by Kate Briggs
How to make a novel? The emphasis on making – the verb faire opening up a space for making as well as writing, for writing-as-making, writing-as-technique, as craftsmanship – is a way of holding the project at a distance from the mythology of the writer: the published writer for whom the work is done (consecrated, the writer and his work monumentalized). It is a way of holding it still open and mobile, as a practice that Barthes, or indeed his audience could share in, too. The idea that the labour of writing is necessarily modest, humble, might be to replace one myth with another. But it also speaks back to Barthes’s investment in the amateur, in her own form of expending energy, the ways in which she chooses, repeatedly, and with investment, to spend her time. What is he, what is she doing? In her drawing room? At the piano? She too is playing, she too is making something, she too is writing. Her gestures are of the same order as the professional’s. These are activities that she too finds time for within the space and among the competing demands of her life, and does so every day. For me, says Barthes, the place where this alliance occurs, where the aesthetic (as the vocation of the technical) meets the ethical – its privileged field – is precisely here: in what he calls the everyday detail of the domestic setting, the home. This is my fantasy, he says, this is the mode of writing I am projecting for myself: a domestic working practice, working from home, which would also entail the writing of the small differences among the days. Hence, once again, the interest in the haiku, which to Barthes’s mind has the capacity to do exactly this: a mode of recording the incidents of daily life, its particularities, the fragile and short-lived reach of the relations between the subject and the world that each tiny poem describes. For Barthes, attending to the detail of domestic life in no way implied a narrowing or circumscribing of the field of interest. On the contrary, as Adrienne Ghaly argues: in the lectures on the haiku, especially, this technical-ethical question of how indeed to write (how to make, how to produce) these ‘“thin” or minimalist relations to the world’ – how, exactly, one might go about doing this, engaging with the actuality, the real-life practice of doing this – is, for Barthes, a way of asking about ‘language’s power to disrupt dominating, classifying and appropriating stances to which certain kinds of language use commit us’. It is a way of asking how to write (and thus also how to make?) the world differently.
There’s an essay by Paul Valéry called ‘Variations on the Eclogues’, published in a translation by Denise Folliot in 1953, which has something to say about the modesty in making: this idea that there might be something inherently levelling about making concrete things. It also speaks of translation explicitly in terms of volume-approximation – as directed by the concern to reproduce the whole insofar as it is materially possible for the translator to do so, attending to the detail of its every part, as well as to how altogether it takes up space. The scenario is this: Valéry has been asked by a friend to translate Virgil’s Eclogues, also known as the Bucolics, from Latin into French. But because the friend intends to produce what in French is called un beau livre, a beautiful-looking, often expensively produced book, there is a layout concern. He wants the pages to be ‘well-balanced’. And so ‘decided it would be well if the Latin and French were to correspond line for line’. A line for a line, a page for a page. Now the difficulty with this, Valéry explains, is that Latin is in general ‘a more compact language’ than French: it is, as he puts it, ‘chary of auxiliaries’; it is ‘sparing of prepositions’. It can say ‘the same things with fewer words’ and, moreover, is able to arrange these ‘with enviable freedom’. ‘The Latin poet, working within the wide bounds of his syntax can do more or less as he likes’; the French poet, on the other hand ‘does what he can within the very narrow bounds of his own’.
The concern to approximate the original form line by line, writing a new line for each one of its lines, is what prompts – because it is bound up with – this further inquiry into the expressive possibilities of each language. The way, for example, English, with its precise single-word verbs (to cudfdle, to eavesdrop), is also said to be a more economical language than French (if I were to cuddle you in French I would – more wordily – te faire un calin, or te prendre dans mes bras; if I were to eavesdrop on you I would écouter tes conversations privées, maybe, or t’écouter d’une façon indiscrète). The translator of Western languages has to contend with these general quantitative differences – what it is possible to say in what quantity of words – as well as, of course, with the particular expressive economy of the writer she is undertaking to translate.
Enfin bref, Barthes writes, sometimes, in the lecture notes.
A small verbal gesture. Marking a change, an end and a new beginning, in the way a conductor uses a hand to swallow the end of a note.
Enfin bref.
The difficulty of doing (making, writing) something of the same subtle order in a comparable number of words:
So, anyway.
There we have it.
For Valéry, as well as the economic differences (what it is possible to say in what quantity of words) between Latin and French, there was the further problem of feeling underqualified. Nothing marked me out for the translation project, he writes (the modesty of a celebrated poet, Chair of Poetics from 1937 to 1945 at the Collège de France): I hardly knew any Latin: my small amount of schoolboy’s Latin had faded, after fifty-five years, to a memory of a memory.
I hardly knew anything about Virgil.
Who am I to attempt the Bucolics, when so many men, so scholarly and erudite, have toiled over three or four centuries at the translation of them?
What’s more, bucolic themes don’t interest me.
Pastoral life is quite foreign to me and strikes me as tedious.
I get depressed by the sight of furrows.
The recurrence of the seasons depresses me, also, showing only the stupidity of nature and life, which can persist only by repeating themselves.
I shall confess that I was born in a port.
No fields round about, only sand and salt water.
And yet in the end I accepted the commission. For the fact is, he writes, I am compliable; my habit is to give in to fate, to chance. Because it is my conviction that no one knows what he is doing or what he will become. And so again I opened my school Virgil. And, after a while, he writes, as I went on with my translation, making, unmaking, remaking, sacrificing here and there, restoring (as best I could) what I had first rejected – this labour of approximation, with its little successes, its regrets, its conquests and its resignations, produced in me an interesting feeling. (Of which I was not immediately aware.)
The sensation was of ‘a poet at work’.
Here am I, writes Valéry, at my desk, with a famous book, set in its millennial fame.
And here I am arguing with it.
Arguing with it as freely as if it were a poem of my own on the table before me.
In the process of translating it, the set book – once fixed in its fame, these necessary words in this necessary order – starts to unsettle. The immobile poem gets sort of remobilized; each of its necessary lines looking now like a sequence of decisions, or indeed of accidents, made by a writing subject engaged in a similar kind of activity. Interestingly, this sensation of the poet at work, with its levelling effect – the labour of two writers at their desks, writing at very different times, in different ways (the one writing something on the close basis of what the other once produced) but both writing nevertheless – opens out onto a new boldness. If this indeed were once written, a reality that I am able to fully recognize only now that I too am writing it – only now that I find myself engaged in the complex process of writing it again – then why should I not argue with you? Why should my writerly instincts, my different ideas and my own particular aesthetic, necessarily cleave to yours?
These are the questions Valéry finds himself asking.
At times, he notes, as I worked on my translation, I caught myself wanting to change something in the venera
ble text. This lasted for one or two seconds of actual time and amused me.
Why not?
I said to myself, returning from this short absence:
Why not?
Because this, I think, is the nature of the relation. This is its asymmetry, or what Anita Raja, in her lecture titled ‘Translation as a Practice of Acceptance’ calls its ‘inequality’. As a translator, however collaborative I consider my process to be, however much my writing, my thinking, depends on and is so closely directed by yours – indeed, the fact is, it couldn’t exist without it – at the end of the day (at the very end of all the days it can take to translate a long work), I am responsible for you. I am responsible for you; not you for me. (Preparing food for my son to eat, if the slice of pear turns out to be too big for him to comfortably swallow, then that will have been my fuck-up and not his.) This is what I take on. This is what shapes my response to the question ‘Why not?’ each time it arises (a response that has to be each time newly configured in relation to the new circumstances in which it arises). I can’t just make something up. I can’t just change something in the ‘venerable’ text, and replace it with something invented of my own.
Meanwhile, of course, within the parameters of the project I have taken on and in response to the instruction of the sentence I am undertaking to translate – its detailed constraints – this is exactly what I’m doing: changing, replacing. I’m never simply making something up but I am nevertheless making something (something new in the name of againness). I accept this peculiar writing scenario – I willingly accept it. Although I don’t think it would be true to say that I accept or have ever accepted it once and for all. I don’t think I could claim to be capable of accepting this and my acceptance holding once and for all. Which is how I understand the title of Raja’s lecture: translation as ‘a practice of acceptance’: an ongoing practice of acceptance, an ongoing rethinking, readjusting and reaccepting the terms of my acceptance.
Translators must write and thereby attend to the whole.
Translators must write and thereby attend to the whole.
But have I fully stated, yet, why this matters?
I think of the kind of materialized reading practice performed by a guy whom Barthes once sat next to on a bus. The number 21 bus, crowded, a Sunday evening in July. This guy, as Barthes tells it, who was engaged in underlining – conscientiously, with a ruler and a black Biro – ‘every single one of the lines’ in the book he was reading. In other words, the whole book. Why? Presumably because everything – every bit of it – mattered. Nothing could be reasonably or responsibly left out.
Likewise, translation. An obvious point, perhaps, but again one that is worth stating and restating, if only because this is one of the further constraints that distinguishes translation from the many other processes and practices with which it is often compared (into which it is so often collapsed). A translation can’t really be, at least not in principle, a great deal shorter or smaller than the original. It can’t really leave things out. Although of course there have been translations across the history of literary translation that miss things, that excise and abridge things and function as and are considered translations nevertheless. Consider an example discussed by Lawrence Venuti: Abbé Prévost’s French version of Pamela, which reduced the seven English volumes to four in French. Even so, Prévost declared: ‘I have not changed anything pertaining to the author’s intention … nor have I changed much in the manner in which he put that intention into words.’ Or, a mid-twentieth-century example: take the first English version of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex by Howard M. Parshley, published in 1953, which cut fifteen per cent of the original’s 972 pages. Or the poet Paul Legault’s recent English-to-English translations of Emily Dickinson’s complete poems where, instead of approximating the size, the sometimes already minute volume, of the original poems, his translations are always and deliberately much shorter (one-liners). These examples are interesting, I think, not because they show how flexible this constraint really is, how infrequently it has been adhered to, but because, in their provocation, they show up the degree to which we feel, generally speaking, that it should be. Three volumes of the novel not translated? Crucial chapters missing? A fourteen-line poem made again as a one-liner? The feeling is: that can’t be right. That can’t really be a translation in the ‘proper’ sense of the term. Perhaps what we’re dealing with here is something generically different – some proximate but not altogether identical practice with its own, different history and protocol: the abridgement; the précis.
That said, just as a translation can’t, in principle, be a great deal shorter or smaller than the original material in quantitative terms, nor can it be a great deal longer or bigger. This is the point that Jacques Derrida makes in a lecture on literary and philosophical translation. And it strikes me as true: I feel this to be true, and once again the exceptions serve only to confirm the feeling. In Lawrence Venuti’s translation, Derrida offers the following scenario: imagine, he writes, a translator who is ‘fully competent in at least two languages and two cultures, two cultural memories with the sociohistorical knowledge embodied in them. Now give her all the time in the world, as well as all the words needed to explicate, clarify and teach the semantic content and forms of the text.’ Give her ‘an entire book filled with translator’s notes’, he suggests, and there is really no reason why she should ‘fail to render – without any remainder – the intentions, meaning, denotations, connotations and semantic over-determinations, the semantic effects of what is called the original’. Give her a big enough book – enough space and enough time (a lifetime) – and she should be in a position to render them all. A translator like Vladimir Nabokov, for example, who famously materialized his dream of a translation with footnotes rising up the page like skyscrapers in an edition of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (‘I want translations with copious footnotes, footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers to the top of this or that page so as to leave only the gleam of one textual line between commentary and eternity.’). Yes, fine. And why not? What an extraordinary project (David Damrosch notes how in ‘Nabokov’s Onegin the actual poem takes up only one seventh of the edition’s fourteen hundred pages.’). The only problem with such an undertaking, following Derrida’s argument, is that ‘this operation, which occurs daily in the university and in literary criticism, is not what is called translation, a translation worthy of the name, a translation in the strict sense, the translation of a work’. In its length, its excessive expansion and additional over-length, it has become something else: translation plus commentary, criticism, explanation, gloss, scholarship.
It is not my intention to hold anyone to making translations in the ‘strict’, ‘proper’ or ‘standard’ sense (all those adjectives are inadequate), nor is it to suggest that translation doesn’t or in some way can’t also involve reading, synthesis, synopsis, criticism, explanation, gloss, scholarship. Translations very often are somewhat longer than the originals, they come with their own additional contextualizing textual apparatus (my translations of the lectures, for example, includes a translator’s preface, situating Barthes’s work). It’s more to try to register what happens – the special kind of knowledge that gets produced – when the concern is to write the whole, when someone endeavours to reproduce, more or less (with all the differences that writing the thing again in a new language makes), a given work’s economy of expression. Or, in other words, how the work is saying what it is saying and doing what it is doing in its given number of words, with its punctuation, white space and use of larger discursive structures. How, working with the constraint of the whole, the practice of translation is also a way of attending to and thinking about this economy in terms of form. A short form for a short form. A long form for a long form. A pithy sentence for a pithy one. A line for a line. The work of translation, as Valéry affirms, always involves ‘a certain approximation of form’. Where form means genre as well as size and shape and duration and volume: the way
the writing-to-be-translated unfolds, the way it is paced, the way it reads over time together with the way it has been shaped and the way that shape occupies space, engages with and configures the spaces around it. This kind of materialized attending to happens at the level of the sentence, the smaller part, the local move or gesture that the translator works to reproduce in her own setting, with her own body and her own different materials. It also happens – what interests me about translation is the way it must also happen – at the level of the whole. A whole newly produced and differently inscribed in its different surroundings, existing here now,
where it didn’t before.
Like what?
Like a table.
Like an Englishman’s rectangular table made again for the first time
in the circle of undeserted island.
I set the comparison down – I have been using it – as a device to think with. A comparison; yet another possible and limitedly illuminating metaphor for translation.
There have been so many.
There’s a panel discussion you can watch on YouTube, a London Review of Books event on translating Kafka, where Anthea Bell, the celebrated translator from the German, French and Danish, describes once trying very hard to talk about her work in concrete terms, without making an image out of it. It was in conversation with the winner of a book prize, she recalls: a very good Italian author; very fluent in English. They were discussing the translation process and she proposed to try saying something about it without recourse to metaphor.
