This Little Art

by Kate Briggs

  You see, she said, it’s like this: after the first reading, that particularly close, intensive reading that for me is the preliminary stage for all translation, the translator’s mind dwells somewhere, for a little while, in a place where there isn’t any language at all.

  And then, with luck, she comes down with an English draft.

  The young Italian writer received her description, thought about it. Then turned to her good-humouredly and asked: okay, but tell me. Where exactly – where concretely, that is, where literally – is this place you’re talking about?

  And she laughed, because of course she realized what she’d done.

  I set the table down as a metaphor; or, more precisely, as an analogy.

  An analogy, of course, is a special kind of comparison. It has the features of an argument, and is usually made for the purposes of clarification or explanation. It works by pointing to something familiar or readily understood in order to clarify or explain something more complex and less readily understood. If the analogy is a good one then it should last long enough for the complex thing to be clarified or explained: for it to emerge, instructively, that this is indeed a bit like that.

  But not only does its good functioning depend on knowing which of the two terms is the simpler and which is the more complex – in this case, table-making or translating? – it is also in the very nature of the analogy that at some point it will break down: the ways in which this, in fact, now you or I come to think of it, is actually quite unlike that, will always win out, eventually.

  Shall I break it down now?

  I read Robinson Crusoe for the purposes of translating Barthes’s first lecture course.

  In fact I reread it; I had read it before, but had forgotten most of it (all of the long second part: who remembers the wolves?!).

  I remember reading the passage about making a table, and thinking and feeling very strongly that this account of remaking a familiar thing – of so laboriously remaking an existing thing – knew something about the practice of translation.

  I recently went back and read it for the third time.

  And discovered – reading more concentratedly this time? – that the infinitely laborious method, the one whereby a whole tree makes but one solitary board, actually describes how Robinson Crusoe made some shelves. The table, on the other hand, he knocked together with bits of ready-made plank. The passage I quoted continues:

  ‘When I had wrought out some boards, as above, I made large shelves of the breadth of a foot and a half, one over another, all along one side of the cave, to lay all my tools, nails and ironwork, and in a word, to separate everything at large in their places, that I might easily come at them; I knocked pieces into the wall of the rock to hang my guns and all things that would hang up.

  However I made me a table and chair, as I observed above, in the first place, and this I did out of the short pieces of boards that I brought on my raft from the ship.’

  It was a mistake, a misreading. Of the kind that happens when you bring your own agenda, your own desire, your own ideas to a book, however much you might want to learn from and be instructed by it. In other words, of the kind that happens in reading and translating. It made sense to me that it should be a table, and not shelves, that he spent such a long time making. In the same way as it made sense to Orwell that Robinson Crusoe should feel something for his table and not for his shelves; that the novel should become interesting only at the point which he starts making a table – precisely, a table, and not any of the other objects he undertakes to make. I imagine this has to do with the way tables have so often been used as devices to think with.

  Philosophy, observes Sara Ahmed, is full of tables, full of examples of tables (of tables – writing desks especially – being invoked as examples). Though perhaps this is not altogether surprising: tables, after all, ‘are “what” philosophy is written upon’. When reaching for a concrete example of an object, something solid, something familiarly real, something that is very and indisputably there and, no doubt, within reach, philosophers have very often reached for the table. When explaining how a wholly useful thing acquires new value the moment it is exchanged Marx, too, points to a table. The famous wooden table: the basic elementarily useful thing that grimaces and gurns, grow paws and a tail, and sets itself upright to dance the strange seductive dance of the commodity. It was Derrida, who at one point looks up from his close reading of this passage in Marx’s Capital to survey ‘all the tables’ that have appeared in what he calls our – Western, male, almost exclusively white European – ‘patrimony’. So many, he writes, ‘that we have lost count of them, in philosophy, rhetoric, poetics, from Plato to Heidegger, from Kant to Ponge, and so many others’.

  ‘Think of a kitchen table … when you’re not there,’ Andrew Ramsay suggests to Lily Briscoe in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, as part of an effort to explain his father’s philosophy of subject and object and the nature of reality. The kitchenyness of the table, its multipurpose-ness, suggesting that perhaps thinking has always happened, and is currently still happening, on that kind of surface, too.

  So many tables, acting as so many supports for the ideas we receive.

  I am attached to my misreading, I realize. Inspired by the way Oana Avasilichioaei and Erín Moure run the word ‘translation’ through all the possible dictionary definitions and common sayings pertaining to ‘roof’ (noun and verb) in their work Expeditions of a Chimaera – an exercise which produces such newly phrased and newly proffered idioms as ‘to hit the translation’ (to become very angry) and ‘to have a translation over one’s head’ (to have somewhere to live) and ‘to be under a person’s translation’ (to be in a person’s home) – I turn stubbornly to the dictionary, determined to think whatever else my table analogy will give me cause to think. It produces this:

  If a translation is like a table, then it consists of a flat slab-like top braced by legs or other (normally, but not always, visible) supports.

  And if to translate is to table, then this means to submit for consideration, to propose, as well as to suspend consideration indefinitely.

  If a translation is like a table, then it has known and is open to different kinds of making (for example, both its initial assemblage and its later repeated setting).

  If a translation is like a table, then one way of earning a living – meagre, maybe, but intellectually challenging and advantageously flexible – is to wait them. As in: she worked her way through the baby years by waiting translations. (American usage)

  If a translation is like a table, then it is also, etymologically speaking, a plate, a meal, an offering.

  If a translation is like a table, then it is either, or can be alternately, the thing itself and the configuration of persons and relations around it.

  In the terms of my misreading, the problem Robinson Crusoe sets himself is how to make a table in what for him will be for the first time, in his new, unlikely circumstances. And the crucial, final point is this: the methods that might have been used to make the tables he has seen, eaten and worked at before are radically unavailable to him now. It is the total unavailability of those original methods – not only because he is not a natural craftsman but also because, even if he were, his setting, his resources, his new materials are very different – that makes his problem so interesting and still, to my mind, so very translation-like. There can be no question of Robinson Crusoe making a table in the same way as the tables he has eaten off or written on at his father’s house, back in York, England. The project involves coming up with his own idiosyncratic solution to the problem of making through the effort of practically engaging with it. A project that demands both application and contrivance. Thus, he writes: ‘I made abundance of things even without tools, and some with no more tools than an adze and a hatchet, which were perhaps never made that way before.’

  Likewise, I contrived to write two volumes of Barthes’s lecture notes again in English. And although at that point they had alrea
dy been translated (for example, from the French into German by Horst Brühmann in 2008, under the title Die Vorbereitung des Romans or from the French into Italian by Emiliana Galiani and Julia Ponzio, whose La preparazione del romanzo was published in 2010), I can assert with confidence that they have never been made in that way before.

  Notes for lectures that were drafted at relative speed, with a fountain pen, in various inks (blue and red and green), marked by crossings out, underlinings, with margin notes and new passages attached to the pages by paper clip, over summer weeks spent at the house in Urt, a village in the South-West of France.

  Notes for the lectures that were then delivered in the mid- to late 1970s in the setting of the Collège de France: one lecture a week between December 1976 and May 1977 for Comment vivre ensemble, between February and June 1978 for Le Neutre and December 1978 and March 1980 for La Préparation du roman.

  Lectures whose live delivery was recorded and archived.

  Notes for the lectures that came eventually to be edited, more than twenty years later, under the general direction of Éric Marty. And, for the two courses I translated, the editorship of Claude Coste for Comment vivre ensemble, and Nathalie Léger for La Préparation du roman I et II. Notes that were then copy-edited, made into a book (published in Seuil’s Traces écrites series, with its specifically plain, cahier-like design) in French in 2003.

  Books that I bought that year, I think, or the one after, in a bookshop on the rue des Écoles.

  Audio recordings that would be made available for purchase at around the same time.

  In 2016, a new edition of La Préparation du roman would be published. Based not on a transcription of Barthes’s notes – his score for the performance of the lectures – but the recordings themselves. A new version which reads altogether differently: in place of the stop-start, telegrammatic quality is transcribed, unpausing speech – which, provocatively, makes for a writing so much closer to the kind of ongoing, continuous prose Barthes dreamt of for his novel. A new commodity which looks entirely different from the first version: now there is a handsome black-and-white photograph of Barthes on the cover (one of the reasons given for publishing the course again, repackaged, in this new, more ‘readable’ version, so relatively soon after the first plain edition, is because ‘it didn’t find its readership’ – it didn’t sell many copies? – the first time around).

  The labour of translation – working the lecture notes into English on a PC on my table by the window some forty years after their original drafting, as well as that of the readers I consulted, the copy-editors, the managing editor, the designers who collaborated on the production of these new books, with their bold design and shiny covers – was different.

  A question Ahmed asks in her discussion of philosophy’s tables: ‘What work goes into the making of things, such that they take form as this thing or that thing?’

  Perhaps, once again, the point is so self-evident that it doesn’t bear making. Except that not only does the translator’s method differ from the first writer’s, for the reasons that Leys and Davis gave, to do with the difference between what it is to invent something for the first time and the very specific project of writing an existing thing again. It will also each time differ, as it were, from itself. The basic instruction, the genre-defining constraint that makes a translation a translation is to write the writing again in another language. And I could tell you that this is indeed more or less what I do every time I translate, and more or less what anyone does every time they undertake to translate, whatever it is that they are translating, and from whatever languages they are translating from and into, and this would be true, but only because it is so broadly, loosely unspecific. In order to work some specificity, some of my own-particular-case idiosyncrasy into it, I could tell you how I proceeded in the most general sense: how I would begin by writing a first English draft of the lecture courses, highlighting in yellow everything I was as yet undecided about until the screen was ablaze with it: a Word doc like a rapeseed field in flower. How I would go through the draft again and again, revising, reading it out loud, asking others to read it for me, until eventually most of the yellow was gone. I could point to some of the pioneering work of Translation Studies: to Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet’s essay, first published in the 1950s, which breaks down the most common strategies of translation into seven basic procedures, a ‘methodology for translation’. Among them is the procedure they call ‘modulation’, which involves moving from a general verb to one that it is more specific, as I did with my translation of faire (a verb which can mean a great deal of things, covering a large semantic territory, that I translated locally and more narrowly as to write). I could direct you to Antoine Berman’s work in the 1980s, specifically to an essay translated by Laurence Venuti offering his analytic of translation, which shows how these broad strategies are also, always, and in their own way distortive. I could point you to Susan Bernofksy’s much more recent illuminating essay on her own translation process, full of local detail about working from the German into English, which I have referred students to so many times in my teaching, sharing out its insights and commonly deployable working methods. Or indeed to Jacqueline Guillemin-Flescher’s Syntaxe comparée du français et de l’anglais: problèmes de traduction, whose case study is Madame Bovary. But even these textured descriptions of the translation process, their breakdowns of the different strategies that translators employ, however real and pertinent they may be, and however common to all translational activity everywhere, operate – they necessarily operate – on a level of abstraction from the living life of translating this work in particular which, because it involves life, and people, because it involves a relation between this culture and that one, this writing subject and that one, as well as reading and feeling and mistakes, because it involves making a risky decision about every single local element of the writing written in this language, because it involves taking responsibility, in this way, for every single one of its details as I set about writing the whole again in this language and circumstance, is each time different.

  WHO REFUSES TO LET GO OF HER TRANSLATIONS UNTIL SHE FEELS SHE HAS WRITTEN THE BOOKS HERSELF (OR, TRANSLATION AND THE PRINCIPLE OF TACT)

  In his book on the English-language translations and translators of Thomas Mann, David Horton shares a detail from a translation conference held in Vancouver in 2002 (a scene he finds first described in an essay on literary translation by Lew Zybatow). How, when the Norwegian translation scholar Per Qvale quoted, to the room, the line about Helen Lowe-Porter ‘never dispatching a translation unless she had the feeling she had done it herself’, everybody laughed.

  There was, apparently, ‘a general outburst of mirth’.

  ‘Each time that in my pleasure, my desire, or my distress, the other’s discourse (often well-meaning, innocent) reduces me to a case that fits an all-purpose explanation or classification in the most normal way, I feel that there is a breach of the principle of tact,’ says Barthes in The Neutral, the notes for the middle lecture course translated by Rosalind Krauss and Denis Hollier. The principle of tact: understood here as an attentiveness to difference, an effort made to not treat all things in the same way; ‘active protests’ or ‘unexpected parryings’ against the all-purpose explanation.

  Everybody laughed. Which suggests that operative in the conference room there must have been some general, already established understanding of how a translator should feel about her work: a better, more considered, less laughable kind of feeling.

  On the one hand, I am outraged that Lowe-Porter’s position should have been laughed at: on the lived-out level of writing, the setting down of language, the making of a new volume of words on the basis of an existing one, she did write the books herself. Of course she did. How could anyone maintain otherwise? On the other, I can see, of course, that it is complicated. Perhaps it was funny because it is complicated; perhaps the room was filled with uncertain, nervous laughter: because while it seems clear
that the conception and the first execution – in other words, the authorship – of The Magic Mountain belongs to Thomas Mann (she didn’t write the novel, she would have been incapable of writing it, as Lowe-Porter would no doubt have also been very ready to concede), still a doubt remains: What to do with – how exactly are we to think about – the labour of translation if it doesn’t on some level entail doing it herself? Or indeed with the status of the object that her labour produces?

  The scholar and theorist Emily Apter has published some fascinating discussions of the ways in which translation can make authorial ownership nervous. How, as she writes, ‘translation offers a particularly rich focus for discussions of creative property and the limits of ownership because it is a peculiar genre … in what is perhaps a unique case of art as authorized plagiarism or legal appropriationism, the translation is encouraged to pilfer the original with no risk of copyright infringement or allegations of forgery. It is granted this license because it implicitly claims to be of the original, that is to say, possessed of no autonomous textual identity. Translation thus challenges legalistic norms of ownable intellectual property … [throwing] into arrears the whole idea that authors of “originals” are the sole owners of their literary property.’ It seems to me that the worry – the nervous laughter – stems from the translation’s claim to be of the original, and thereby – Apter’s ‘that is to say’ – ‘possessed of no autonomous textual identity’. I would suggest that this claim gets made more explicitly than ‘implicitly’: by announcing itself to be a translation, a translation clearly states its derivativeness, pointing to the original as the condition of its coming into being, and perhaps it is this, this assertion of having sprung from, of being of and therefore still belonging to the original (if only in the sense that it can always be checked and measured against it), that makes me feel confident in my reading. Assertive in my sense that when it comes to The Magic Mountain – without any German, without, as yet, any prospect of reading the novel in German: Yes, I too have read it. But must it follow from this that the book I have read, that I am still repeatedly reading – my copy of The Magic Mountain, with its bashed-up cover – has ‘no autonomous textual identity’? Which would be, as Apter points out, its legal status, the basis upon which the translator was enabled to write something wholly derived without risking infringement?