking a translation, I may well learn nothing. I may end up making work that unknowingly does violence to the original writing: misunderstanding it, forcing it to adapt and conform to my own desire for it, my fantasy of what it represents for me, closing it down rather than opening myself and others up to it. Getting led nowhere by the exercise of translation other than back into what I already presumed to know about the writing (the language, the culture) in question. But, at the same time, I would be unconvinced by an account of translating that passes too quickly over or fails altogether to notice its chance of learning. The chance it offers of becoming-expert, becoming-linguistically and culturally competent, becoming-critical, becoming-intimate, becoming a better – or, if not a better (because are we really getting any better at reading and writing? Is it useful to think of these activities in terms of progress?) – then certainly a different reader and writer. Translation as the chance – a translation project as a means of giving oneself the chance – of being taught by the other’s writing, where answers to the questions of how to be responsible for this writing, and whether or not you or I will be capable of taking responsibility for this writing are, again, in no way given in advance.

  Too quickly and too fast. So fast, in fact, that the thing disappears, as if down a trapdoor. When I read translation described in terms of ‘thorough-going mastery’, personally, I can no longer recognize it.

  To be clear: it is not my intention to downplay the knowledge that is involved in translating (Oh yeah, it sounds hard but actually, as it turns out, anyone can do it: really, just look at the woman on her lovely holiday; just look at us translating for fun and leisurely from the Dutch). Nor is it to absolve anyone of the requirement to learn new languages. (Gayatri Spivak is brilliant on this: ‘If you are interested in talking about the other,’ she writes, ‘and/or in making a claim to be the other, it is crucial to learn other languages.’) It’s rather to offer a view of translation as a site for learning through reading and writing, through testing and researching, through asking and arguing, in the hope of extending the invitation to do translations to more of us (why not to all of us?).

  Because (to put the same point another way): at what prior stage in her education would – or could – the translator presume to already know enough? To have already read widely and closely enough? To be fully linguistically and culturally competent enough? Tell me, really: when could anyone, any reader or writer, consider themselves adequately pre-qualified to undertake the translation of, say, a 730-page novel set in a sanatorium? One of Germany’s most formative contributions to European literature? Or indeed an unpublished story by a Dutch artist – his first effort at fiction? It seems to me that translators undertake to write translations not as a means to demonstrate their expertise but precisely because they know, without yet knowing exactly how or in what particular ways, doing so will be productive of new knowledge. As yet un-acquired, un-grounded knowledge of the world – of experiences and stories, ideas and things, people and places, tastes and smells, rhythms and sounds. Knowledge of the world as well as, always, and always in the form of, writing. Passing over this in the name of promoting the status of translation and translators risks passing over what I consider to be the most powerful argument for its interest. While at the same time making exclusive what might otherwise be its more open and shared adventure. Do translations! Yes, yes and absolutely. But who are we saying can?

  When the gym is so full of bodies I can’t see the instructor, I copy the woman in front of me, and the woman behind me copies me in turn. In this way we share the moves around. We get to dance them – the pleasure of actually getting to dance them! Someone else’s moves, only this time made with my own body – falling in and out of sync with each other, with the music, with h
ip hop, tango, ballet.

  Among the distributed topics that make up Barthes’s autobiography, translated by Richard Howard as Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, there is one titled ‘La jeune fille bourgeoise’, a title translated by Howard as ‘The middle-class maiden’. It comes immediately before the paragraph in praise of the ‘Amateur’, and in many ways prefigures it.

  ‘Middle-class maiden’ – I actually like how wrong and untimely that sounds (a synonym for lady translator?).

  The paragraph she titles begins: ‘Surrounded by political upheaval, he plays the piano, paints watercolours.’

  Who does?

  The pronoun switch is for a moment confusing.

  Before it becomes clear that Barthes does.

  It is Barthes who occupies – who, here, is claiming for himself – the position of the middle-class maiden: playing the piano and painting watercolours in his apartment in Paris’s sixth arrondissement. He’s the one who would regularly engage in what he calls all the false – or fake? sham? (les faux) – occupations of another era’s accomplished young lady. How to justify such leisured activities? ‘Surrounded by political upheaval…’ how to justify the piano-playing, the watercolour-painting, the Saturday morning exercise, the amateur translating?

  There he is: this is the scene that Barthes offers us. Barthes as the middle-class maiden, producing uselessly, stupidly (bêtement, writes Barthes – mindlessly?), and seemingly only for his/her own pleasure, for his/her own distraction and instruction.

  But be that as it may, the point for Barthes is that still she produced. Still, he writes, ‘she was producing’. Of the middle-class young maiden’s unprofessionalized and yet still productive activity, he affirms: C’était sa forme de dépense à elle.

  A sentence translated by Howard as: ‘It was her own form of expenditure.’

  Is there a way of ending, appositionally, on the elle, I wonder? Reproducing the emphasis of the à elle?

  Awkwardly: it was her form of using energy proper to her.

  Or, it was her way of expending energy – for her.

  What Barthes finds of interest in the activities of the middle-class maiden is not her repetition, her re-inscription of some erstwhile aspect of bourgeois life. It is instead, as Adrien Chassain argues in a detailed discussion of Barthes’s investment in the amateur, how she seems to be exceeding her role in it. It is something like the affirmation that he sees in her ongoing commitment to such privileged activities: this private assertion of her own energy and potentiality. An energy that she expends without any ambition of ever producing a finished worldly product – but that is still productive nevertheless.

  Of what though?

  What – to use Barthes’s term – might be the utopia of such apparently unproductive productive activities?

  I find an answer – at least, I think I find the suggestion of an answer – in a lesson plan for children that Barthes once offered in an interview.

  Titled ‘Literature / Teaching’ and published in 1975, the interview pertains to the teaching of literature in schools. Can ‘literature’ be taught? was among the questions asked. And, if so, how? Barthes’s answer, translated by Linda Coverdale, unfolds in stages:

  ‘People are usually concerned with content in the teaching of language and literature,’ he says. ‘But the task involves much more than that. It also involves the relations between and the shared presence of living bodies. The real problem is to learn how a class in language or literature can be filled with values or desires that are not accommodated by the institution, when they’re not being actively repressed by it.’

  ‘It seems to me,’ he goes on, ‘that if I were facing a classroom of students, my chief concern would be to find out what is desired. It would not be a question of wanting to liberate desires, nor even of learning what they might be (which would be an enormous undertaking in any case), but of asking the question: “Is there desire?”’

  In seminars, the smaller and more intimate pedagogical settings of the EHESS (where Barthes was teaching prior to his appointment at the Collège de France), ‘there is always desire,’ he recounts. The students attend because of their own desires, using the thesis (the writing of a doctoral thesis) as a pretext for writing. He says: ‘There is always, deep inside, a desire for writing. People come because I have written.’ This of course is not likely to be the case in the school classroom. How then to enable the possibility of reading and writing pleasure there? How to open up reading and writing as practices so that the schoolchildren might share in them, too?

  Well, why not try something like this: give children ‘the opportunity to create whole objects, over a long period of time’. As such, the exercise would be something quite different from the usual homework assignment. Imagine each pupil being asked to create a whole work, and setting him or herself all the tasks necessary to its completion. Why not offer children a real possibility of structuring the object to be created? Without, he adds, ‘reifying any eventual outcome’, but engaging instead with what, in the light of the lecture course he delivered three years later, we might call its ‘preparation’. (The lesson plan reads like an outline for the project of The Preparation of the Novel.) This, Barthes suggests, would do two things. First, it would open children up to the pleasures of producing for its own sake, before it reaches the circuits of esteem, grades or commercialization. Second, it would offer a different point of entry into literature, a way of sharing in the making of it. It would give them access to literature as a storehouse of possible forms to be copied, relayed and circulated amongst themselves.

  At stake in all this is how the works that get distributed by professionals in the public sphere come to meet and interact with the daily lives of those who do not occupy that sphere, or not in the same way, and not with the same agency: children, for example; or the bored privileged young woman at her piano, her synthesizer, her iPhone. How these forms might be made to circulate more widely in the social field, while also recognizing the manners in which they are already circulating, the ways in which they are already being extended and modified, corrupted and re-energized by the less visible agents of that circulation, where the field also includes the classroom, the gym above the swimming pool, the bourgeois living room. The middle-class maiden’s productivity, practising in her own private amateur mode, is of value because she represents – she both enacts and represents – one of the ways in which things get made to move, how forms travel, how they get tried out, passing from body to body, from the public sphere into the private and back again. Reading Chassain’s discussion, I am struck by a line he quotes from a very early review Barthes wrote of a chamber music concert: ‘A society is beautiful only to the extent that there’s a natural circulation between the works of its great men and the intimate life of its individuals and its homes.’

  Creative writing exercises for everyone!

  Aerobics classes with a mishmash of dance moves for everyone!

  Translation for everyone!

  Is that right?

  Yes and why not?

  This is the fantasy. It is the order of a fantasy, I know: where aerobics meets translation at the level of energy and instruction and pleasure, a means to try out and learn from, to share in and repurpose the gestures and moves we receive from elsewhere. From the works of ‘great men’ and women (the theorist and scholar Marielle Macé has recently made a brilliant case for the way our reading informs our living in precisely these terms, and her thinking informs my own here). As well as, vitally and hopefully, from the incalculable number of as yet unread and as yet unrecognized works whose new reception, here, in our individual lives and homes, might be the chance of expanding and nuancing, of querying the terms of the category we receive as ‘great’. A fantasy where the invitation of translation is opened out to more of us, with the assurance – the sense of new permission – that comes with the claim that translation can start, that it need only take, at the outset, something like desire, or curiosity, or some prior or suggeste
d interest in a bit of writing written in another language, in the work of someone else written somewhere else. Bringing no guarantee that the translations produced will be any good, necessarily – that they will reach the standards of the professionals. But perhaps that doesn’t always have to be the point. An invitation to translate that would in turn depend on a willingness to embrace (rather than worry over) the constitutive amateurishness of the translator. The way translation starts – always to some degree, I think, regardless of previous experience – from a position of not knowing. Not knowing what the task, this time, will entail, not knowing whether, this time, I will be capable of it, not knowing what the doing of it – the fact of me doing it, right here and now – will make happen. But the way it creates a scene – a domestic scene, a classroom scene, a bourgeois living-room scene or a mum-on-holiday-with-her-kids scene – for learning (for testing and finding out) nonetheless. A little bit of translating, a little bit of engagement with the world in the mode offered by this very particular art. The little set down here with no intention of downplaying anything at all, but as a way of taking measure of the ways energies get expended of a regular weekly morning, of an occasional afternoon, or every single day over a lifetime. Think of the committed Saturday morning exerciser, the way she takes the moves she learns in the gym home, whacking them out, now, on the living room floor. How she essays them – how she might at this very moment be re-essaying them and sharing them, putting them into new circulation as she dances dodgily with her family and friends. I offer amateur translation as a means to do the same, only this time with sentences, only this time with the kick and different beat of a sentence written in another language: C’était sa forme de dépense à elle.