This Little Art

Kate Briggs

• Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781910695463
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

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 writer: distinctive, wise, frank, funny and utterly original.

MAKER OF WHOLES
(LET’S SAY OF A TABLE)

The first time I visited the Bibliothèque François Mitterand, with its tall glass corner towers, I had no idea about the sunken forest garden. Approaching the library from a distance I remember mistaking the trees for shrubs, which I assumed to be knee- or even ankle-height. It was this slow giddy tilt when I realized that in fact they were the crowns of trees, sprung from branches and then from trunks, and how deeply they plunged. It turns out that the tallest are sycamore pines. On the library’s website you can read about how, as part of the construction of the new site in the mid-1990s, hundreds of trees – birches, oaks and hornbeams, as well as the 165 sycamore pines – were uprooted from a real forest two hundred kilometres away, to be transported and replanted here, making a replica forest garden. And, it so happens, a passing home for starlings. Pasted every now and then along the inner windows of the research rooms are these big blue stickers: graphic shapes of bigger birds silhouetted from above or below. I think the idea is to startle the starlings, and make them indirectly aware of the glass.

Looking sideways onto that transplanted portion of forest, at a desk in one of the lower-level reading rooms, I’m told there is a researcher currently working on Bouvard and Pécuchet, Gustave Flaubert’s last, unfinished novel.

As part of his novel-writing project, Flaubert is said to have read a great many books. The final estimate is something extraordinary. In the introduction to his recent retranslation of the novel, Mark Polizzotti puts it at some fifteen hundred.

And the researcher, well.

The story I heard about the researcher is that she is reading them again. That is, every single one of the books that Flaubert read in order to have his characters read them, or bits of them, as they try and mostly fail, comically, to apply their learning to life.

In the same sequence? I don’t know.

I hope so.

I can’t tell you any more about the researcher because I’ve never spoken to her. I don’t know her name. I’ve never even had her pointed out to me. I have no idea how she thinks about her project: this dedicated retracing of someone else’s reading path, cut through the stacks of some other reading room well over a century previously. Whether she is close to finishing, or – perhaps? – has given up altogether. But the giddy tilt I felt upon discovering that the shrubs planted in the heart of the library were actually trees – it was the same delighted unnerving feeling when I first heard the story about her work.

I’ll read the books that Barthes read, I told myself, when starting out on the project of translating his lectures. Ideally, in the order in which he read them. This would be my own directed reading programme. For what purpose, exactly? To find the passages in the works he quotes, of course; also, to be in a better position to follow the arguments he makes. Yes, but what else? To know something, a part of what he knew? To experience some thing – even to feel something – that he felt and he experienced? The desire for a novel, for example, so wholly bound up with his reading of Tolstoy, and especially, essentially, of Proust? It sounds a bit unlikely now.

Reading the same books as someone else is a way of being together. This is the premise of seminars, book-clubs, of so many friendships and conversations. What it is to discover that you’re currently reading the same book as someone else – especially someone you don’t know all that well. The startling, sometimes discomforting, effect of accelerated intimacy, as if that person had gone from standing across the room to all of a sudden holding your hand.

But then again, what kind of shared experience is this? Who’s to say that when reading The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, for example, a novel which occupies a privileged place in the first lecture course, I’ll notice what Barthes noticed, think what Barthes thought, experience what he experienced? Or even: that I’ll pause where he paused, looking up from the page where he did? The novel is of interest to Barthes because of its status as a novel of solitude, or living-alone. In How to Live Together, it offers a way into thinking about what might be community’s opposite term. A lecture course whose founding fantasy, he tells us, developed out of the chance encounter with a word. It was while reading an academic article on the monasteries of Mount Athos, says Barthes, that I happened across this beautiful new word: ‘idiorrhythmy’. A chance encounter, a chance reading: Barthes’s phrase is une lecture gratuite, an adjective I turned over and over in the effort to translate it. Not a gratuitous reading or a purposeless reading exactly. But something more like an as-yet-un-instrumentalized reading: reading for its own sake; reading with no expectation of being made useful or for the purposes of anything else. It was in the course of such a reading, says Barthes, that I came across the word that would open out a whole new direction of inquiry: the forms of community that might accommodate the particular life-rhythms of each individual (‘idiorrhythmy’ is made from idios + rhythm). Barthes’s deliberately unsystematic method is to go where the word leads him: to be led, to be pulled by this word, and to attend to those various tugging forces: to allow himself to stumble, as he puts it, among snatches, fragments, between tastes and flavours, the bounds of different fields of knowledge (again, the proximity he points up, in French, between the words saveur and savoir). An unorthodox mode of proceeding, perhaps, for a lecture course delivered in the academic setting of the Collège de France. But is this not how reading generally happens? The point seems to be this: 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.

And then along comes the translator, thinking of the researcher in the library, determined to walk that straying path all over again.

There can be many different motivations for doing or making something again, only this time in your own setting and doing it yourself. It might be that you need your own version of it, or others do. It might be a way of bringing the extant thing closer, or for you to draw closer to it. It can be a way of understanding what the extant thing is or was, and a way of making it behave or mean differently – producing new knowledge and understanding. It can also be a form of entertainment. A friend tells me about a film called Living with the Tudors by artists Karen Guthrie and Nina Pope, which narrates their time spent living among a community of historical re-enactors. She describes a distinction that Guthrie and Pope posit in relation to their work. Which is the difference between doing something again in the name of newness and doing something new in the name of againness. I’m delighted by this: giddy again, and unnerved. And after some deliberation I think I would place translation in the second category. Here is a translation. Here is a thing often (if not always) conscious of and keen to gesture toward its origins, to its already existing first manifestation. This is the frame of againness, the name in which you are invited to receive it (and indeed compelled, by copyright law, to receive it). Even as the materials and the manner, the agent and the occasion of making, as well as the thing itself, are all new.

Look to the whole, Helen Lowe-Porter asked (of the readers of her translations).

But what kind of maker and of what kind of whole is the translator with her translation?

Let’s say – I want to propose now, as a device to think awhile with – a table-maker. The maker of a table.

But with a very specific scene of making in mind: Robinson Crusoe on his undeserted island, making a table again in what for him will be the first time.

Robinson Crusoe – what ‘a dismal book’, declares George Orwell in an essay from 1949 on Charles Reade, the nineteenth-century novelist, whose Foul Play is for Orwell an altogether superior example of the desert-island novel. Unlike Defoe, Reade was ‘an expert on desert islands,’ writes Orwell. ‘Or at any rate he was very well up in the geography textbooks of the time. Robinson Crusoe,’ on the other hand, is a book ‘so unreadable as a whole that few people even know that the second part exists.’

For Barthes, too, by far the best bit is the long first part: all the small differences it makes between the days. Here is Robinson Crusoe alone on and anxiously claiming his island. Here he is planting things, sometimes writing. Here he is recording the weather. It is, Barthes remarks, an oddly event-less novel; its charm lies in its low-key unfolding.

Yes, it’s truly ‘a dismal book’, wrote Orwell. That said, no desert-island story ‘is altogether bad when it sticks to the actual concrete details of the struggle to keep alive’. In this regard, even Defoe’s novel ‘becomes interesting when it describes Crusoe’s efforts to make a table’. From my Wordsworth Classics edition of Robinson Crusoe:

‘And now I began to apply myself to make such necessary things as I found I wanted, particularly a chair and a table; for without these I was not able to enjoy the few comforts I had in the world; I could not write or eat, or do several things, with so much pleasure without a table. So I went to work.

And here I must needs observe that as reason is the substance and origin of the mathematics, so by stating and squaring everything by reason, and by making the most rational judgement of things, every man may in time be the master of every mechanic art. I had never handled a tool in my life, and yet in time, by labour, application, and contrivance, I found at last that I wanted nothing but I could have made it, especially if I had had tools; however, I made abundance of things even without tools, and some with no more tools than an adze and a hatchet, which were perhaps never made that way before, and that with infinite labour. For example, if I wanted a board, I had no other way but to cut down a tree, set it on an edge before me, and hew it flat on either side with my axe, ti...