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!

Two by Brian Dillon (#FitzcarraldoFortnight)

I first read Brian Dillon's Essayism (2017) just under two years ago. I didn't blog about it, but I did feel it was one of the best things I read that year. So when I saw In The Dark Room late last year, I picked it up. I read it this week and then reread Essayism.

In The Dark Room (2005) is Dillon's first book, and the Fitzcarraldo Edition is a reprint with an introduction by Frances Wilson.

"...a reflection on memory might also be a reflection on my memory..."

-p. 235

That quote is a bit of an aside in context, but gives a strong sense of the way the book (I suspect) came into being for Dillon. He had a sad and (what has fortunately, in the West at least, become) a rare childhood: he was orphaned at twenty. His mother died when he was fifteen after a long bout with a painful disease, scleroderma; she was also afflicted by depression. Then his father died of a heart attack five years later. So when he started thinking about memory as a topic, it's understandable he might not want to include an examination of his own. But what memories do any of us have more readily available to examine?

So he centers his study of memory around his memories of his own childhood, and of his parents. There are five organizing areas in the book, hooks that memory often gets hung on: the house he grew up in, the things that survived his parents, photographs of his parents, their actual bodies, and revisiting the places associated with his childhood. What does it mean to look at a photograph of one's parents together before one was conceived? What can you say about them, though knowing them well, but not in that moment?

Dillon is forthright about his own battles with depression, and 'The Dark Room' alludes more to that than to the process of making photographs. He writes with deep reference to other literary investigations of memory, with Augustine's Confessions and Proust being particularly important, but also Joe Brainard's I Remember, Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida, Virginia Woolf, Sebald. A fascinating investigation.

Then I went back to Essayism. Dillon takes the word from Musil's The Man Without Qualities. The title of chapter 62, in the Sophie Wilkins translation, reads:

I remembered Essayism as a wonderfully insightful book about the glories of reading essays, sometimes (and especially for Dillon) a melancholic pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless. And it is very good on a number of essayists. When I first read it, I was so overwhelmed by his (judicious, but real) praise for Palinurus' (Cyril Connolly's) impossible masterpiece The Unquiet Grave I immediately went and reread that. He was equally good, I thought, on Sontag, on Sir Thomas Browne, on Elizabeth Hardwick, on Montaigne. Less time was spent--but still it was quality time-- with Didion, Benjamin, Barthes, Cioran, Gass. For instance he says of first volume of Sontag's diary, (from when she was a teenager and in her early twenties) that it is 'quite endearing in its pretension.' Which is exactly what I thought when I read it, though without the wit to phrase it so well. He was so good I wished he'd told me about essayists I already loved, Hazlitt in particular.

I remembered from that first reading there was an autobiographical component as well, but it was only in reading it immediately after In The Dark Room that I realized how important that was to its conception. That old black dog had been hanging around again and Dillon needed to work. For Dillon, essayism, to essay, to look closely at things and write about them, is a crucial part of maintaining who we are. Good thoughts for a blogger.

I think both of these are very good. Essayism is a little more outward-looking, and I prefer it, probably for that reason, but In The Dark Room is also very good, and especially if your tastes run more to autobiography or memoir.

I also have a copy of This Little Art by Kate Briggs and I'm hoping to read it this week. I earlier read Flights and actually as a Fitzcarraldo book; it was later released by Riverhead (Penguin) and the Fitzcarraldo isn't distributed here anymore. I liked it, but it did occasionally make me squeamish, I admit. I very much liked Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of Dead, but read that in the Riverhead hardback and didn't blog about it.

Thanks to Kaggsy for the great idea of hosting this!

Side note: I'm forever fascinated by the vagaries of my spellchecker. Didion and Barthes are famous enough that my spellchecker approves. Cioran and Gass, enh, not so much. I think of Palinurus as a pretty important character in the Aeneid, as well as being Cyril Connolly's pseudonym, but that's not good enough. Aeneas himself checks out OK, unsurprisingly. Anchises yes, but Achates, however faithful he might have been, no.