by Kate Briggs
I think again of the researcher in the library, sitting at her desk-island, undertaking her monumental and discreet undertaking. Reading her way through Flaubert’s enormous list of books at her own, presumably different pace, unwitnessed by the other concentrated bodies, the birds and the trees.
There’s every chance, I realize, that she’s planning to one day convert her labour into pieces of scholarship: a sequence of articles, or a monograph, say, that in themselves are very unlikely to bring her any financial reward. Work that will perhaps come to be valued for the contribution it makes to knowledge, to Flaubert scholarship, that might come in time to boost her credibility, her standing, her chances of promotion. There’s every chance that she, too, is speculating. But what kind of long-term speculation is this? I remember reading an interview with the novelist and critic Adam Thirlwell, who had just published a book telling the many adventures of the novel in translation. When asked if he’d consider doing a full-length translation himself (in addition to the French-English translation of the Vladimir Nabokov story that is included as an appendix to The Delighted States), his answer was to say: ‘I’d love there to be more translated from South American writers from the early twentieth century: Roberto Arlt, Macedonio Fernández. Then a more complete version of Central Europeans like Bohumil Hrabal. And also more from less well-known periods of major literatures, like the libertine French novels of the eighteenth century, by novelists like Crébillon fils. As for me, though, I don’t know when I’ll ever undertake any of these. I was asked by my publisher if I wanted to translate Madame Bovary – which initially excited me and then I thought of the time it would take – about the time, basically, it would take to write Madame Bovary. I wish more novelists translated novels, but novelists, rightly, in a way, are selfish, and translation of long works takes up so much time.’
The translation of long works takes up so much time.
In the meantime, one could have written a novel: my own monographic thing.
What’s more, even when they do get finally finished: ‘Glory, for the translator, is borrowed glory.’ Or so Tim Parks recently announced in a column for the New York Review of Books. And ‘there’s no way round this’. Parks’s point is that a translator’s work is celebrated if and only if the work she is translating is worth celebrating; there is no separating her achievement from that of its original author. As a consequence of this, Parks argues, mediocre translators of successful books sometimes get unduly praised, while those more talented translators translating less visible works hardly get noticed at all.
I think part of what Parks says is true: the translator’s achievement is indeed inseparable from that of the original author. I also think that the translator, altogether conscious of the collaborative, intensely relational nature of her work – of the fact that she is always translating something by someone else – is unlikely ever to dispute the inseparability of her achievement. For me, what this suggests is that accompanying (or undermining) the translator’s calculation, her opportunism, her quest for borrowed glory – if indeed, there has been such speculation; if, indeed, she has been conscious of it – there is something always a bit untallyable about her project. Translating takes such a long time, it’s true, which means that its promise of cultural capital is only ever a distant promise. What’s more, if and when it does come her way, according to Parks it would appear to have no authentic or especially stable value anyway. Or at least no value that can’t very easily be disputed and taken away (‘borrowed glory’ – Parks’s phrase is deeply and strikingly suspicious). In these terms, writing translations doesn’t make a great deal of sense; it’s altogether illogical according to the logics that we are all supposed to be contained and explained by (the ongoing and ever more efficient accumulation of status, money and things). Which suggests to me that there’s something resistant in this: about undertaking a project – a great life-structuring and long-time-consuming collaborative project – whose returns are precisely so unimmediate, so precarious and so indirect.
I think of Bouvard and Pécuchet sitting on a bench by the Canal St Martin. Two new friends falling into friendship on a warm summer’s evening. Marvelling over ‘the catalogue of their shared tastes’ (as Barthes puts it in A Lover’s Discourse). This scene, affirms Barthes in Howard’s translation, ‘undoubtedly, is a love scene’:
‘You like this?’
(cinnamon, cold beer, lavender?)
‘So do I!’
‘You don’t like that?’
(harpsichords, geraniums, women in trousers?)
‘Neither do I!’
Two new friends making the decision to chuck in their careers as copyists and devote themselves to a new life of applied self-instruction. Where the digressive, frustrating path of the novel will be to move them out of the city to the countryside, into household management and smallholding and medicine and novel-writing, only to bring them back to exactly the position they started from: seated at a table copying out passages from other people’s books. A path which makes no sense, really: they’ve learned nothing, earned nothing, accumulated nothing, apparently. But on the way there’s been comedy, sunshine and companionship, argument and failure, literature and love.
I think of the researcher in the library, rereading fifteen hundred books originally read for the purposes of writing a comic novel about the failed application of books to life (even if she were capable of reading one whole book per day, with no breaks for weekends or holidays, the project would take her over four years to complete);
Of Robinson Crusoe desiring a table and having to fell – having to waste the most part of – a whole tree in order to smooth down each one of its solitary boards.
Then of the three years it took to complete the translation of a volume of lecture notes originally drafted in a matter of eight weeks. (My own way of expending my energy – c’était ma depense à moi.)
Robinson Crusoe is famously a novel of repetition, of doing and making things again: following the shipwreck, he remakes tools, re-cultivates crops, re-domesticates some kinds of animal, re-husbands others and eventually comes to re-enslave more people. But there is, of course, a crucial difference between so-called primitive man’s path to civilization and the shipwrecked Robinson Crusoe. It is the difference between acting and re-enacting, between doing or making something for the very first time and knowingly redoing something that has already been done, or made, before.
For example, a table. There are already tables in the world. Robinson Crusoe knows this. But the point and his problem is: there are none here. Or none that he recognizes as being fully a table: only the flat-topped rocks that I imagine might have served him as an improvised writing and eating surface, or the stumps of fallen trees. He wants a familiar table, an Englishman’s table, to act as the symbolic centre of his own home, his castle. He wants a table of the type that he has eaten off and written on before. Of the kind, indeed, that no one else here yet knows. No one, except perhaps the dogs and the cats. But not the parrot, and not Friday either, it seems, when he eventually appears. Introducing the table-from-England onto the island, with its powerful rectangular aesthetic, will be a way of transforming his new setting, of making a home there, of claiming, colonizing, a portion of the island-space. The way that sounds. At once so full of new possibility, because:
What will happen to the circle of the island when the table is imposed?
What different configurations of subject and space might its introduction produce?
Who will sit at it? What conversations will happen around it? What sorts of activities will its newly planed horizontal surface support?
A bit like the forest garden, transplanted in the mid-nineties into the heart of France’s new national library. Will it do to lift a section of sycamore pines and transplant them here (I imagine the contractors asking themselves)? A rectangular-shaped section, sunk into the middle of a rectangular- (a page?-)shaped library, whose four corners are marked by four glass corner towers, standin
g, it is said, like upright half-open books. A rectangle of transplanted forest breathing in the heart of a library, surrounded by concrete and wood and glass, by a cinema now, and alongside the river. What new eco-systems will be formed among the books, the trees and the readers? Or between the readers coming here for the books and the communities making their homes in the surrounding residential buildings, distracted as they all sometimes are by the murmurations: the late autumn twilight spectacle of starlings rising and falling into the sycamore pines?
Projects so full of possibility, because we can’t know. No one, I don’t think, is in a position to know in advance what the remaking of a thing made (or grown) in one place in another – what Lawrence Venuti calls translation’s necessary process of de- and re-contextualisation – will do.
(Since the inner garden was installed, the library’s website tells me, a number of new trees have self-seeded themselves there by chance: nineteen cherrywoods, seven elderberries, three mountain ashes and one trembling poplar – also known as a quaking aspen.)
Projects that for precisely this reason are so risky and so perilous, because:
What indeed will happen?
When the Englishman makes his table again, with its imported aesthetic, only this time here, with the local materials and in the new setting of this wholly different island?
When he seats Friday at his table and starts speaking at him until he learns to speak back, instating a power dynamic, a learning relation, that is so entirely and so violently asymmetrical?
Or to the city birds, making new homes in the branches of imported trees, but getting regularly stunned now – knocked out – by the glass?
When it comes to making a table, Robinson Crusoe is a novice, a beginner. He has never made a table before. But others have. He is fortunate in the sense that he has a model in mind: this, along with the many items he salvages from the ship (the tools, the grains, the gunpowder and the guns), is the embodied knowledge he carries with him. He knows what a table is: he has seen and used them before, back in York, England. Like the translator, he is not tasked – he has not tasked himself – with making something wholly original, in the sense of unprecedented, without reference or comparison. However it turns out, his table will not be an invention.
Which I realize is an altogether obvious point. But it is also the key, I think, to one of the further and very particular interests of writing a translation: ‘As a temporary or permanent substitute for creation,’ writes Simon Leys, in an essay translated by Dan Gunn, ‘translation is closely allied to creation, and yet is of a different nature, for it offers an artificial inspiration.’ He goes on: ‘One can sit down at one’s table every morning at the same hour, assured of giving birth to something. Of course, the quality and the quantity of daily production can vary, but the nightmare of the blank page is, for its part, definitively exorcised. It is, besides, this very reassuring guarantee which fundamentally places translation in the domain of the artisan rather than in that of the artist. However difficult translation may sometimes be, as distinct from creation it is fundamentally risk-free.’
When it comes to translation, and when it comes to what is specific and therefore specifically interesting about translation, there’s never a question of what to write (and so, whether or not today there will be something to write) because the work has already been written. What matters is how to write it again.
Just make something up, is what Barthes said to Richard Howard. Just do whatever you want.
Can I? I’ve often wondered.
I’ve wanted to.
But then have found myself coming back round to thinking: if I were to just make something up, if I were to do whatever I wanted, would that not take me beside the point of writing a translation? In other words: would not making something (anything) up, doing whatever I wanted, mean writing something else? There’s nothing to stop me, of course, from retroactively declaring my made-up or extrapolated or differently derived thing to be a translation, with all the performative power that the declaration this is a translation brings with it. And I have no intention of policing anyone else’s power of naming, of limiting their expansion of what can be included in the genre-category of translation. But between myself and myself, I always seem to eventually come back round to thinking: the constraints on how far I can go, the limits on my making-up (because of course this is also what translation involves: making something, making this thing up again), the limits on doing what I want, are what interest me. They are what make the practice of translation specific and difficult and interesting in my experience of it. They interest me because they instruct me, leading me (forcing me?) outside of what I might already be capable of writing, thinking, knowing and imagining. I don’t want to just make something up. Or perhaps elsewhere and one day I do. But I think I’ll call it something else.
In an interview with Lydia Davis, Dan Gunn invites her to consider Leys’s position. Do you agree? he asks. Do you feel substantially different when you are sitting down to write one of your stories, from how you feel when sitting down to ‘translate’ another chapter of Bob, Son of Battle (a novel for children first published in 1898 by Alfred Olivant, where Davis’s project was to ‘convert the Cumbrian and Scottish dialect – of which there is a huge amount – into clear standard English and to tinker throughout with the narrative passages so that the prose is less difficult.’) Yes, says Davis, ‘with just a slight hesitation at eliminating the idea of art from translation, at calling the translator an artisan or craftsperson rather than an artist. I say hesitation, not absolute refusal, because I generally have a two-fold reaction to the question of which exactly the translator is: first I want to say that the translator is more a highly skilled craftsperson than an artist, but then immediately think twice about it and feel that there are moments when real artistry is involved in translation.’
It is worth noting that, for Leys, the question of risk is related not to the event of translation – and thus to whether the translation will be good or bad, or what it might come to do in the world – but rather to the experience of writing something for the first time (of making something as yet unmade).
Davis goes on: ‘To return to your question – it is true that the work to be done is already there in front of me when I sit down to translate; and that there is not the same risk involved as there is in creating a work of my own; and yes, I do feel different sitting down to a translation – whether from the French, or from the Dutch, or from Bob, Son of Battle – than I do sitting down to a story of my own.’
However provisional and collapsible this distinction might be – and as, over the course of the interview, it proves to be (for instance, when Davis discusses her translations of the found Flaubert material that appear as new stories in her collection Can’t and Won’t), she insists on the possibility of making a distinction. The activities are related (they are very closely allied), but they are not simply the same.
I can think of a number of obvious ripostes to this. Perhaps the first would be to say: Yes but look. Look at all the writing that gets made from extant material and lays claim to the status of – and indeed operates as – new art.
And then to wonder out loud: Who was it that said the blank page is never blank, but always written over with quotations from existing works?
I could imagine a further objection which would begin by asking: Don’t all writing projects involve working with existing rules and parameters that guide and to some degree direct what it is possible to write? And is this not, in its way, the lesson of the Oulipo? The Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or workshop in potential literature, whose members, Georges Perec and Harry Mathews and Italo Calvino among them, were also fascinated practitioners of translation. The idea being that all writing is to some greater or lesser extent determined by constraints: the protocols of our literary genres (the seventeen syllables of the haiku; the rhetorical conventions of the academic essay; the shortness of a short story), as well as the operative rules of the l
anguage in which it is written. In recognition of this, the project of the Oulipo has been to invent and write under new constraints, as well as to reactivate old and forgotten ones (for instance the lipogram, the writing exercise which produced La Disparition, Perec’s famous novel written without the letter e). The writing of translations is of special interest because it is especially directed and especially constrained; as such, this argument might go, it serves as an illuminating limit-case for all kinds of so-called spontaneous and undirected writing activity everywhere.
Yes, but – hold on.
To say all of that, I think, would be to pass too quickly over what is not the same about the project of making a translation.
To go too fast.
As Davis points out, the activities are not simply the same.
Because: come here, says the writing-to-be-translated. This is its invitation: come here, turn away from your blank page, your self-expression, your efforts at unprecedented monographic creation. Come here, sit down and attend for a while to this, to someone else’s work, and let’s see what that does. (‘One of the ways to get around the confines of one’s “identity” as one produces expository prose,’ writes Spivak, ‘is to work at someone else’s title, as one works with a language that belongs to many others. This, after all, is one of the seductions of translating.’)
Is it worth arguing over whether doing this, working at someone else’s title, makes the translator a craftsperson rather than an artist? No, I don’t think so. I’m not interested in thinking of art-making solely in terms of the first time, newness and invention. But I am interested in pushing a bit further at our understanding of craftsmanship, especially in relation to this question of risk.
