This Little Art

by Kate Briggs

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781910695463
Publisher:	Fitzcarraldo Editions
Publication date:	09/20/2017
Sold by:	Bookwire
Format:	eBook
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	803,746
File size:	947 KB

About the Author

Kate Briggs is the translator of two volumes of Roland Barthes's lecture and seminar notes at the Collège de France: The Preparation of the Novel and How to Live Together, both published by Columbia University Press. She teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam.

Kate Briggs is the translator of two volumes of Roland Barthes’s lecture and seminar notes at the Collège de France: The Preparation of the Novel and How to Live Together, both published by Columbia University Press. She teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam.

Read an Excerpt

DRAGONESE
It’s Walpurgis-Nacht in the sanatorium and Hans Castorp, the hero of The Magic Mountain, has been made to feel hot and reckless by the atmosphere of carnival. Standing a small distance behind him, in the doorway of the little salon, is Frau Chauchat. She is dressed in a startling gown of thin, dark silk.
Was it black? Probably.
Or, at most, shot with golden brown.
Cut with a modest little neck, round like a school-girl’s frock. Hardly so much as to show the base of her throat. Or the collar bones. Or, beneath the soft fringes of her hair, the slightly prominent bone at the back of her neck.
But all the while leaving bare to the shoulder her arms.
Arms so tender and so full.
So cool and so amazingly white, set off against the dark silk of her frock.
To such ravishing effect as to make Hans Castorp close his eyes. And murmur, deep within himself: ‘O my God!’
He had once held a theory about those arms. He had thought, on making their acquaintance for the first time – veiled, as they had been then, in diaphanous gauze – that their indescribable, unreasonable seductiveness was down to the gauze itself. To the ‘illusion’, as he had called it. Folly! The utter, accentuated, blinding nudity of those arms was an experience now so intoxicating, compared with that earlier one, as to leave our man no other recourse than once again, with drooping head, to whisper, soundlessly: ‘O my God!’

Editorial Reviews

★ 02/26/2018
This beautiful book, part memoir, part love letter, gives a glimpse of the art of translation, as Briggs recounts her struggle to render into English Roland Barthes’s late lecture courses, La Préparation du roman and Comment vivre ensemble. She attributes her title to Thomas Mann’s translator Helen Lowe-Porter, who saw translation as a “little art,” little “as distinct from the big ones. Neither very important nor very serious.” While differing with Lowe-Porter’s view, Briggs shows her craft to be fraught with difficulty; one wishes to avoid mistakes, but often the correct interpretation of a sentence requires a deep level of empathy with the author. Translation is the product of “the dance of readerly excitement: the smack of an open hand on a desk, abrupt shifts in position, breath quickening or slowing down.” Or it occurs in reaction to a sentence or paragraph that “you find... has acted upon you.” It is in such encounters with the text, and through the text, with the author, that translation happens—almost, it seems, as the byproduct of an intense intellectual adventure. Lucid and engaging, Briggs’s book is essential, not just for translators, but anyone who has felt the magic of reading. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

‘Kate Briggs’s This Little Art shares some wonderful qualities with Barthes’s own work – the wit, thoughtfulness, invitation to converse, and especially the attention to the ordinary and everyday in the context of meticulously examined theoretical and scholarly questions. This is a highly enjoyable read: informative and stimulating for anyone interested in translation, writing, language, and expression.’
— Lydia Davis, author of Can’t and Won’t

‘I have been thinking, many weeks after having finished it, of Kate Briggs’ truly lovely This Little Art, a book-length essay on translation that's as wry and thoughtful and probing as any book I’ve read in the past year. My favourite works are those in which one feels the writer wrestling with genre even as she is writing; Kate Briggs does this with her own kind of magic, never failing to write beguilingly and intelligently and passionately about the little art of translation, which in the end shows itself to be not so little, at all.’
— Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies

‘In This Little Art, a digressive, scholarly, absorbing 350-page essay, Kate Briggs roams across the vast terrain – practical, theoretical, historical, philosophical – of translation. Briggs’s writing is erudite and assured, while maintaining a tone that is modest and speculative; this paradox encapsulates something of the essence of translation, which is always contingent (no translation is ever definitive) yet also – for its time at least – authoritative.... There have been many books written about translation, but few as engaging, intriguing or exciting as Kate Briggs’s exploration, with its digressive forays, infinite self-questioning, curiosity, modesty and devotion to the concrete – the very qualities, as it happens, that distinguish the translator’s labour.’
— Natasha Lehrer, Times Literary Supplement

‘Maurice Blanchot once wrote that translators are “the silent masters of culture”. Kate Briggs amends this, commenting that Blanchot wrote “hidden masters of culture” and that it’s “our recognition” of translators’ “zeal” that “remains silent”.... Her engaging memoir unfolds in unnumbered, untitled, unstructured short chapters: a pillow book on the translator’s love affair with words and writers. ... Briggs can sound like a visionary.’
— Marina Warner, London Review of Books

‘Lucid and engaging, Briggs’s book is essential, not just for translators, but anyone who has felt the magic of reading.’
— Publishers Weekly, starred review 

From the Publisher