This Little Art

by Kate Briggs

  Je vous aime, cela sonne mieux en français.

  I love you, it sounds better in French (would be the obvious – the only? – translation).

  But the vous.

  It is striking and important: what it is to make a declaration of love with a formal ‘you’.

  I can’t render it in English.

  Or I can, I could, but not in the same number of words, and not with the same economy of expression: I’d need time, and space, a whole book of notes, rising to the top of the page, possibly, in order to unfold and explain, exhaustively, all the connotations and denotations of this small compaction of language.

  In other words: I could write something for you on this moment, of this moment, but I’m not sure I’d call it a translation.

  There is a powerful irony in the fact that two accomplished writer-translators chose to solve the problem of all the subtle differences between their respective languages and cultures by refusing to translate. And yet, that decision is what makes something of the stakes involved in translating appear:

  ‘My dear Friend,’ Bussy writes to Gide on 5 November 1918. ‘Do you know that this beginning to a letter which is such an ordinary one in French is very unusual in English?’

  ‘But a nice one all the same and I like it.’

  She signs off: ‘Ever yours –

  do you know that this ending to a letter which would sound so terrific in French is very common in English and just implies a pleasant friendly intimacy?’

  Some ten years later, on 19 November 1927, Gide hazards a letter in English. He ends it: ‘But forever yours, André Gide.’

  ‘Your English is very good,’ writes Bussy in reply.

  ‘Only a slight nuance may be pointed out. Though you may sign “Ever yours” to anybody you know fairly well without compromising yourself in the least, “forever yours” is practically equal to a declaration!

  I am afraid I can’t give you the credit of knowing this.

  But I – fully aware, call myself: Forever yours, D. B.’

  Throughout the correspondence, Bussy alternately delights in or agonizes over the small disjunctions between the codes of letter-writing in English and French, appraising the degrees of intimacy and feeling, measuring what these stock phrases usually mean against what – when transposed into another language, or when newly used by someone writing in English as their second language – they might be made to mean. The effect is cumulative: Bussy’s comments on such forms of address were a way, I think, for her to keep more or less indirectly expressing her love for Gide; at the same time, they make for this wholly compelling account of a lived – never resolved, ongoing, mobile and always intensely charged, always intensely accompanied – translating experience.

  For me, the most powerful moment in that account occurs towards the very end. Gide and Bussy are old now. ‘Dear Gide. It is no use telling you that I am growing very old now … that my hair and teeth are falling out, my eyes, my ears, my memory failing, that I hardly dare walk without a stick, that perhaps you wouldn’t recognize me’ (it is October 1944; she was seventy-nine). ‘But! I prefer to think of you…’ The epilogue to the Selected Letters reproduces a page written by Roger Martin du Gard on his sense of the relation between Bussy and Gide (Martin du Gard was a friend of them both, and the French translator of Bussy’s novel Olivia). He writes: ‘I who have heard [Gide’s] confidences concerning Dorothy since 1920 and in the following years, I remember with no possible error that he never felt for her more than a compassionate and deeply tender friendship…’ He didn’t love her as she loved him, clearly. But he wrote this: ‘You cannot imagine, my dear, what attraction I feel for her face, and always more so, truly, with the years … Yes. I find the expression of that face exquisite … I look at her now with more emotion than ever.’

  In a letter dated 22 August 1948, Gide writes to Bussy of his own failing health. They are aged eighty-four and eighty-three – growing very old now. He remarks on two different questions of translation: whether Bussy would undertake to translate his Feuillets d’automne and the Martin du Gard translation of Bussy’s novel in progress, whose merit Gide had finally recognized in a recent telegram (referencing Gide’s early reactions to the first volume of In Search of Lost Time, which were famously dismissive, it read: ‘As repentant and embarrassed as with Proust, Gide’). As usual, Gide’s letter is written in French. But it concludes with a sentence that shifts suddenly from French into English – as far as I can tell, for the first time since the mistake over ‘forever yours’ some twenty years earlier. The sentence reads:

  ‘De tout mon coeur bien fatigué, I love you.’

  (With all my tired heart, I love you).

  ‘Like desire, the love letter waits for an answer; it implicitly enjoins the other to reply…’ writes Barthes.

  And then, on ‘Je-t’-aime’/‘I-love-you’: ‘Everything is in the speaking of it: it is a “formula,” but this formula corresponds to no ritual; the situations in which I say I-love-you cannot be classified: I-love-you is irrepressible and unforeseeable.’

  Bussy’s reply to Gide is dated six days later.

  She begins the letter with some words on Gide’s health, she accepts the commission to translate the Feuillets d’automne; she writes of the two books the whole of London was talking about (The Trials of Oscar Wilde, and Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter), her correspondence with Roger Martin du Gard.

  The letter is relatively long.

  It is only at the very end that she addresses what Gide had written. She writes:

  ‘I hope all this stuff won’t bore and tire you. Dear Gide, at any rate it won’t make your heart beat as one sentence in your letter made mine beat this morning.

  But then I say to myself, “He doesn’t know English well enough to quite realize what he was saying!” Oh dear! What nonsense from your friend aged 83 last birthday… D. B.’

  So her letter ends.

  In the preface to his Critical Essays, Barthes describes writing a letter to a friend who had just lost a loved one, wanting to express his sympathy. But finding it difficult. Feeling that all the words at his disposal are unsatisfactory: they are merely ‘phrases’, and do nothing to convey what he feels. He goes on, in Richard Howard’s translation: ‘I … realize that the message I want to send to this friend, which is my sympathy itself, could be reduced to a single word: “condolences”. Yet the very purpose of the communication is opposed to this, for the message would be cold and consequently reversed, when what I want to communicate is precisely the warmth of my sympathy. I conclude that in order to correct my message (that is, in order for it to be exact), I must not only vary it but that this variation must be original and seemingly invented.’ The demand to come up with a new, unexpected – some unforeseen – variation, in light of these new circumstances, taking a measure of how things are – this demand, wrote Barthes, is the demand of literature. This is ‘its precious indirection’. Indeed, ‘it is only by submitting to its law that I may communicate what I mean with exactitude; in literature as in private communication, to be least “false” I must be most “original”, or if you prefer, indirect.’ With his sudden, unexpected decision to write a short, vital phrase in English in the context of a letter in French, against the background of so many years of writing to Bussy in French – so many years, their eyes, their ears, their faces so much older now – I think Gide achieves this precious indirection, something that, in the late lectures, Barthes also calls tact. There is a precision to writing an English formula in a French letter – a writing which, in the very moment of its utterance, and in the ongoing present of their correspondence, is made irrepressible, unforeseeable – an exactitude which I think has very precisely to do with its beautifully detoured directness: ‘De tout mon coeur bien fatigué: I love you.’

  Dorothy Bussy had ended her letter. She’d concluded, and signed off with her initials. But then the letter takes up and ends again, with the addition of a postscript:

 
‘P.S. One word more – a postscript – the postscript to my life. I do believe those three English words in your letter. I believe, I know, you understand, you mean them. D. B.’

  One recent late afternoon, I took the number 85 bus to the Port Royal side of the jardin du Luxembourg. My plan was to walk through the park to the rue Servandoni. To stand for a while in front of the building where Barthes lived and worked for twenty years, from 1960 to 1980, in an apartment on the sixth floor. I had never done so before; over the five or so years of translating the lecture courses, it had never really occurred to me to do so before. But I was thinking, still on that day, of the ‘bad mother’ glimpsed from the window: the walking woman, hurried, perhaps, and out-of-step – and of the degree to which she might be me.

  I walked through the gardens, through the park, past the fountain where the young men gather. Pondering which area of the park might have been wide and open enough for Barthes to play prisoner’s base there, as I read he used to with his friends (before he was a young man shyly – or boldly? – chatting literature and philosophy) – when he was still a child. ‘What I liked best about that game,’ he writes in Richard Howard’s translation of this scene, wasn’t ‘provoking the other team and boldly exposing myself to their right to take me prisoner; what I liked best was to free the prisoners – the effect of which was to put both teams back into circulation: the game started again at zero’. It is the same with language, he suggests: ‘in the great game of the powers of speech, we also play prisoner’s base: one language only has temporary rights over another; all it takes is for a third language to appear from the ranks for the assailant to be forced to retreat.’ Is there something of this order also going on in Gide’s letter, I wonder? In his small late adjustment to his mode of address, choosing, so suddenly and unexpectedly, to write to Bussy in English, which is to say: in neither his own French nor exactly in her own English, but in something like a third language – effecting a release, starting the game all over again – so late, after so many years – at zero?

  I think so. I like to think so. I’d like to think that these rights that one language exerts over another, setting the rules for what can be said, and for who can say it, for what counts as important and what doesn’t, are only ever temporary. That all it need take is for a further language to appear – neither the one nor the other, neither aggressor nor retreater, but just different: a different vocabulary, a different rhetoric, a different set of questions and answers – for the power and the positions to be redistributed, and for the game to begin again. I believe in translation’s part in this: as a power game between two languages, whose dynamics are, at least in principle, always reversible (writing your French into my English, okay; and now here is my English being written into your French); translation – like literature – as the condition of possibility for a new question, a new set of questions to appear, for a new manner of phrasing or responding to the familiar ones to appear, or indeed for something else, for something apparently or entirely beside the point to appear, for something that I’ve never thought of, some form of experience that has never happened to me, nor to any one of us playing here, in the rich cities of Europe, in the organized beauty of a Paris public garden, and for that something to release, if only for a moment: to release us and redistribute the power among us, before setting us back into new circulation. (Do translations! Yes, yes, and absolutely.)

  I walked through the gates of the park and turned onto the rue Varin, walking on, all the way to the Hotel Aramis, looking for the right turn.

  Aramis, Athos, Porthos… I thought: I can’t be far now (in The Three Musketeers Alexandre Dumas has D’Artagnan lodge at no. 10, rue Servandoni – next door, let’s say, to Roland Barthes). But I was: I’d gone too far. When I finally found the street it was empty. Outside no. 11 I stood for a little while in the sun.

  I felt that I should probably try imagining a person, a body. Leaning some of his weight against one of the heavy double doors, pushing it open, stepping inside and climbing the stairs marked ‘B’.

  Or a forefinger punching out the building code: once, twice, several times a day, over the space of twenty years. (Would Barthes’s building have had a keypad then as clearly it does now? Or is this me? Imposing my different present, my new temporality?)

  I thought of Barthes seated at the writing desk in the apartment on the sixth floor. The small vase of flowers. Daffodils, I think, in the black-and-white photograph I have seen of it. (Although how could that be? The date on the calendar reads Wednesday, 25 August.) The beautiful sixties-style timepiece hanging on a nail; the system of paper arrangement (the high shelf for what is à faire, to do; the lower for attente); the small bottle of Tipp-ex in the far right-hand corner; a pair of scissors; several small bowls (ashtrays?); a pencil.

  But it was hard: imagining the reality of it was hard. The point being, perhaps – or of course (of course, of course) – that I have never been upstairs, with Barthes.

  I have always been elsewhere: working at the desk by my different window; or outside, like the walking woman, on the street below.

  I didn’t stay all that long. The summer’s afternoon was turning slowly into evening and I’d need to be home soon. The rue Servandoni is an ancient paved street. The pavement outside Barthes’s apartment building is fairly wide, but as it inclines up towards the park it narrows to the smallest step. At some point, I thought to myself, the woman glimpsed walking on this stretch of pavement, ‘the bad mother’ with her empty buggy, her tugged-along son, would have had to walk in the road. It was time to go home. Making my way back to the bus-stop on the edge of the park I found myself walking as one of my kids might: lolloping unevenly up the last stretch of the street, one foot up and the next one down, making a game out of alternating between road and curb. What was I doing? Walking home now, away from Barthes’s apartment building, but carrying the work, or a part of it – some parts of it – with me: my own idiosyncratic assimilation, my own problematic appropriation – the line between the two being, as Horton wrote of Helen Lowe-Porter, so danceable and so ‘truly thin’ – walking a bit awkwardly now, it’s true, shifting my weight, but still moving and heading home, the sun warm in my face: what exactly was I – what have I been and what am I still intent on – doing?

  Protesting, I think.

  By which I mean, in keeping with my sense of Barthes’s principle of tact: trying to find ways, in recognition of the common ground that exists between one translator and another, between one translational activity and another, of attending to what is delicate and particular. On my own behalf, clearly: at issue has been my translation. The way I think and feel: the books I have thought with and felt with, confronting and being carried by their force. But also in the name of writing translations. In the name of the writers of translations. This little art: the each time uniquely relational, lived-out practice of it.

  Yes, that’s it: I’m protesting.

  Let’s say I’m actively parrying against the all-purpose explanation.

  Sources

  It seemed impossible to me to write an essay about translation (as a form of close and long-term engagement with the work of others) without engaging very closely and at length with the work of others. I have done this in a variety of ways: citation, translation and citation, translation and paraphrase, translating and writing into and out of the passage at hand, writing and speaking with someone else’s words or letting someone else’s words write and speak their way through me. Clearly, the degree to which any one of those processes is really all that different from or could be said to not involve the others is a central concern of this book. At one point in The Neutral, Barthes says – in Krauss’s and Hollier’s translation: ‘it is obvious that knowledge enters the course by means of very fragmented bits, which can seem offhand… I try to create, to invent a meaning from independent materials, which I liberate from their historical, doctrinal “truth” → I take the referential bits (in fact, bits of reading) and I submit them to
an anamorphosis…’ (The Neutral, pp. 64-65) I hope in the notes that follow to indicate some of the ways in which knowledge, the bits of my reading, have entered this essay, should readers wish to consult (to read, to retranslate, re-anamorphosize) the sources themselves.

  The key tutor-text for this book has been Barthes’s last lecture course and a further note of clarification is necessary here. La préparation du roman I et II was first published by the Editions du Seuil in 2003, under the general direction of Éric Marty and edited, annotated and introduced by Nathalie Léger. This volume was a transcription of Barthes’s lecture and seminar notes – the notes he read from (and adhered very closely to) when delivering the lectures themselves. My English-language translation was based on this volume, and published by Columbia University Press in 2011. The audio recordings were also released as a CD by Seuil in 2004. In 2016, Seuil published La préparation du roman, cours au Collège de France – this new edition is a transcription, by Nathalie Lacroix, of those audio recordings; in other words, of the performed lectures. When writing this book, I have taken pleasure in working from this later edition, and registering the difference between the notes for the lectures (which have this elliptical, stop-start quality) and the ongoing, unfolding discourse that those notes produced. I have also enjoyed rethinking and reworking my translations – re-engaging with the inexhaustible work of translation – of the notes for certain passages of the course, translating from the more expanded oral version as well as or sometimes instead of the written one. I have indicated what I have been doing, and on the basis of which source, in the notes below.