by Kate Briggs
11 A startling gown of thin, dark silk: the lines in this opening section are taken from Helen Lowe-Porter’s 1927 translation of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (London: Vintage, 2007), pp. 322-343; in order to condense this scene – which in the novel unfolds over a number of pages – I have slightly modified tense and punctuation.
15 Towards the end of his address he’ll speak of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain: from ‘Inaugural Lecture, Collège de France’, translated by Richard Howard in Susan Sontag, ed. Barthes: Selected Writings (Oxford: Fontana, 1983), p. 477.
17 ‘Who are my contemporaries?’: Roland Barthes, How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces, Notes for a lecture course and seminar at the Collège de France 1976-1977, edited by Claude Coste and translated by Kate Briggs (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), p. 6.
21 Winter is descending: http://ask.metafilter.com/
105552/Noubliez-pas-ne-rendre-mon-crayon
22 Like a decalcomania: here I am expanding on Richard Howard’s translation of this line from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes which reads: ‘Fiction: slight detachment, slight separation which forms a complete, coloured scene, like a decalcomania.’ (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), p. 90.
25 John E. Woods, trans. The Magic Mountain (New York: Knopf, 1995). In a New York Times review of the new translation, D. J. R. Bruckner, assuming that Lowe-Porter is a ‘he’, writes: ‘All the characters in Thomas Mann’s masterpiece The Magic Mountain come considerably closer to speaking English in John E. Woods’ version than they did in its predecessor, by H. T. Lowe-Porter, first published by Knopf in 1927. Lowe-Porter’s apology – “better … an English version … done ill than not done at all” – was exaggerated, but his vocabulary was wholly Victorian, and he missed Mann’s voice.’ New York Times, 22 October 1995.
26 The dragon-training book: How to Train Your Dragon (London: Hodder, 2010) is Book 1 of Cressida Cowell’s 12-book series. Book 3 is titled How to Speak Dragonese, but we’re not quite there yet…
26 The Apostles speak: Acts 2:5-6.
26 Interview with her translator Ann Goldstein: ‘Ann Goldstein on Translating Elena Ferrante and the Inner Workings of the New Yorker’, by Melinda Harvey, Lithub, 1 September 2016.
27 ‘He Stuttered’: Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, translated by Michael A. Greco and Daniel W. Smith (London: Verso, 1998). The essay begins ‘It is sometimes said that bad novelists feel the need to vary their dialogic markers [indicatifs] by substituting for “he said” expressions like “he murmured,” “he stammered,” “he sobbed,” “he giggled”…’, p. 107.
33 ‘A little art’: in her essay ‘On Translating Thomas Mann’, Lowe-Porter writes of ‘the little art of translating’. Her essay is reproduced in full in John C. Thirlwall’s In Another Language: A Record of the Thirty-Year Relationship between Thomas Mann and His English Translator, Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966).
35 ‘vegetate intellectually’: Thirlwall, In Another Language, p. 3. All further quotations on this page are taken from Helen Lowe-Porter’s ‘On Translating Thomas Mann’, pp. 178-209.
36 David Horton, Thomas Mann in English (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), p. 54.
37 Horton, Thomas Mann in English, p. 220.
38 ‘There is an age’: Barthes also describes a third age: from teaching what we know, to teaching what we do not know (‘this is called research’) to the ‘age of another experience’: ‘that of unlearning, of yielding to the unforeseeable change which forgetting imposes on the sedimentation of the knowledges, cultures, and beliefs we have traversed.’ ‘Inaugural lecture, Collège de France’, p. 478.
38 ‘research, not a lecture’: Barthes, How to Live Together, p. 21
41 This is the question that Gérard Genette asks, briefly: in the passage I have in mind, Genette is discussing Nelson Goodman’s contention that what he calls a ‘work’ should be absolutely identical with its ‘text’ (its ‘manifestation’). A translation, of course, is materially different from the original – which means that it inevitably fails to meet Goodman’s criterion of sameness of spelling. Thus, on Goodman’s terms, each new translation would have to be considered ‘a new work’. Genette’s point is that while this ‘simple’ position is philosophically convenient for a nominalist, it doesn’t really fit with the way we commonly speak about translations, which authorize us to say, indifferently: ‘I’ve read a French translation of War and Peace’, ‘I’ve read War and Peace in French’, or indeed, in the same situation, and just as easily, ‘I’ve read War and Peace.’ He writes: ‘a likely objection to this would be to say that these locutions follow from a simple metonymy, such as “War and Peace is in the living room”; but it seems to me these two metonymies are not of the same order: the figural slippage from the text to its copy is more sensible (and, as it goes, more ‘ontological’) than from the text to its translation.’ [Editor’s note: author’s translation.] Gérard Genette, The Work of Art: Immanence and Transcendence, translated by G. M. Goshgarian (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 177.
41 ‘The right words in the right order’: what Virginia Woolf wants to stress here is how difficult this is to achieve. ‘It is only a matter of finding the right words and putting them in the right order.’ ‘But,’ she goes on, ‘we cannot do it because they do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind. And how do they live in the mind? Variously and strangely…’ ‘Craftsmanship’ in David Bradshaw, ed., Virginia Woolf: Selected Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 89.
42 ‘these specific words in this specific arrangement’: Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), especially p. 75.
45 The performative power of the speech act: Theo Hermans writes: ‘the view I am putting forward here is that a translation comes into being when a text that has been written alongside another text is declared to be a translation of that other text. The declaration is an illocutionary speech act … I regard a translation as initially being merely another text until it is declared to be a translation.’ Provided, as he points out, that the speech act succeeds. The Conference of the Tongues (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 91.
47 A sort of stammering: Anne Carson, Nay Rather, The Cahier Series no. 21 (London: Sylph Editions, 2013), p. 32.
50 There is a moment in Barthes’s last lecture course: Roland Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel, Lecture Courses and Seminars at the Collège de France (1978-1979 and 1979-1980), edited by Nathalie Léger and translated by Kate Briggs (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 207. Here I am retranslating from the transcribed audio recordings of the live delivery of that passage, recently published as La préparation du roman: Cours au Collège de France 1978-79 et 1979-80, text annotated by Nathalie Léger, transcription by Nathalie Lacroix (Paris: Seuil, 2016), pp. 380-1.
53 Renee Gladman, poet, novelist and translator, asking her interviewer in an interview: ‘Language and Landscape: Renee Gladman’ by Zack Freidman, BOMB Magazine, 24 December 2011.
53 ‘loose and evasive appositional syntax’: Elizabeth W. Bruss quotes this observation of Culler’s in her chapter on Roland Barthes in Beautiful Theories: The Spectacle of Discourse in Contemporary Criticism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 372.
55 the three per cent problem: The Three Percent Problem: Rants and Responses on Publishing, Translation and the Future of Reading by Chad W. Post (Open Letter, 2011).
55 Rachel Cooke, ‘The subtle art of translating foreign fiction’, the Observer, 24 July 2016.
58 as Edith Grossman puts it: in Why Translation Matters (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010).
60 I’m told that in French the midway scene is this most extraordinary thing: the theorist and translator Antoine Berman discusses the ‘heteroglossia’ of Der Zauberberg in ‘Translation and the Trials of the Foreign’, translated by Lawrence Venuti, in Venuti, ed., The Translation Studi
es Reader, 2nd edition (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), p. 288.
63 the most ‘selfless’ art: In a recent interview with the brilliant Spanish to English translator Megan McDowell, McDowell is described as ‘the most selfless sort of artist there is’. ‘The Making of a Tireless Literary Translator: Why Megan McDowell Never Stops Working’, by Nathan Scott McNamara, Lithub, 29 March 2017.
65 A lecture, he says, is a specific kind of production: Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel, p. 7; here, again, I am translating and paraphrasing from the transcribed audio recordings, La préparation du roman (2016), pp. 24-5.
71 ‘Who we choose to translate is political’: Antena is ‘a language justice and language experimentation collective’ founded in 2010 by Jen Hofer and John Pleuker. The pamphlet titled ‘A Manifesto for Ultratranslation’ was published by Antena Books/Libros Antena in 2013.
71 we need to vary our choices: ‘Translating Poetry, Translating Blackness,’ by John Keene published on Harriet poetry blog, 2016.
72 ‘if by some unimaginable excess of socialism or barbarism’: Barthes, ‘Inaugural Lecture, Collège de France’, translated by Richard Howard, pp.462-464.
73 ‘a very selective, densely motivated choice’: Lawrence Venuti, ‘Translation, Community, Utopia’, in The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd edition, p. 488.
74 Lydia Davis’s ongoing translation diary: ‘Alphabet of Proust Translation Problems’ in Proust, Blanchot and a Woman in Red, The Cahier Series no. 5 (Lewes: Sylph Editions, 2007), p. 11.
74 Katy Derbyshire researching: Katy Derbyshire, ‘Bricks and Mortar by Clemens Meyer –A Translator’s Note’, http://lovegermanbooks.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/bricks-and-mortar-by-clemens-meyer.html.
75 In November 1995 the scholar Timothy Buck published an article: I am quoting variously here from the three different published versions of Buck’s assessment of Lowe-Porter’s translations: ‘Neither the letter not the spirit: Why most translations of Thomas Mann are so inadequate’, Times Literary Supplement, 13 October, 1995; the chapter titled ‘Mann in English’ in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann, edited by Ritchie Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) and the Thomas Mann entry in the Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English Vol. 2, M-Z, edited by Olive Classe (London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2000).
78 In a recent interview in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Gayatri Spivak: ‘Critical Intimacy: an Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’ by Steve Paulson, LA Review of Books, 29 July 2016.
80 Lady Rothermere: the letter was dated 10 November 1918. The Selected Letters of André Gide and Dorothy Bussy, edited and translated by Richard Tedeschi with an introduction by Jean Lambert (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).
80 ‘little masterpiece’: in a letter dated 5 June 1948; Selected Letters, p. 284.
82 an accident: for example, in an interview by Liesl Schillinger, Goldstein is asked: ‘Do you remember when you first became aware of translation as something you might do professionally?’ She replies: ‘It happened by accident in 1992’. ‘Multilingual Wordsmiths, Part 4: Ann Goldstein on “Ferrante Fever”’, Los Angeles Review of Books, 29 May 2016.
84 a small rush of letters: for further discussion of Buck’s article, its responses and the questions this case raises for translation and Translation Studies more generally, see Theo Hermans’s preamble to Translation in Systems (London and New York: Routledge, 1994) titled ‘Mann’s Fate’. Venuti’s letters to the TLS were published on 24 November and 22 December 1995; David Luke’s replies on 8 and 29 December 1995; the letter from Helen Lowe-Porter’s daughters, Frances Fawcett and Patricia Lowe, was published on 19 January 1996.
85 A perverse pleasure: this line and the ones that follow are taken from Buck’s original article, with the exception of ‘look to the whole’ which comes from the daughters’ letter, reproducing their mother’s letter to her publisher. The full passage reads: ‘Another principle I have, which I may just mention, because a lot of people mightn’t agree with it, is substitution. Each language has its own genius, though some are more alike in genesis and growth. I may come on a fine idiomatic or allusive phrase in the German and find that the English just doesn’t lend itself to the same effect. But perhaps another sentence somewhere else in the text can display the same kind of literary virtue in English … But it makes the reviewer’s job harder. He has to look at the whole, and not pick out sentences, if he wishes to judge the translation at all.’
86 In a recent exasperated critical review: Geoffrey Bennington, ‘Embarrassing Ourselves’, Los Angeles Review of Books, 20 March 2016.
89 ‘Of course it’s good to get things right’: Michael Wood, ‘Impossible Wishes,’ London Review of Books, 6 February 2003.
89 ‘Do we write better?’: Virginia Woolf, ‘Craftsmanship’, p. 89.
95 ‘Everything had a theory, and yet there was no master theory’: Iris Murdoch, Under the Net (London: Vintage, 2002), pp. 65-66. The line breaks in the long quotation here are my own.
96 ‘The coming day had thrust a long arm into the night’: Murdoch, Under the Net, p. 121.
98 Why write? Why writing?: a section titled ‘The Desire to Write: origin and departure’, The Preparation of the Novel, pp. 130-167, especially pages 130-32; here, once again, I am basing my translations on the recently published transcriptions of the audio recordings, La préparation du roman (2016), pp. 241-262, especially pages 241-43.
98 ‘I have often flirted’: The Preparation of the Novel, p. 15.
101 Passion for typologies: Susan Sontag, ‘Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes’, Barthes: Selected Writings, p. xii-xiii.
101 Two types of reader: illustrated, Barthes says, ‘by two ancient words, one Latin, the other Greek: Volupia, goddess of fully satisfied Desire, of Fulfillment symbol ≠ Pothos, poignant desire for the absent thing.’ The Preparation of the Novel, p. 132.
102 the reading that passes us by: ‘We pass most things in novels as we pass things on a train. The words flow by like the scenery. All is change.’ William Gass, ‘The Concept of Character in Fiction’, in Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy, eds. Essentials of the Theory of Fiction (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 116.
102 ‘my Desire to write doesn’t stem from reading as such’: The Preparation of the Novel, p. 132.
102 but In Search of Lost Time, not the earlier Jean Santeuil: The Preparation of the Novel, p. 13.
102 ‘I dined two or three times at the Governor’s house’: Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 6: Times Regained, translated by Andreas Mayor and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright (London: Chatto and Windus, 1992), p. 284.
104 That’s it, says Barthes: in this passage I am translating and paraphrasing the transcribed audio recordings of the lectures, La préparation du roman, pp. 243-4. For my translation of the passage in note-form, see The Preparation of the Novel, pp. 131-2.
106 I like: Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard, pp. 116-7; I have slightly revised Howard’s translation.
107 how disappointing he found them, how tiresome: Jonathan Culler, ‘Preparing the Novel: Spiralling Back’, Jürgen Pieters and Kris Pint, Roland Barthes Retroactively: Reading the Collège de France Lectures, Paragraph, Vol. 31, No. 1, March 2008, p. 109.
109 Translators are never: Douglas Robinson, The Translator’s Turn (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 260.
109 A ‘holistic, gendered, literary being’: Michelle Woods, Kafka Translated: How Translators have Shaped our Reading of Kafka (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 6.
110 ‘As for me’: Selected Letters of André Gide and Dorothy Bussy, p. 35.
111 J’ai toujours eu envie: Barthes, La Chambre claire: Note sur la photographie, OEuvres complètes vol 5, Éric Marty, ed. (Paris: Seuil, 2002), p. 791; Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), p. 18.
113 a moment in the course on the Neutral: The Neutral, Lecture Course at the Collège de France (1977-1978), edited by Thomas Clerc and translated by Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 117.
113 Gilles Deleuze on the interview: Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 1.
114 ‘I’ is a method: The Preparation of the Novel, p. 23.
114 I’d say, Barthes says: here I am translating and worrying over my translation of the transcribed audio recordings of this opening lecture, especially over how to translate les leurres; La préparation du roman (2016), p. 14.
115 ‘Every beautiful work’: here I am translating from the transcribed audio recordings, La preparation du roman (2016), p. 245; for the same passage in note-form, see The Preparation of the Novel, p. 132.
