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This Little Art
An essay with the reach and momentum of a novel, Kate Briggs’s This Little Art is a genre-bending song for the practice of literary translation, offering fresh, fierce and timely thinking on reading, writing and living with the works of others. Taking her own experience of translating Roland Barthes’s lecture notes as a starting point, the author threads various stories together to give us this portrait of translation as a compelling, complex and intensely relational activity. She recounts the story of Helen Lowe-Porter’s translations of Thomas Mann, and their posthumous vilification. She writes about the loving relationship between André Gide and his translator Dorothy Bussy. She recalls how Robinson Crusoe laboriously made a table, for him for the first time, on an undeserted island. With This Little Art, a beautifully layered account of a subjective translating experience, Kate Briggs emerges as a truly remarkable distinctive, wise, frank, funny and utterly original.
400 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 4, 2018
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3644 people want to read
About the author
Kate Briggs
25 books56 followersKate Briggs was born in Somerset, United Kingdom.
Writer, essayist, and translator from French into English of authors such as Roland Barthes and Hélène Bessette. She lives and works in Rotterdam, where she founded and co-directs the writing and publishing workshop Short Pieces That Move and teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute.
In addition to The Long Form, her first novel, her works This little art and Entertaining Ideas.
In 2021, Kate Briggs received the Windham–Campbell Prize.
Writer, essayist, and translator from French into English of authors such as Roland Barthes and Hélène Bessette. She lives and works in Rotterdam, where she founded and co-directs the writing and publishing workshop Short Pieces That Move and teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute.
In addition to The Long Form, her first novel, her works This little art and Entertaining Ideas.
In 2021, Kate Briggs received the Windham–Campbell Prize.
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January 19, 2024The other day I noticed that I have written nearly 800 reviews. The thought of all the time spent writing about books, plus answering comments, plus reading all those books in the first place, has preoccupied me quite a bit since.
What does this amateur reviewing amount to? What is it worth, this little art we lucky people with access to books and computers practice so regularly on Goodreads? Does it have any worth in the world beyond the pleasure of practicing it?
Considering all that, it seems appropriate while 'reviewing' This Little Art by Kate Briggs about the art of translation (and don't worry, I'm not saying reviewing is equivalent to translation—though translation is vital to our continued reviewing), to also look at why so many of us feel this urge to write about everything we read, in our various and individual styles, and sometimes at considerable length, to the extent that casual observers might think we are all would-be writers!
Kate Briggs herself confesses that although she is by profession a translator, she is also a would-be writer. For this, her first book, she took the title from a phrase used by Helen Lowe Porter (the first translator of Thomas Mann into English) to describe the practice of translation as she saw it—'this little art'—something she could do in her own home while rearing her three children. Lowe Porter never used the word 'amateur' about herself but Kate Briggs tells us that other people eventually used it about her translations, adding the adjective 'bungling' and accusing her of all sorts of errors of "lexis, syntax and tense; unexplained omissions; unjustified rephrasings". She was even accused of being a would-be writer, of refusing "to let go of her translations until she feels she has written the books herself."
So it's interesting that in spite of knowing how Lowe Porter was dismissed in later decades, and in spite of accepting the validity of some of the criticisms of her work, Kate Briggs still has huge affection for her copy of The Magic Mountain, translated by Lowe Porter—as I have for my copy of Buddenbrooks, also translated by Lowe Porter. Incidentally, I mostly remember Buddenbrooks as 'charming' in comparison to the more powerful impression I retained of The Magic Mountain, translated by the much more celebrated John Woods, though it's also interesting to note that I had more issues with Woods' translation than I had with Lowe Porter's, even going so far as to buy a copy of Magic Mountain in German to see what certain phrases were in the original.
Kate Briggs maintains that translation is so complex that there is no easy way to judge that one translator is immeasurably better than another. She mentions Constance Garnett, the early translator of many Russian language books into English, whose work had also been denigrated by later professional translators, and reminds us that without Lowe Porter and Garnett, those middle-class women of a certain leisure who could afford to spend long hours researching and translating for a pittance, many generations of readers would have missed out on accessing literature in Russian and German.
One of the criticisms leveled against Garnett was that all the authors she translated sounded the same—that they basically sounded like Garnett. That criticism is similar to the one made about Lowe Porter, that she wanted to rewrite Thomas Mann's novels and make them her own.
Kate Briggs would argue that there is a sense in which the translator is a writer, that the translator does make something new—even if the elements of the new have been taken from someone else's work. She quotes Roland Barthes on translation (from her own translation of his final series of Lectures into English): "when it comes to writing and reading translations the question of what is wholly normal or truly plausible, of what was really said or written, gets suspended, slightly. The translator asks me to agree to its suspension. To suspend, or to suspend even further, my disbelief." She adds the following qualification: "This can’t really have been what he said (Barthes spoke in French; he claimed to barely speak English at all); nevertheless, I’ll go with it. In this sense, there’s something from the outset speculative and, I would say, of the novelistic about the translator’s project, whatever the genre of writing she is writing in."
Notice how even when speaking of her own translation of Barthes' words Briggs reminds us that the words she has given us are not what he really said but are the best she can offer, that when we read in translation there's always going to be a gap between what the original text said and how the translation undertakes to present it. But at the same time, she goes on to describe the huge research she carried out to narrow that gap, even to reading in the same order all the books he read in preparation for his lectures. And she tells us that Lowe Porter and Garnett did similar preparatory work in terms of research. Translation is no 'Little Art' at all, it seems.
Briggs asks herself too why she has undertaken "the writing of literary translations...What is it about this activity, its difference from single-handed original authorship, the way it complicates the authorial position: sharing it, usurping it, sort of dislocating it? But the way it gets things said and written, heard and read nonetheless, by these other, more distributed means. What is it about the practice of writing translations? And how (in whose terms exactly?) do you propose to properly register what’s going on with this—with your—work?"
I find her self-questioning very on point, not only in connection with translation but also in relation to the practice of amateur reviewing I mentioned in the first paragraph and the questions about our compulsion to write about the books we've read, our efforts to decipher them in our own unique ways which result in them sometimes being picked up by other readers across the globe.
And it's curious that Barthes himself had a theory that is not unconnected to all of this.
Briggs tells us that he believed music, art, and literature have been fostered and enriched, and in some cases spread throughout the world, by amateurs in their own homes. He talked of the amateur pianists who popularized pieces of music, the amateur water-colorists who educated people's tastes, the amateur readers who spread the word about certain books among their circle, all contributing in their modest way to promoting access to the arts.
Isn't that what we are doing when we write about reading on this world-wide site? Spreading the word about great books. We do it for art and music too, because many 'amateur' reviewers on this site use paintings and pieces of music to help explain their reactions to what they've read.
And what's more, Kate Briggs, though a professional translator who teaches courses in translation, says she is first and foremost a reader. She sounds just like us when she talks of "how, in fact, the font does matter, or it can—likewise the timing and circumstances of my reading, the books I am reading the book with, the people I am talking to about it, who might make me think differently; the difference between reading a book for the first time and for the third." How familiar is all that! And her further thought that reading the same book someone else happens to be reading makes us feel close to that person though we may be oceans apart.
Barthes, it seems, was primarily a reader too. Talking of a favourite text, he says "If I chose to read it, it is because the text produces, in me, a sudden dazzle of language, it moves me in pleasure. I could say that it caresses me, and its caress produces its effects each time I read it. Even just now, when I read it out loud to you, I felt it again."
Kate Briggs echoes that feeling: "There are sentences, half-lines, parts of pages that I happen across and find myself holding on and returning to because they produce in me something like a flash, a stun-gun of language, or what Barthes also calls, unapologetically, a moment of truth."
Briggs tells us that Barthes followed a deliberately unsystematic method in his reading, and she herself concludes that left to its own devices, the path of reading is very rarely chronologically ordered, thematically coherent, limited by language or respectful of borders. Books open out onto, they cross with and follow haphazardly on from one another. Left to its own devices, the path of reading strays all over the place.
Never have I heard my own reading experience described so accurately.
A last word from Barthes: when questioned about his desire to finally write a novel, he said: "One very spare answer: I write because I have read."
And a last word from me: although we reviewers may not write novels, we too write because we have read. We write because of the 'dazzle' and the 'flash' produced by certain passages, and we quote those passages in our writing about reading because we want to experience the 'dazzle' again and share it with others. "The right words in the right order" as Virginia Woolf puts it so neatly.
I can say in truth that reading the 'amateur' reviews others have shared on this site over the last twelve years has opened up my reading world and given me access to books I'd never have heard of otherwise.
And a good number of those titles have been the result of 'this little art' called translation.
What does this amateur reviewing amount to? What is it worth, this little art we lucky people with access to books and computers practice so regularly on Goodreads? Does it have any worth in the world beyond the pleasure of practicing it?
Considering all that, it seems appropriate while 'reviewing' This Little Art by Kate Briggs about the art of translation (and don't worry, I'm not saying reviewing is equivalent to translation—though translation is vital to our continued reviewing), to also look at why so many of us feel this urge to write about everything we read, in our various and individual styles, and sometimes at considerable length, to the extent that casual observers might think we are all would-be writers!
Kate Briggs herself confesses that although she is by profession a translator, she is also a would-be writer. For this, her first book, she took the title from a phrase used by Helen Lowe Porter (the first translator of Thomas Mann into English) to describe the practice of translation as she saw it—'this little art'—something she could do in her own home while rearing her three children. Lowe Porter never used the word 'amateur' about herself but Kate Briggs tells us that other people eventually used it about her translations, adding the adjective 'bungling' and accusing her of all sorts of errors of "lexis, syntax and tense; unexplained omissions; unjustified rephrasings". She was even accused of being a would-be writer, of refusing "to let go of her translations until she feels she has written the books herself."
So it's interesting that in spite of knowing how Lowe Porter was dismissed in later decades, and in spite of accepting the validity of some of the criticisms of her work, Kate Briggs still has huge affection for her copy of The Magic Mountain, translated by Lowe Porter—as I have for my copy of Buddenbrooks, also translated by Lowe Porter. Incidentally, I mostly remember Buddenbrooks as 'charming' in comparison to the more powerful impression I retained of The Magic Mountain, translated by the much more celebrated John Woods, though it's also interesting to note that I had more issues with Woods' translation than I had with Lowe Porter's, even going so far as to buy a copy of Magic Mountain in German to see what certain phrases were in the original.
Kate Briggs maintains that translation is so complex that there is no easy way to judge that one translator is immeasurably better than another. She mentions Constance Garnett, the early translator of many Russian language books into English, whose work had also been denigrated by later professional translators, and reminds us that without Lowe Porter and Garnett, those middle-class women of a certain leisure who could afford to spend long hours researching and translating for a pittance, many generations of readers would have missed out on accessing literature in Russian and German.
One of the criticisms leveled against Garnett was that all the authors she translated sounded the same—that they basically sounded like Garnett. That criticism is similar to the one made about Lowe Porter, that she wanted to rewrite Thomas Mann's novels and make them her own.
Kate Briggs would argue that there is a sense in which the translator is a writer, that the translator does make something new—even if the elements of the new have been taken from someone else's work. She quotes Roland Barthes on translation (from her own translation of his final series of Lectures into English): "when it comes to writing and reading translations the question of what is wholly normal or truly plausible, of what was really said or written, gets suspended, slightly. The translator asks me to agree to its suspension. To suspend, or to suspend even further, my disbelief." She adds the following qualification: "This can’t really have been what he said (Barthes spoke in French; he claimed to barely speak English at all); nevertheless, I’ll go with it. In this sense, there’s something from the outset speculative and, I would say, of the novelistic about the translator’s project, whatever the genre of writing she is writing in."
Notice how even when speaking of her own translation of Barthes' words Briggs reminds us that the words she has given us are not what he really said but are the best she can offer, that when we read in translation there's always going to be a gap between what the original text said and how the translation undertakes to present it. But at the same time, she goes on to describe the huge research she carried out to narrow that gap, even to reading in the same order all the books he read in preparation for his lectures. And she tells us that Lowe Porter and Garnett did similar preparatory work in terms of research. Translation is no 'Little Art' at all, it seems.
Briggs asks herself too why she has undertaken "the writing of literary translations...What is it about this activity, its difference from single-handed original authorship, the way it complicates the authorial position: sharing it, usurping it, sort of dislocating it? But the way it gets things said and written, heard and read nonetheless, by these other, more distributed means. What is it about the practice of writing translations? And how (in whose terms exactly?) do you propose to properly register what’s going on with this—with your—work?"
I find her self-questioning very on point, not only in connection with translation but also in relation to the practice of amateur reviewing I mentioned in the first paragraph and the questions about our compulsion to write about the books we've read, our efforts to decipher them in our own unique ways which result in them sometimes being picked up by other readers across the globe.
And it's curious that Barthes himself had a theory that is not unconnected to all of this.
Briggs tells us that he believed music, art, and literature have been fostered and enriched, and in some cases spread throughout the world, by amateurs in their own homes. He talked of the amateur pianists who popularized pieces of music, the amateur water-colorists who educated people's tastes, the amateur readers who spread the word about certain books among their circle, all contributing in their modest way to promoting access to the arts.
Isn't that what we are doing when we write about reading on this world-wide site? Spreading the word about great books. We do it for art and music too, because many 'amateur' reviewers on this site use paintings and pieces of music to help explain their reactions to what they've read.
And what's more, Kate Briggs, though a professional translator who teaches courses in translation, says she is first and foremost a reader. She sounds just like us when she talks of "how, in fact, the font does matter, or it can—likewise the timing and circumstances of my reading, the books I am reading the book with, the people I am talking to about it, who might make me think differently; the difference between reading a book for the first time and for the third." How familiar is all that! And her further thought that reading the same book someone else happens to be reading makes us feel close to that person though we may be oceans apart.
Barthes, it seems, was primarily a reader too. Talking of a favourite text, he says "If I chose to read it, it is because the text produces, in me, a sudden dazzle of language, it moves me in pleasure. I could say that it caresses me, and its caress produces its effects each time I read it. Even just now, when I read it out loud to you, I felt it again."
Kate Briggs echoes that feeling: "There are sentences, half-lines, parts of pages that I happen across and find myself holding on and returning to because they produce in me something like a flash, a stun-gun of language, or what Barthes also calls, unapologetically, a moment of truth."
Briggs tells us that Barthes followed a deliberately unsystematic method in his reading, and she herself concludes that left to its own devices, the path of reading is very rarely chronologically ordered, thematically coherent, limited by language or respectful of borders. Books open out onto, they cross with and follow haphazardly on from one another. Left to its own devices, the path of reading strays all over the place.
Never have I heard my own reading experience described so accurately.
A last word from Barthes: when questioned about his desire to finally write a novel, he said: "One very spare answer: I write because I have read."
And a last word from me: although we reviewers may not write novels, we too write because we have read. We write because of the 'dazzle' and the 'flash' produced by certain passages, and we quote those passages in our writing about reading because we want to experience the 'dazzle' again and share it with others. "The right words in the right order" as Virginia Woolf puts it so neatly.
I can say in truth that reading the 'amateur' reviews others have shared on this site over the last twelve years has opened up my reading world and given me access to books I'd never have heard of otherwise.
And a good number of those titles have been the result of 'this little art' called translation.
November 6, 2023
Kate Briggs has created a wonderful case study about the experience of translating a text. While working on the translation of Barthes’s “The preparation of the novel”, she explores the translation as a cultural phenomena, a craft, a profession and, yes, an art. The book is called “A little art” as a quote from Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter , a translator of The Magic Mountain. Briggs follows her work in this book as well as the relationship between Andre Gide and Dorothy Bussy his English translator of 30 years (the writer by herself and also apparently the lover of E. M. Foster). In this essay, we also find out a lot about the text Briggs is working on and Barthes himself.
Briggs shows us what she is thinking and how is she going about the process of translation. For example, to get closer to the text she decides to read everything Barthes was reading while working on his lectures. It is evident how the original text and its author shapes her thoughts even in her daily life. She uses the verb “to write” i.e. “writing a translation” rather than translating. This implies that to translate one need to be a skilful writer by herself. In fact, she mentions many example of the prominent writers and thinkers who were translating the works from other languages. For example, a famous Russian poet, the Nobel laureate, Boris Pasternak translated a lot of Shakespeare, Goethe and Rilke among others; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak translated ‘Of Grammology” a huge work by Derrida almost straight after it was published. She wanted the English speaking world to read it as soon as possible and thought she is best placed to write a translation. According to Briggs, Javier Marias, said he would rather put aspiring writers to translate major literary works instead of trying to teach them creative writing.
Another theme is never-ending debate between the supporters of literal translation versus imaginative use of the language the work is being rendered into. Apparently, Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter was severely criticised posthumously for the mistakes and interpretations made in her translation. The debate was so heated that her daughters felt the need to support her position with some of her personal letters. But her translation was very well received by the public and it is still in print. I am aware of another recent controversy around Deborah Smith translating “TheVegetarian” https://www.theguardian.com/books/boo.... I am personally of course for creativity, as soon as the general intention of the original is still there. But sometimes, I read something in English translated from Russian and I seriously wonder about the translator’s decision. The recent example is Chekhov’s Драма на Охоте ( literary “Drama during the hunting”). The title is pointing towards a dramatic accident, namely the murder which takes place during the hunting. And this title was rendered as “The Shooting party”. Why?
Biggs essay is much wider than the process of translation per se. She muses on writing and reading in general: “The reading offers us occasions for inappropriate improbable identification.” And, what is more valuable: decoding the words or the time when we raise our heads from the page for a moment and look into the space?
For those of us who speak more than one language at home raising bilingual family or use many languages at work, the translation is a daily life as well as a daily magic. This book is giving a wonderful insight into this magic. In my view, the literature in translation enormously enriches and even shapes the literature of the country-recipient. So I hope, that the trend of increasing volume of books in translation will become much more pronounced, especially in English speaking universe.
Briggs shows us what she is thinking and how is she going about the process of translation. For example, to get closer to the text she decides to read everything Barthes was reading while working on his lectures. It is evident how the original text and its author shapes her thoughts even in her daily life. She uses the verb “to write” i.e. “writing a translation” rather than translating. This implies that to translate one need to be a skilful writer by herself. In fact, she mentions many example of the prominent writers and thinkers who were translating the works from other languages. For example, a famous Russian poet, the Nobel laureate, Boris Pasternak translated a lot of Shakespeare, Goethe and Rilke among others; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak translated ‘Of Grammology” a huge work by Derrida almost straight after it was published. She wanted the English speaking world to read it as soon as possible and thought she is best placed to write a translation. According to Briggs, Javier Marias, said he would rather put aspiring writers to translate major literary works instead of trying to teach them creative writing.
Another theme is never-ending debate between the supporters of literal translation versus imaginative use of the language the work is being rendered into. Apparently, Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter was severely criticised posthumously for the mistakes and interpretations made in her translation. The debate was so heated that her daughters felt the need to support her position with some of her personal letters. But her translation was very well received by the public and it is still in print. I am aware of another recent controversy around Deborah Smith translating “TheVegetarian” https://www.theguardian.com/books/boo.... I am personally of course for creativity, as soon as the general intention of the original is still there. But sometimes, I read something in English translated from Russian and I seriously wonder about the translator’s decision. The recent example is Chekhov’s Драма на Охоте ( literary “Drama during the hunting”). The title is pointing towards a dramatic accident, namely the murder which takes place during the hunting. And this title was rendered as “The Shooting party”. Why?
Biggs essay is much wider than the process of translation per se. She muses on writing and reading in general: “The reading offers us occasions for inappropriate improbable identification.” And, what is more valuable: decoding the words or the time when we raise our heads from the page for a moment and look into the space?
For those of us who speak more than one language at home raising bilingual family or use many languages at work, the translation is a daily life as well as a daily magic. This book is giving a wonderful insight into this magic. In my view, the literature in translation enormously enriches and even shapes the literature of the country-recipient. So I hope, that the trend of increasing volume of books in translation will become much more pronounced, especially in English speaking universe.
February 6, 2020
Kate Briggs teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam and has translated two volumes of Roland Barthes’s lecture notes from French into English. A “little art” is how Helen Lowe-Porter, who translated Thomas Mann’s works into English in the 1920s to 1940s, referred to translation – a rather disparaging phrase that echoes the widespread opinion that translation is a lesser skill than writing, that only those who can’t produce their own work are reduced to translating others’.
It should not come as a surprise that Briggs takes issue with this belittling argument. Translation is not a substitute for one’s own writing, she contends, but a unique form of engaging with language and literature. It’s about solving word problems, as Lydia Davis has described, as well as about being seized by particular works or even individual sentences. For instance, Elena Ferrante claims to have never gotten over a line from Madame Bovary in which Emma exclaims at her daughter’s ugliness.
In essence, Briggs asserts, reading a translation involves a suspension of disbelief: you know that the words you are reading originally appeared in another language, but you must attempt to forget about the middleman and absorb them afresh. As she puts it, “there’s something from the outset speculative and, I would say, of the novelistic about the translator’s project, whatever the genre of writing … The translator asks us to go with the English”. However, one should bear in mind that no translation comes with “the promise of zero distortion,” since the individual translator brings to the work their own style and set of experiences.
I learned that translators earn a shockingly low per-word fee that is not in keeping with the amount of time it takes to do the work well (perhaps £90 for 1,000 words). I was interested in Briggs’s general thoughts about the translator’s art, but not necessarily in her extended examples: Lowe-Porter’s experience with Mann, Barthes’s interest in haiku, and so on. At 150 or 200 pages this would have been a fine, tightly honed essay; at more like 360 pages, it is rambling and likely to lose readers partway, unless they have a vested interest in translation.
It should not come as a surprise that Briggs takes issue with this belittling argument. Translation is not a substitute for one’s own writing, she contends, but a unique form of engaging with language and literature. It’s about solving word problems, as Lydia Davis has described, as well as about being seized by particular works or even individual sentences. For instance, Elena Ferrante claims to have never gotten over a line from Madame Bovary in which Emma exclaims at her daughter’s ugliness.
In essence, Briggs asserts, reading a translation involves a suspension of disbelief: you know that the words you are reading originally appeared in another language, but you must attempt to forget about the middleman and absorb them afresh. As she puts it, “there’s something from the outset speculative and, I would say, of the novelistic about the translator’s project, whatever the genre of writing … The translator asks us to go with the English”. However, one should bear in mind that no translation comes with “the promise of zero distortion,” since the individual translator brings to the work their own style and set of experiences.
I learned that translators earn a shockingly low per-word fee that is not in keeping with the amount of time it takes to do the work well (perhaps £90 for 1,000 words). I was interested in Briggs’s general thoughts about the translator’s art, but not necessarily in her extended examples: Lowe-Porter’s experience with Mann, Barthes’s interest in haiku, and so on. At 150 or 200 pages this would have been a fine, tightly honed essay; at more like 360 pages, it is rambling and likely to lose readers partway, unless they have a vested interest in translation.
March 22, 2021
Kate Briggs is now a recipient of one of the 2021 Windham–Campbell Literature Prizes "Pushing at the formal boundaries of the literary essay in witty, speculative prose, Kate Briggs explores the intricacies of translation and narrative structure in revelatory, provocative ways."
In the copy of the novel I have open next to me as I read and write, Hans Castorp replies in English. Clavdia Chauchat has asked him, pointedly, in French, to address her in German, and his reply is written for me in English. I mean, of course it is. It’s an everyday peculiar thing: I am reading The Magic Mountain in Helen Lowe-Porter’s translation, first published in 1927. A novel set high up in the Swiss Alps, one of Germany’s most formative contributions to modern European literature (so the back cover of my edition tells me) and here they all are acting and interacting – not always, but for the most part – in English. And I go with it. I do. Of course I do. I willingly accept these terms. Positively and very gladly, in fact. Because with French but no German – I look at my bookshelves: also, no Italian and no Norwegian, no Japanese and no Spanish, no Danish and no Korean (and so on and so on) – I know that this is how the writing comes:
An unassuming young man named Hans Castorp travels up from his native city of Hamburg to Davos-Dorf. When the train stops at the small mountain station, he is surprised to hear his cousin’s familiar voice: ‘Hullo,’ says Joachim, ‘there you are!’
Helen Lowe-Porter, the original English-language translator of Thomas Mann's novels, including the Magic Mountain, once, too modestly, described translation as a 'little art.'
Kate Briggs's The Little Art, a 360 page, plus notes, essay on (the art? the practice? the science? the creative work?) of literary translation, another worthy book from Fitzcarraldo Editions, takes its title from her words.
Briggs herself has translated Roland Barthes’s seminar notes at the Collège de France: How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces, and The Preparation of the Novel: Lecture Courses and Seminars at the Collège de France, 1978-1979 and 1979-1980 Her experience from undertaking these translations (the three years it took to complete the translation of a volume of lecture notes originally drafted in a matter of eight weeks) runs through the essay, as indeed does her commentary on Barthes lectures.
Her thoughts roam far and wide but crucially she focuses not on the academic theories of translation, or indeed particularly on the reader's experience (despite the opening quote) but primarily on the experience of the translator herself.
I really didn’t want to repeat the things I have so often read or heard said about what we should all think and feel about translation. I wanted to work out what I actually thought and felt—thoughts and feelings that are perhaps a bit more complicated and contradictory than the ‘faithful’ or ‘generous’ or ‘modest’ or even the ‘free’ and ‘boldly unfaithful’ or ‘creative’ translator-position might allow for. (from an interview in Music and Literature)
And, as this quote suggests, she doesn’t reach for easy answers, for a one-size-fits-all approach, indeed her essay ends I’m actively parrying against the all-purpose explanation.
As such it is almost impossible for a review to do the book justice without being 400 pages, or even longer, itself - rather like a literary translation in fact.
But among many other topics, a key thread is formed by the experience of Lowe-Porter, including her posthumous reputation.
Another comes from that of Dorothy Bussy, drawing on her personal correspondence over many decades with André Gide, whose books she translated. A correspondence where they chose, despite them both being reasonably fluent in each other’s languages, to each write in their native language, as Gide said, because “I have precise things to tell you and am afraid of not being clear enough” [except he wrote that line in French, this is a translation] which left the recipient of the letter with the duty of translating these precise feelings.
As with Constance Garnett (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/...) and more recently Deborah Smith (https://www.theguardian.com/books/boo...), Lowe-Porter's translations have been attacked , I would argue in a rather condescending fashion, for both their factual inaccuracies and over-creative re-interpretations.
Others (see the two links) have sprung to their defence and pointed out the equal dangers of over-literal approaches. And Briggs argues, echoing Lowe-Porter (see below) works should be judged as a whole: I know that translation is very different from copying or acting out a line from a book, not least because the translator, in my sense of her work, is a maker of wholes.
For Lowe-Porter, a key debate arose in the TLS in 1995, starting with a Timothy Buck article "Neither the letter nor the spirit" (https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/pr...) and backed-up in the letters page by David Luke who produced (per Buck) "a model translation" of Death in Venice. Buck's criticism of Lowe-Porter's approach (NB he also criticised the 1990s John E. Woods versions) included these revealing comments:
Briggs herself quotes Marias's argument for the cross-fertilisation between translation and writing novels:If I ever had my own creative writing school I would only admit people who could translate. And I would make them do it over and over again.Javier Marias, interview in the Guardian 2013 (https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...)
The debate in the TLS culminatd with Lowe-Porter's two surviving daughters writing in with a copy of a letter their mother had written, in 1943, to her publisher, saying that since her work is under attack at this time, it is appropriate that she should retrospectively be given the chance to air her philosophy.. The letter is worth reading in full (https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/pr...) but includes her carefully considered approach that:
It seemed impossible for 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.
And indeed Briggs's sources range wide: for example among my own favourites Javier Marias, Lydia Davis's summaries of the pleasures of translation, Elena Ferrante - who figures as both an author (the decision she made not to actually use Neopolitan dialect in her novels but instead to signal that the character were doing so) and essayist (her infatuation and desire to take possession of a single sentence in Madame Bovary) - as well as the translator Anita Raja, and Virginia Woolf and her radio lecture on "Craftsmanship" (which is also the only surviving recording of her voice - www.bbc.com/news/av/entertainment-art...)
The topic of Barthes lectures are, themselves, also of less personal interest, i.e. this book didn't stimulate me to search out the original. He divides readers into two categories based on the nature of their pleasure in reading:
“The absolute pleasure of adolescent reading, immersed in a classic novel, the absolute satisfaction of reading, in exactly the sense that we read without wanting to do likewise”
“The pleasure of reading that is already tormented by the desire to do the same, in other words by a lack.” (Briggs translation)
And his lectures are rather addressed to those in the 2nd camp - those who through their reading are inspired to themselves write. Not only I am in the 1st group, but I would also take serious issue with the pejorative use of the word 'adolescent', which implies an immaturity that to me sits at least as well with the 2nd attitude of mind: it rather misses the case of the careful reader who analyses and discusses the work, yet still has no desire to write his or her own version: we might call this person the Goodreader!
Briggs describes how Barthes refers to a reader who he sat next to on a bus 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, which reminds me of how I would revise my maths lecture notes and indeed for some of my favourite books how my reviews can start to look (particularly if I have a Kindle copy).
Although Barthes 2nd case does fit neatly into the work of translation, the attentive reader so careful that they want to rewrite the book itself sentence by sentence, in another language. Shades of Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote.
Overall a fascinating, highly personal in many respects but also very important work about a topic - literary translation - that is of vital importance to our culture.
Excerpts:
http://www.thewhitereview.org/feature...
https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/book...
Interview:
http://www.musicandliterature.org/fea...
Reviews:
http://review31.co.uk/article/view/52...
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/pr...
http://www.musicandliterature.org/rev...
https://mapmagazine.co.uk/little-art
In the copy of the novel I have open next to me as I read and write, Hans Castorp replies in English. Clavdia Chauchat has asked him, pointedly, in French, to address her in German, and his reply is written for me in English. I mean, of course it is. It’s an everyday peculiar thing: I am reading The Magic Mountain in Helen Lowe-Porter’s translation, first published in 1927. A novel set high up in the Swiss Alps, one of Germany’s most formative contributions to modern European literature (so the back cover of my edition tells me) and here they all are acting and interacting – not always, but for the most part – in English. And I go with it. I do. Of course I do. I willingly accept these terms. Positively and very gladly, in fact. Because with French but no German – I look at my bookshelves: also, no Italian and no Norwegian, no Japanese and no Spanish, no Danish and no Korean (and so on and so on) – I know that this is how the writing comes:
An unassuming young man named Hans Castorp travels up from his native city of Hamburg to Davos-Dorf. When the train stops at the small mountain station, he is surprised to hear his cousin’s familiar voice: ‘Hullo,’ says Joachim, ‘there you are!’
Helen Lowe-Porter, the original English-language translator of Thomas Mann's novels, including the Magic Mountain, once, too modestly, described translation as a 'little art.'
Kate Briggs's The Little Art, a 360 page, plus notes, essay on (the art? the practice? the science? the creative work?) of literary translation, another worthy book from Fitzcarraldo Editions, takes its title from her words.
Briggs herself has translated Roland Barthes’s seminar notes at the Collège de France: How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces, and The Preparation of the Novel: Lecture Courses and Seminars at the Collège de France, 1978-1979 and 1979-1980 Her experience from undertaking these translations (the three years it took to complete the translation of a volume of lecture notes originally drafted in a matter of eight weeks) runs through the essay, as indeed does her commentary on Barthes lectures.
Her thoughts roam far and wide but crucially she focuses not on the academic theories of translation, or indeed particularly on the reader's experience (despite the opening quote) but primarily on the experience of the translator herself.
I really didn’t want to repeat the things I have so often read or heard said about what we should all think and feel about translation. I wanted to work out what I actually thought and felt—thoughts and feelings that are perhaps a bit more complicated and contradictory than the ‘faithful’ or ‘generous’ or ‘modest’ or even the ‘free’ and ‘boldly unfaithful’ or ‘creative’ translator-position might allow for. (from an interview in Music and Literature)
And, as this quote suggests, she doesn’t reach for easy answers, for a one-size-fits-all approach, indeed her essay ends I’m actively parrying against the all-purpose explanation.
As such it is almost impossible for a review to do the book justice without being 400 pages, or even longer, itself - rather like a literary translation in fact.
But among many other topics, a key thread is formed by the experience of Lowe-Porter, including her posthumous reputation.
Another comes from that of Dorothy Bussy, drawing on her personal correspondence over many decades with André Gide, whose books she translated. A correspondence where they chose, despite them both being reasonably fluent in each other’s languages, to each write in their native language, as Gide said, because “I have precise things to tell you and am afraid of not being clear enough” [except he wrote that line in French, this is a translation] which left the recipient of the letter with the duty of translating these precise feelings.
As with Constance Garnett (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/...) and more recently Deborah Smith (https://www.theguardian.com/books/boo...), Lowe-Porter's translations have been attacked , I would argue in a rather condescending fashion, for both their factual inaccuracies and over-creative re-interpretations.
Others (see the two links) have sprung to their defence and pointed out the equal dangers of over-literal approaches. And Briggs argues, echoing Lowe-Porter (see below) works should be judged as a whole: I know that translation is very different from copying or acting out a line from a book, not least because the translator, in my sense of her work, is a maker of wholes.
For Lowe-Porter, a key debate arose in the TLS in 1995, starting with a Timothy Buck article "Neither the letter nor the spirit" (https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/pr...) and backed-up in the letters page by David Luke who produced (per Buck) "a model translation" of Death in Venice. Buck's criticism of Lowe-Porter's approach (NB he also criticised the 1990s John E. Woods versions) included these revealing comments:
For Lowe-Porter who once wrote, revealingly, of “the promise I made to myself of never sending a translation to the publisher unless I felt as though I had written the book myself” translation work offered a large measure of “the pleasures of creative authorship”. The dangers of her kind of “creative” translation with, at times, scant regard for the author’s text or intentions are clearly shown in the examples above. The licence she permitted herself in translating Mann’s works is consistent with her view of her task, expressed in relation to Buddenbrooks, as that of “transferring the spirit first and the letter so far as might be”.That 'wrote the book myself' is of course precisely what a literary translator has in fact done - the theorist Emily Apter has, as quoted by Briggs, described translation as “authorised plagiarism” - and see also my recent review (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) of Javier Marias's Between Eternities who argues that his favourite novel is Tristam Shandy precisely because he has both read it (in English) and then written it (in his award-winning Spanish translation).
Briggs herself quotes Marias's argument for the cross-fertilisation between translation and writing novels:If I ever had my own creative writing school I would only admit people who could translate. And I would make them do it over and over again.Javier Marias, interview in the Guardian 2013 (https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...)
The debate in the TLS culminatd with Lowe-Porter's two surviving daughters writing in with a copy of a letter their mother had written, in 1943, to her publisher, saying that since her work is under attack at this time, it is appropriate that she should retrospectively be given the chance to air her philosophy.. The letter is worth reading in full (https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/pr...) but includes her carefully considered approach that:
Another principle that I have, which I may just mention, because a lot of people mightn’t agree with it, is what I call substitution. Each language has its own genius, though some are more alike than others in their genesis and growth. I may come on a fine idiomatic or allusive phrase in the German and find that the English just does not lend itself to the same effect. But perhaps another sentence elsewhere in the text can display the same kind of literary virtue in English, where it did not happen in the German. I consider it justifiable to take advantage of the fact. But it makes the job of the reviewer harder. He has to look at the whole, not pick out sentences, if he means to judge the translation at all.The book is, while erudite, generally highly readable and mercifully free of footnotes, although Briggs does, in an appendix, acknowledge various sources. As she explains:
It seemed impossible for 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.
And indeed Briggs's sources range wide: for example among my own favourites Javier Marias, Lydia Davis's summaries of the pleasures of translation, Elena Ferrante - who figures as both an author (the decision she made not to actually use Neopolitan dialect in her novels but instead to signal that the character were doing so) and essayist (her infatuation and desire to take possession of a single sentence in Madame Bovary) - as well as the translator Anita Raja, and Virginia Woolf and her radio lecture on "Craftsmanship" (which is also the only surviving recording of her voice - www.bbc.com/news/av/entertainment-art...)
“But words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind. If you want proof of this, consider how often in moments of emotion when we most need words we find none. Yet there is the dictionary; there at our disposal are some half-a-million words all in alphabetical order.The parts of the book making specific references to Barthes lecture were the least appealing to me. Firstly, one accesses Barthes thoughts doubly-second hand - in Briggs's comments on her own translation; this makes for a good extended metaphor on the art of translation but a less satisfactory reading experience.
But can we use them? No, because words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind. Look again at the dictionary. There beyond a doubt lie plays more splendid than Antony and Cleopatra; poems more lovely than the Ode to a Nightingale; novels beside which Pride and Prejudice or David Copperfield are the crude bunglings of amateurs. It is only a question of finding the right words and putting them in the right order. But 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, much as human beings live, by ranging hither and thither, by falling in love, and mating together”
(http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/2016...)
The topic of Barthes lectures are, themselves, also of less personal interest, i.e. this book didn't stimulate me to search out the original. He divides readers into two categories based on the nature of their pleasure in reading:
“The absolute pleasure of adolescent reading, immersed in a classic novel, the absolute satisfaction of reading, in exactly the sense that we read without wanting to do likewise”
“The pleasure of reading that is already tormented by the desire to do the same, in other words by a lack.” (Briggs translation)
And his lectures are rather addressed to those in the 2nd camp - those who through their reading are inspired to themselves write. Not only I am in the 1st group, but I would also take serious issue with the pejorative use of the word 'adolescent', which implies an immaturity that to me sits at least as well with the 2nd attitude of mind: it rather misses the case of the careful reader who analyses and discusses the work, yet still has no desire to write his or her own version: we might call this person the Goodreader!
Briggs describes how Barthes refers to a reader who he sat next to on a bus 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, which reminds me of how I would revise my maths lecture notes and indeed for some of my favourite books how my reviews can start to look (particularly if I have a Kindle copy).
Although Barthes 2nd case does fit neatly into the work of translation, the attentive reader so careful that they want to rewrite the book itself sentence by sentence, in another language. Shades of Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote.
Overall a fascinating, highly personal in many respects but also very important work about a topic - literary translation - that is of vital importance to our culture.
Excerpts:
http://www.thewhitereview.org/feature...
https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/book...
Interview:
http://www.musicandliterature.org/fea...
Reviews:
http://review31.co.uk/article/view/52...
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/pr...
http://www.musicandliterature.org/rev...
https://mapmagazine.co.uk/little-art
September 25, 2021
This is a book that I have had on the to-read wishlist for a long time, and finally picked up during one of Fitzcarraldo's recent sales.
It is impossible to resist comparing it with David Bellos's Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything, as both books are largely about the experiences, pitfalls and evaluation of the literary translation process, but that comparison is a very superficial one, as Briggs takes a very different and personal approach, inspired by Roland Barthes, whose lecture series was her first major translation project.
Apart from Barthes, the other main figures in the book is Helen Lowe-Porter, who was the first English translation of several Thomas Mann novels, not least The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg) and Dorothy Bussy, who translated Gide. Briggs sympathises with Lowe-Porter, and to some extent defends her from recent critics, while acknowledging that there are inevitably oversights and personal choices involved in any translation.
This is a very impressive book, and an enjoyable and stimulating read.
It is impossible to resist comparing it with David Bellos's Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything, as both books are largely about the experiences, pitfalls and evaluation of the literary translation process, but that comparison is a very superficial one, as Briggs takes a very different and personal approach, inspired by Roland Barthes, whose lecture series was her first major translation project.
Apart from Barthes, the other main figures in the book is Helen Lowe-Porter, who was the first English translation of several Thomas Mann novels, not least The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg) and Dorothy Bussy, who translated Gide. Briggs sympathises with Lowe-Porter, and to some extent defends her from recent critics, while acknowledging that there are inevitably oversights and personal choices involved in any translation.
This is a very impressive book, and an enjoyable and stimulating read.
May 12, 2020
Si no sigo loco perdido por este libro dentro de 20 años será que algo ha muerto en mí.
April 1, 2024
kate briggs'i ve çevirdiği iki rolannd barthes kitabını günde üçer beşer sayfa okuyarak 10 aya yayan bir okuma grubu takip ediyordum. başlangıcı kaçırdığım için kaldığım yerden yakalamayı hedefleyerek aldım kitabı elime, ama o kadar bırakamadım ki programdan yaklaşık iki ay önce bitirdim kitabı.
kate briggs yazar ve çevirmen. this little art ise kendi tabiriyle "çeviri yazmanın" çok farklı perspektiflerine odaklanıyor. böyle deyince sadece çeviri ile ilgilenenlere hitap eden bir kitapmış gibi algılanabilir ama asla öyle değil: çeviri kitap okuyanlar, birden fazla dil konuşanlar ve (benim gibi) şu anda yeni bir dil öğrenenler için bile muazzam bir düşünce ve anlama/anlaşılma egzersizi.
temelde belki yerelleştirilmiş çeviri diyebileceğim methodla birebir çeviri methodu arasındaki yaklaşım farklılıkları üzerine kurulu metin. bu iki kampın en önemli tartışmalarını çok güzel aktarıyor. ama bunu yaparken o kadar kişisel deneyimleri üzerinden anlatıyor ki, hayran kalmamak elde değil. birkaç kez daha demiştim, kurgu dışı artık tam olarak böyle olmalı. özneden bağımsız, literatür araştırması sunmamalı sadece, yazarın da dizine dirseğine kadar bulaşması gerek mevzuya. kate briggs tam olarak bunu yapıyor. argüman inşa etmenin, kendinden parçalar katmanın, tarihsel akış takip ederken güncelle bağlamanın başyapıtsal bir örneği.
tüm bunların yanında paragraf ve sayfa kullanımı o kadar orjinal ki, düşünce akışıyla metin akışı o kadar örtüşüyor ki çok çok keyif aldım.
yakın zamanda everest'ten türkçesi çıkacakmış. fransızcadan ingilizceye çeviri üzerinden verilen örnekler türkçeye nasıl aktarılcak gerçekten çok merak ediyorum, kitabın genel olarak derdi de bu zaten: bir dilden başka bir dile aktarırken her şey yanlış ve her şey doğru. döner dönmez özellikle bazı sayfaların türkçelerine göz atmak istiyorum. ama önerim ingilizce okuyabilenlerin ilk tercihinin ingilizcesini okumasından yana.
kate briggs yazar ve çevirmen. this little art ise kendi tabiriyle "çeviri yazmanın" çok farklı perspektiflerine odaklanıyor. böyle deyince sadece çeviri ile ilgilenenlere hitap eden bir kitapmış gibi algılanabilir ama asla öyle değil: çeviri kitap okuyanlar, birden fazla dil konuşanlar ve (benim gibi) şu anda yeni bir dil öğrenenler için bile muazzam bir düşünce ve anlama/anlaşılma egzersizi.
temelde belki yerelleştirilmiş çeviri diyebileceğim methodla birebir çeviri methodu arasındaki yaklaşım farklılıkları üzerine kurulu metin. bu iki kampın en önemli tartışmalarını çok güzel aktarıyor. ama bunu yaparken o kadar kişisel deneyimleri üzerinden anlatıyor ki, hayran kalmamak elde değil. birkaç kez daha demiştim, kurgu dışı artık tam olarak böyle olmalı. özneden bağımsız, literatür araştırması sunmamalı sadece, yazarın da dizine dirseğine kadar bulaşması gerek mevzuya. kate briggs tam olarak bunu yapıyor. argüman inşa etmenin, kendinden parçalar katmanın, tarihsel akış takip ederken güncelle bağlamanın başyapıtsal bir örneği.
tüm bunların yanında paragraf ve sayfa kullanımı o kadar orjinal ki, düşünce akışıyla metin akışı o kadar örtüşüyor ki çok çok keyif aldım.
yakın zamanda everest'ten türkçesi çıkacakmış. fransızcadan ingilizceye çeviri üzerinden verilen örnekler türkçeye nasıl aktarılcak gerçekten çok merak ediyorum, kitabın genel olarak derdi de bu zaten: bir dilden başka bir dile aktarırken her şey yanlış ve her şey doğru. döner dönmez özellikle bazı sayfaların türkçelerine göz atmak istiyorum. ama önerim ingilizce okuyabilenlerin ilk tercihinin ingilizcesini okumasından yana.
December 18, 2017
You also don’t have to be a translator to enjoy this book. Certainly this is the perfect book for someone, like me, who is just getting started in the world of translation, and I suspect more experienced translators would find many gems here as well. But if you don’t translate but love reading, this book might be for you, too. Obviously, you’ll get a fascinating glimpse of the behind-the-scenes work of translation–something than doesn’t usually get much more than a token nod from the reviews and word-of-mouth recommendations that move us to read a book, or the conversations, essays, and interviews that we seek to figure out a book after we’ve finished it. But, less obviously, this book might also inspire you to think differently about literature and reading quite apart from the “little art” of translation, through ruminations on, for example, what it means to identify with an author or a character in a novel, why we keep coming back to the same books over and over again, why reading inspires some to write but not others, and what it is exactly about certain sentences that moves us so.
For my full review, head over to my blog, Strange Bookfellows: https://strangebookfellowsblog.wordpr...
For my full review, head over to my blog, Strange Bookfellows: https://strangebookfellowsblog.wordpr...
March 31, 2019
In short vignettes spanning some 370 pages, Kate Briggs explores what it means to translate literary works. She herself has translated Roland Barthes’ lecture notes from French to English, a process which comprises one of the main strands of This Little Art, but there is a lot of interesting discussion on, for instance, Helen Lowe-Porter’s translations of Thomas Mann’s works into English and the lively yet hostile debate her translations engendered, involving even Lowe-Porter’s surviving daughters who defended their mother in the Times Literary Supplement as late as 1996, i.e. some 70 years after Lowe-Porter had translated Mann’s most famous novels. Brigg’s tangential essay is a fascinating read, an honest and thoughtful account of translation, a book not far from a novel actually. Definitely recommended even if you’re not a translator, as it offers a lot of interesting commentary on writing, sense-making, and language. I timed my reading of it well, as I’m currently reading through the Man Booker International longlist. Perhaps, thanks to Briggs, I now won’t forget to #namethetranslator as I type my next reviews.
June 3, 2018
Once I quoted from a book in translation and was approached by the translator to state her name as well. I would have blushed if she was actually sitting in front of me, not so much out of shame but because of my respect for her litle art.
Since then my reading always takes the translator into account. Even so much that I select books by translator.
Kate Briggs translated some of Roland Barthes's lecture and seminar notes. I am familiar with Barthes. I have read some of Barthes's works in English translation. Now I've finished 'This Little Art' I am no longer sure how familiar I am exactly with Barthes. Have I read Barthes's works?
Of course I have. But when I will read them again, or any other of his works, my reading will be no longer the same. I will be reading another Barthes. My Barthes. The translators Barthes. Our Barthes. Barthes's Barthes. No Barthes.
Thinking this I start to make myself believe I have reasons to prefer a translation above the original work. Because the translators words never change.
(But then again I do not know and I doubt this is really preferable.)
"Unlike most books about translation, Kate Briggs’s This Little Art does not ask what is lost in the journey from one language to another. Rather, it turns to the reader, the translator or potential translator, and asks, what have you found in the practice of translation? As Kate puts it in this conversation, “Of all the things that you might do in a life, why do this?” Why would translation be the form that someone’s writing would wish to take, and what possibilities, what unique and private pleasures, can this desire lead to?
The result is not only a generous and wonderfully subversive re-orientation of a discourse often limited to notions of fidelity and failure, but also a celebration of translation’s embeddedness in life. Based on her own experience of translating Roland Barthes’s late lecture courses, La Préparation du Roman and Comment vivre ensemble (as The Preparation of the Novel [2010] and How to Live Together [2012], respectively), Kate Briggs thinks through the ‘preparation of the translation,’ the complex and ever singular interplay between a life and a (re)writing project, using everything from Barthes’s own examples of The Magic Mountain and Robinson Crusoe to aerobics classes and misheard Madonna lyrics. The stories of two women translators—Helen Lowe-Porter, who first brought Thomas Mann into English and made his reputation abroad, only to later be maligned by a new generation of critics, and Dorothy Bussy, André Gide’s devoted friend, translator, and correspondent for over thirty years—endow the book with a passion and depth of character to rival a novel. That the reader could find her heart skipping a beat at an astonishing moment in the Gide/Bussy correspondence, even as an insight into translation, quietly building for pages, suddenly bursts into her awareness, is a testament to Briggs’s skill as a writer and thinker, and—for me, at least—a reminder of the love at the heart of the word ‘philosophy.’ (Madeleine LaRue on 'This Little Art')
On musicandliterature.org I read a Skype conversation between Kate Briggs and Madeleine LaRue, I couldn't find a better introduction to 'This Little Art': "Waiting Translations: A Conversation with Kate Briggs" http://www.musicandliterature.org/fea... (20-11-2017, Music and Literature)
"Yes, that is definitely the central question: Why do translations? So often, the answer to that question, the one we hear all the time is: because they’re necessary, the world needs them, because translation a good thing to do. Brilliant. Yes. We need translations, of course we do, perhaps now more than ever. But a different, and to my mind equally important question has to be: okay, but why would you write a translation? Of all the things that you might do in a life, why do this? Especially when—clearly this has radically changed even since we first met five years ago, in terms of the new visibility and celebration of translators in our current moment—but even with these fantastic changes, there’s still a question of why, for instance, translate a novel rather than write one? And I don’t feel like the answer that says, “because it’s a good thing to do” is adequate. I don’t want to play down those motives of generosity to or engagement with the world, clearly. But they don’t account for everything. I don’t think they’re necessarily reason enough to invite more people to do more translation. Which is absolutely my ambition in the book, to say: look, perhaps it hasn’t occurred to you, monolingual person, to do a translation, but you could. I really think you could. Perhaps even you should? Perhaps translation, the writing of translations, amateurishly, is an activity available to all of us—this is one of the propositions of the book: one that could be productive for more of us, to engage with at one time or another. (Kate Brigss)
Since then my reading always takes the translator into account. Even so much that I select books by translator.
Kate Briggs translated some of Roland Barthes's lecture and seminar notes. I am familiar with Barthes. I have read some of Barthes's works in English translation. Now I've finished 'This Little Art' I am no longer sure how familiar I am exactly with Barthes. Have I read Barthes's works?
Of course I have. But when I will read them again, or any other of his works, my reading will be no longer the same. I will be reading another Barthes. My Barthes. The translators Barthes. Our Barthes. Barthes's Barthes. No Barthes.
Thinking this I start to make myself believe I have reasons to prefer a translation above the original work. Because the translators words never change.
(But then again I do not know and I doubt this is really preferable.)
"Unlike most books about translation, Kate Briggs’s This Little Art does not ask what is lost in the journey from one language to another. Rather, it turns to the reader, the translator or potential translator, and asks, what have you found in the practice of translation? As Kate puts it in this conversation, “Of all the things that you might do in a life, why do this?” Why would translation be the form that someone’s writing would wish to take, and what possibilities, what unique and private pleasures, can this desire lead to?
The result is not only a generous and wonderfully subversive re-orientation of a discourse often limited to notions of fidelity and failure, but also a celebration of translation’s embeddedness in life. Based on her own experience of translating Roland Barthes’s late lecture courses, La Préparation du Roman and Comment vivre ensemble (as The Preparation of the Novel [2010] and How to Live Together [2012], respectively), Kate Briggs thinks through the ‘preparation of the translation,’ the complex and ever singular interplay between a life and a (re)writing project, using everything from Barthes’s own examples of The Magic Mountain and Robinson Crusoe to aerobics classes and misheard Madonna lyrics. The stories of two women translators—Helen Lowe-Porter, who first brought Thomas Mann into English and made his reputation abroad, only to later be maligned by a new generation of critics, and Dorothy Bussy, André Gide’s devoted friend, translator, and correspondent for over thirty years—endow the book with a passion and depth of character to rival a novel. That the reader could find her heart skipping a beat at an astonishing moment in the Gide/Bussy correspondence, even as an insight into translation, quietly building for pages, suddenly bursts into her awareness, is a testament to Briggs’s skill as a writer and thinker, and—for me, at least—a reminder of the love at the heart of the word ‘philosophy.’ (Madeleine LaRue on 'This Little Art')
On musicandliterature.org I read a Skype conversation between Kate Briggs and Madeleine LaRue, I couldn't find a better introduction to 'This Little Art': "Waiting Translations: A Conversation with Kate Briggs" http://www.musicandliterature.org/fea... (20-11-2017, Music and Literature)
"Yes, that is definitely the central question: Why do translations? So often, the answer to that question, the one we hear all the time is: because they’re necessary, the world needs them, because translation a good thing to do. Brilliant. Yes. We need translations, of course we do, perhaps now more than ever. But a different, and to my mind equally important question has to be: okay, but why would you write a translation? Of all the things that you might do in a life, why do this? Especially when—clearly this has radically changed even since we first met five years ago, in terms of the new visibility and celebration of translators in our current moment—but even with these fantastic changes, there’s still a question of why, for instance, translate a novel rather than write one? And I don’t feel like the answer that says, “because it’s a good thing to do” is adequate. I don’t want to play down those motives of generosity to or engagement with the world, clearly. But they don’t account for everything. I don’t think they’re necessarily reason enough to invite more people to do more translation. Which is absolutely my ambition in the book, to say: look, perhaps it hasn’t occurred to you, monolingual person, to do a translation, but you could. I really think you could. Perhaps even you should? Perhaps translation, the writing of translations, amateurishly, is an activity available to all of us—this is one of the propositions of the book: one that could be productive for more of us, to engage with at one time or another. (Kate Brigss)
February 14, 2021
A sort of undefinable essay on translation that makes you rethink what a book could be.
February 22, 2020
Perfect timing for me to read this book, as I start out on doing literary translation professionally. Have stuck notes on nearly every page!
June 9, 2024
This Little Art is Kate briggs ode to translating. Within the book, in short vignettes, Briggs goes into the different obstacles a translator encounters: if it's capturing an author's voice, whether translating is an art or a form of literary regurgitation, certain words to use and even little detours such as misinterpretation of lyrics, and the dragonese sections in Cressida Cowell's How to Train your Dragon series.
Kate Brigg's observations are peppered with examples from Barthes, Thomas Mann, Nicholson Baker and Andre Gide's correspondence with translator Dorothy Bussey.
An enlightening and entertaining read.
October 21, 2020
I barely have the words to express how much I loved this or what I loved about this. At times, it felt so specific (who is Barthes?) I would ask myself, "why am I reading this?", and then there'd come a bit that would make me go, wow. I've always loved translating, and writing down things I've read, in pieces of paper and pretty notebooks and my phone's notes app, and I could never really put into words why.
"What is missing is me: my action, my further activity. These lines are not mine; I know that. The point is: I didn't write it myself."
Even quoting the book as I write this review is a case in point. This feeling, it has always been simply me wanting to make something more mine. It's the arrogance of thinking something is so good, it could only feel better if I had made it. It's wanting to participate, to have a little bit of me in it, my words in my language, my handwriting, changing it minimally and thus holding it closer to my heart. I am so thankful for this book for giving me the words to say this. And reading this part was such a special experience, I immediately went to tweet about it, and in the very next paragraph she went: "Now there's Twitter: a space for adding yourself actively to the lines you love". Genuinely mindblowing. I'm starting to dip my toes into the study of translation and I feel like this has helped me understand the why so much better. (Do translations! Yes, yes, and absolutely.)
"What is missing is me: my action, my further activity. These lines are not mine; I know that. The point is: I didn't write it myself."
Even quoting the book as I write this review is a case in point. This feeling, it has always been simply me wanting to make something more mine. It's the arrogance of thinking something is so good, it could only feel better if I had made it. It's wanting to participate, to have a little bit of me in it, my words in my language, my handwriting, changing it minimally and thus holding it closer to my heart. I am so thankful for this book for giving me the words to say this. And reading this part was such a special experience, I immediately went to tweet about it, and in the very next paragraph she went: "Now there's Twitter: a space for adding yourself actively to the lines you love". Genuinely mindblowing. I'm starting to dip my toes into the study of translation and I feel like this has helped me understand the why so much better. (Do translations! Yes, yes, and absolutely.)
June 28, 2020
Me ha hecho querer volver a tener 18 años y volver a pisar por primera vez una facultad de traducción. Qué cosa tan bonita este libro y todo lo que cuenta, qué suerte es haberlo leído.
May 12, 2021
I wrote about this book here: https://readingindie.substack.com/p/t...
March 6, 2022
An absolutely delightful meditation on translation, writing, and language.
January 5, 2021
muy pocas son las veces en las que soy, realmente consciente, del trabajo que hace un traductor o una traductora a la hora de enfrentarse a un texto que no tiene nada que ver con su lengua materna como tampoco con el escritor original. y aquí ya me doy de bruces con la primera pregunta. ¿En qué nivel situamos al traductor? ¿Un escalón por debajo del escritor? ¿Al lado? ¿Es el traductor un trampantojo del escritor? ¿Que requisitos debe reunir el traductor para ser un buen traductor? Y así podríamos llegar hasta el infinito.... porque el traductor es alguien más que un mero dispensador de palabras de una lengua a otra pero ¿qué es ese más?
Kate Briggs trata de explicar en su ensayo #estepequeñoarte con numerosos ejemplos prácticos y a los que todos podemos recurrir en un momento dado quien es la persona que se pone a traducir, a transportar algo más que palabras de un idioma a otro. Tomando como punto de referencia una serie de conferencias que dio Roland Barthes sobre la creación de la novela, Briggs comienza la casa por la puerta grande y de la mano de las traducciones que se han hecho de La Montaña Mágica de Thomas Mann. Porque si ya el mismo texto original tiene "problemas" al aparecer un segundo idioma, el francés, junto al aleman... como se debería traducir esto, por ejemplo, al inglés.... Se traduce por completo a un solo idioma, se mantiene la parte francesa, se traduce pero aparece en cursiva para que el lector aprecie mentalmente ese cambio de idioma del personaje... todo este tipo de peripecias son a las que se enfrenta el traductor.
Robinson Crusoe también pasa la prueba de la traducción pero en este caso se dota a Crusoe de las herramientas de las que dispone un traductor. Uno creará una mesa, el otro hará una traducción pero ambos harán algo que ya existe pero que a su vez son objetos nuevos. Estamos ante el sentido más aristotélico de la "creación" de algo. Escritor, traductor, lector todos somos potencia de algo "nuevo" que llegará en el momento en que echemos a caminar. Dice Barthes "siempre hay, en lo más profundo, un deseo de escribir."
para que la obra de otro pase por mi interior - dice barthes - tengo que definirla como escrita para mi y al mismo tiempo deformarla, para hacerla Otra bajo la acción del amor." escriban, lean, traduzcan, inventen haikus. les dirán que pierden el tiempo. si, puede ser, pero, mientras tanto, escriban, lean, traduzcan e inventen haikus y tengan #estepequeñoarte como libro de cabecera
Kate Briggs trata de explicar en su ensayo #estepequeñoarte con numerosos ejemplos prácticos y a los que todos podemos recurrir en un momento dado quien es la persona que se pone a traducir, a transportar algo más que palabras de un idioma a otro. Tomando como punto de referencia una serie de conferencias que dio Roland Barthes sobre la creación de la novela, Briggs comienza la casa por la puerta grande y de la mano de las traducciones que se han hecho de La Montaña Mágica de Thomas Mann. Porque si ya el mismo texto original tiene "problemas" al aparecer un segundo idioma, el francés, junto al aleman... como se debería traducir esto, por ejemplo, al inglés.... Se traduce por completo a un solo idioma, se mantiene la parte francesa, se traduce pero aparece en cursiva para que el lector aprecie mentalmente ese cambio de idioma del personaje... todo este tipo de peripecias son a las que se enfrenta el traductor.
Robinson Crusoe también pasa la prueba de la traducción pero en este caso se dota a Crusoe de las herramientas de las que dispone un traductor. Uno creará una mesa, el otro hará una traducción pero ambos harán algo que ya existe pero que a su vez son objetos nuevos. Estamos ante el sentido más aristotélico de la "creación" de algo. Escritor, traductor, lector todos somos potencia de algo "nuevo" que llegará en el momento en que echemos a caminar. Dice Barthes "siempre hay, en lo más profundo, un deseo de escribir."
para que la obra de otro pase por mi interior - dice barthes - tengo que definirla como escrita para mi y al mismo tiempo deformarla, para hacerla Otra bajo la acción del amor." escriban, lean, traduzcan, inventen haikus. les dirán que pierden el tiempo. si, puede ser, pero, mientras tanto, escriban, lean, traduzcan e inventen haikus y tengan #estepequeñoarte como libro de cabecera
January 5, 2024
this has been one of the most special books i've read in a long time. it took me since may to finish it -- not because it was dense, or difficult to get through. almost quite the opposite: it is very readable, so much so that i enjoyed it so much that i only read it when i had a clearer head for it. it's divided into short sections - one or two pages each - which makes it ideal for dipping in and out of, and each time i returned to it i never felt lost or as if i needed to refresh myself. that is quite fitting given a major point of discussion in the book is concepts of time and slow reading, of attending to moments in life, of letting the particular remain particular.
this is a very considerate and thoughtful book. even if you have no interest or knowledge of translation at all, it doesn't matter. it was deeply engrossing and briggs spends so much time and careful attention to elucidating what she discusses, nothing ever feels glossed over, but neither does anything feel like a slog - the book has a really nice rhythm and tempo of its own which fitted well into my own life. and it made me really emotional at points -- both from brigg's own sensitivity to describing the world through language and the affective pulse she reveals within translation and reading.
anyone who loves reading will be engaged with what briggs discusses - the importance of literature, of language, of words, and how translation fits into that, in its own right.
formally, it brings to the essay form the affectivity and creativity that briggs is discussing in her content which i loved. its an inventive use of the essay form, akin to maggie nelson or anne carson.
i have so many passages and whole pages marked up or annotated. it is a book that i'll be thinking of and thinking with for a very very long time to come.
this is a very considerate and thoughtful book. even if you have no interest or knowledge of translation at all, it doesn't matter. it was deeply engrossing and briggs spends so much time and careful attention to elucidating what she discusses, nothing ever feels glossed over, but neither does anything feel like a slog - the book has a really nice rhythm and tempo of its own which fitted well into my own life. and it made me really emotional at points -- both from brigg's own sensitivity to describing the world through language and the affective pulse she reveals within translation and reading.
anyone who loves reading will be engaged with what briggs discusses - the importance of literature, of language, of words, and how translation fits into that, in its own right.
formally, it brings to the essay form the affectivity and creativity that briggs is discussing in her content which i loved. its an inventive use of the essay form, akin to maggie nelson or anne carson.
i have so many passages and whole pages marked up or annotated. it is a book that i'll be thinking of and thinking with for a very very long time to come.
February 4, 2025
I loved this so dearly. It feels like a long and involved love letter to translation more than it feels like an essay. She talks about all the self-consciousness and the anxieties of being a translator, the constant feeling of what if I'm not the right person to translate this, what if my language isn't good enough, along with all the criticism levelled at translators for every mistake. I loved the idea of talking about translation with 'tact' and god the letters from Bussy to Gide made me wanna cry. Really great read. Need to get my own copy so I can highlight all the bits I love and also have a reread.
"For me, in the translations I claim to have written myself, my preference has been for warmth. For the warmth I feel in Barthes's mode of address. Its reach: the way it seemed to include me."
"For me, in the translations I claim to have written myself, my preference has been for warmth. For the warmth I feel in Barthes's mode of address. Its reach: the way it seemed to include me."
March 16, 2025
how good a book on translation theory and practice has to be to get you to feel physical sensations of excitement. this gave me butterflies
April 29, 2025
"It's easy not to think about translation and translators. It's easy not to bear the translator in mind, to hold the thought of her, the history of her work, in the head, while reading. She might have a great deal of investment in you investing in the ventured rightness of her new phrasing, and this in itself - the pull of the sentences she has written, and what they call forth - can serve to distract you from her."
This is a marvelous book on the 'little' art of translation, inextricably linked to the craft of writing. At times a literary analysis, professional commentary, and journal, it encourages readers to explore the many facets of the profession, question its meaning, and consider it in the wider context of art making.
For me, the passages on finding a great work - reading a text that "produces, in me, a sudden dazzle of language" and inspires one to complete the message of the work with their own writing - those passages really stayed with me.
This is a marvelous book on the 'little' art of translation, inextricably linked to the craft of writing. At times a literary analysis, professional commentary, and journal, it encourages readers to explore the many facets of the profession, question its meaning, and consider it in the wider context of art making.
For me, the passages on finding a great work - reading a text that "produces, in me, a sudden dazzle of language" and inspires one to complete the message of the work with their own writing - those passages really stayed with me.
October 8, 2019
Perfect for me: an essay about translation, which is also an essay about Kate Briggs, and about a whole bunch of great books and a whole bunch of interesting translators, largely women (whither Margaret Jull Costa in this book?!). It's beautifully written. It's essayistic and has short sections. I am old and can only deal with short sections, and can only be bothered reading beautiful prose. This book was so targeted at me that I didn't even mind Briggs' love for Roland Barthes, whom I find increasingly irritating and whose appeal I find incomprehensible. I look forward to flicking back through this when I'm 80, when I'm even grumpier than I am now (as well as long before then).
December 22, 2017
a loosely arranged set of objects around the subject of translation. translation as partnership, translation as love, translation as the maieutic, risk-taking, pragmatic, responsibility-taking voice of the woman, the mother, the maiden, the midwife. Gide, Barthes, Mann, but more importantly their translators: Dorothy Bussy, Kate Briggs, Helen Lowe-Porter.
January 30, 2020
lads today we ARE crying over translation theory and the life and work and loves of bloomsbury bisexual dorothy bussy
August 15, 2020
This is a delightfully rambling and simultaneously very acute meditation on what translating, translation and switching between languages may tell about understanding, meaning, reading, and language. It tackles the very big questions, but does this in a resolutely individual gesture, clinging to seemingly minor and / or intimate details and highly individual experiences. I particularly liked how Briggs writes and thinks about translation as a highly gendered practice and how this relates to our culture’s disparaging of being an amateur, an a-professional. You don’t have to know one bit about Barthes to read this book (it’s nominally a book about translating Roland Barthes lecture notes) & get into thinking your own thoughts about translating, reading, understanding. You just have to be a reader who likes attention to details. Very close attention to details.
April 20, 2025
Oddly formatted so that some pages only have a few lines of text. There was plenty to enjoy here although I may have enjoyed it more if I had ever read Barthes. Still there were plenty of other touchpoints that I felt more comfortable with from Madonna (Poppadom Peach), to Ferrante, to Robinson Crusoe. This was deeply philosophical about the practice of translation but also about he very nature of translation and whether it is an act of creation or an act of plagiarism, or neither, or both. I don't always manage to think so hard about things, but there were enough ways into the author's thinking to keep this light and accessible. I read a handful of books in translation every year these insights are super valuable for my struggling intellect.
Read
September 5, 2025I’m not sure if this means anything, but I keep reading books that mention other books I just read, either by reference or in depth. Briggs started out with ‘The Magic Mountain’ which I just finished, and then went into other works, Barthes primarily, as that’s what Briggs has translated. This book fulfills a niche passion I have for the art/practice of translation, so I recommend this (over ‘The Philosophy of Translation’ by Damion Searls) for anyone interested in translation studies!
did-not-finish
December 24, 2020Another for the "did-not-finish" stack. In fact I'm really frustrated, this essay is really circumlocatious, i.e. it's not really going anywhere, but with enormous verbose gusto. Irritating more than anything. There must be some other way to talk about this stuff!
June 9, 2024
“This, I think, is why so many writers translate, or have translated, and speak of translation as a special kind of negotiation of the passage from reading to writing, as its own way into other forms of writing, as a way to move their writing elsewhere.”
You have to be very fascinated by translation to get into this book but even if you aren’t it keeps a pace that feels theatrical yet contemplative. I really enjoyed it!
You have to be very fascinated by translation to get into this book but even if you aren’t it keeps a pace that feels theatrical yet contemplative. I really enjoyed it!
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