Saturday, February 29, 2020

Kate Briggs' This Little Art (#Fitzcarraldo Fortnight)

Well, I've got a couple of hours to squeeze in one last book for Kaggsy's and Lizzy's Fitzcarraldo Fortnight, but I can't dilly-dally...

This Little Art by Kate Briggs is an essay/meditation on the translation of works from one language to another. Briggs herself is the translator of two of Barthes' late lectures from French to English and she brings that experience to bear, but she also looks at other translators, in particular Helen Lowe-Porter (the person responsible for originally translating most of Thomas Mann into English) and Dorothy Bussy (who was André Gide's first translator into English.) And, in fact, the title of her book comes from an off-hand, possibly meant as disparaging, comment by Lowe-Porter about her own work.

Lowe-Porter has taken a bit of a beating over the years, and Briggs is supportive of her work and gives reasonable indulgence to Lowe-Porter's method and the possibility of errors. She's even better, I thought, on the complicated, but loving, relationship between Bussy and Gide, which comes across as touching in Briggs' telling.

For me, one of the most interesting suggestions in the book is Briggs' notion that the translator/artist has a sense of recreating the original work, adopting it as one's own, pushing it almost into the area of original creation.
"All books are made from other books and so, in their way, all books are translations in one way or another." (p.138)
She cites an essay by Elena Ferrante with an interesting example about Ferrante's reading of Madame Bovary and wanting to write a story in Italian that could the very sentence Ferrante found in Flaubert. She doesn't cite, but could, something like Zadie Smith's retelling of Howards End as On Beauty. Is that a translation? Well it is a carrying-across (the Latin root of the word) of a story on class relations, on the relations between art and commerce, from 1900 to 2000. From a white England to a multiracial United States.  It's a fascinating idea and Briggs pushes it hard, but is careful not to push it farther than it should go.

The other thing that definitely needs to be remarked is the prose, and here, I'm afraid, I was less taken with the book. I wrote 'essay/meditation' above with deliberation: Briggs has a way of meditatively circling around an idea without ever quite lighting upon it. Some of this may come from Barthes, whom I scarcely know (and haven't read the works Briggs translated.) Sometimes it may be to remind of the way a translator works, trying out different words before settling on the preferred one. But some of it I just found maddeningly repetitive. Robinson Crusoe's table! I love Robinson Crusoe. But I will not be able to reread Defoe for quite a long time into the future without thinking, "Robinson Crusoe needs a table...He wanted a table because it was wanting." (p.237) And yes, I did definitely elide there.

Ah, well. Still a fascinating read.

In Googling for an image of the cover, I saw that Benjamin Moser reviewed the book for the New York Times. Moser himself is sometimes a controversial figure, but he cares about translation and is responsible for our most recent versions of Clarice Lispector. (As translator, but also as general editor.) But he fundamentally misread this book, I'm afraid. He sees Briggs as advocating some sort of translatorial relativism, as if all translations are equally good. No. "Translation cannot dispense with...the effort to get it right." (p.140) Now maybe Briggs' way of talking around an issue and seeing all sides made it a bit more difficult to see what she was saying, but, heck, I got it, and I felt Moser was just phoning it in, working out some issues he'd been irritated about in the past. Bah.

And that leaves me with no unread Fitzcarraldo Editions books! I may very well have to do something about that...

Thanks to Kaggsy and Lizzy for the great idea and for hosting!


16 comments:

  1. i've mused about this off and and for years... Constance Garnett was pretty good, i thought. the more modern translations have seemed to me wanting in comparison, but i admit to not having much association with later stuff... never read Lictor, or heard much about her for that matter...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. For Dostoevsky I liked Pevear & Volkonsky better than Constance Garnett, for Tolstoy less so. But Ms. CG was pretty good in any case.

      Anyhoo, an interesting thing to think about...

      Delete
  2. I'm quite taken with the thought that all books are translations of one sort or another.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Isn't it such a suggestive idea? That's what really got me thinking in reading the book.

      Delete
  3. not only that, but i recently acquired the conviction that all books are different... that each reader reads a different book even though it's the same book!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Each reader in time reads his own book! So you can never step into the same book twice! Herawhozit says something like that, I'm sure...

      Delete
    2. This comment has been removed by the author.

      Delete
    3. Herodotus? i read his ballastic tome and he could have said it but i don't recall...

      Delete
    4. I was thinking of Heraclitus, No man steps in the same river twice. Could be true of books, too...

      Delete
  4. I try not to get too hung up on translation, otherwise I start feeling like I need to learn Russian before I can read War and Peace or whatever. I have to remind myself not to worry and that I don’t even ]21understand everything in English 100% of the time. It was the Pevear & Volkonsky vs. Constance Garnett “debate” that even made me aware that something could be lost in translation.

    Congratulations on having no unread Fitzcarraldo Editions laying around, gathering dust! That must, however briefly, feel good!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There are a few other unread books lying around... :D

      The idea of translation is interesting and mostly you don't get a choice, you have to read what there is. But for major classics that I've read more than once it's actually kind interesting to read different translations. There's always an implied interpretation in a translation and it sometimes get me to think about the book in a different way.

      Delete
  5. What an interesting imprint, eh? I was so intrigued and I did end up reading one (Dan Fox's book about Pretentiousness), but I hadn't really planned, so it was a slim volume.

    This book on translation was in my stack, too, but I just couldn't connect with it - it kept reminding me that I haven't read Barthes, which I've always meant to do - and finally decided my mood was off and I'll try it another time. Nonetheless, I enjoyed reading your thoughts about it.

    And what did we do without the 'net, when we couldn't so easily find bookish opinions with which we could disagree! :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I was a bit put off by the prose myself and it took me a while to get into it. Interesting as I found it, I did think it could be shorter.

      But yes, that makes five for me from Fitzcarraldo (counting also Drive Your Plow, which they are kind of responsible for) & everything I've read has been fascinating. Their list shows a very solid taste I would certainly look at least twice (!) at a book just because they had published it.

      The 'net has just given us bookish types so much more space for discussion. Even as a graduate student I don't remember this sort of thing.

      Delete
  6. Thank you Reese for rendering such an interesting article. Your review did develop a great amount of curiosity and I finally ended up reading the book though there was no actual plan to do so. Emphasising the fact that one should be able to connect with the book on translation and your scripting gave a completely new perspective to what I thought about the book.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Glad you found it useful and thanks for your comment!

      Delete
  7. How good are translated books? I've never attempted to read them. Talk about translating French to English! I've been fascinated by French ever since high school. Working at the institute, my hands are already full. I don't think I have the time to squeeze French classes into my schedule right now.

    ReplyDelete