This Little Art

by Kate Briggs

  It has to be possible, in other words, for someone, for the critic, for the philosopher, for the harder-working translator, to identify and correct the translator’s mistakes. Doing so can be a means of alerting readers to the fact of translation (to the fact of reading a work that has been twice-written; the second writing determined and motivated by its own history and context and agenda), and of preparing the ground for retranslation. It has to be possible to continue this inexhaustible work together: to query and vary each other’s decisions, holding to or elaborating alternative measures of precision and care, without quarrelling, necessarily, or policing. And without shaming? This, it seems, is less clear. Bennington’s article is titled ‘Embarrassing Ourselves’, a reference to one of Spivak’s translation mistakes (mistranslating the verb embarrasser as ‘to be embarrassed’ in a given passage, when, as Bennington points out, Derrida’s meaning is ‘to be entangled in’ or ‘caught up by’). It’s embarrassing that she should have made such a mistake in the first place, Bennington seems to be suggesting; it’s embarrassing, also, for those who have trusted in her translation, who have quoted the sentences she mistranslated, building arguments around and on the basis of them; it’s embarrassing – it’s a shame – to be in the position of having to call her out on her many regrettable mistakes now. Perhaps embarrassment is simply what comes – what has to come – with the territory of claiming to have written a translation, with taking responsibility in this way for someone else’s prose. If you don’t want to risk being publicly embarrassed, then don’t do (or at least don’t publish your) translations. Is that right?

  I don’t know. I don’t think so. It has to be possible to continue this work together, I agree. And I can see how this has to involve questioning and overturning each other’s decisions, and the grounds upon which we made them. But I would insist on continuance over improvement: on doing this work in the name of continuance and variation over progress. Because the question is: are we really getting any better at translation, with our changing standards of practice? Are we all making progress? Is John E. Woods’s newer translation of Buddenbrooks, published in 1993, for example, better than Lowe-Porter’s? Not really, Buck concedes. For Woods, too, makes a number of comprehension mistakes. Is Woods’s 1995 translation of The Magic Mountain an improvement on Lowe-Porter’s? No, says Michael Wood, responding mildly to the fierceness of Buck’s arguments (as they appeared rephrased in a chapter of the Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann): ‘Of course it’s good to get things right, but I’m afraid we’re all capable of careless errors at times. I have to say that I find the language of both Lowe-Porter and Woods lucid and serviceable.’ (‘Do we write better, do we read better, than we did 400 years ago?’ asks Virginia Woolf in her broadcast on the radio. Do we translate better? What would it mean to claim that we do?)

  What’s more, there is something about the way the choice, in Buck’s article especially, is being set out for me. Here is a choice: between, on the one hand and at long last, the promise of the right, the altogether better, and more appropriate translation of Mann’s novel (made this time by the right, the altogether better, and more appropriate translator) and, on the other, the translator who happened to be there, who happened to pitch up to pitch for the translation commission and to do (some great quantity of) the work, the translator who was either spectacularly unaware or stubbornly unwilling to acknowledge her own limitations. Here is a choice, but it’s not really a choice, is it? Because surely your choice has already been made. Who would want a bad translation? This is the further question that Buck’s article seems to be asking, rhetorically. Who really, who rationally? Who actually on earth would want a faulty and mistaken translation? An overreached, miscalculated and ultimately failed translation? I react to this. A warm and instinctive reaction that no doubt has a great deal to do with my own translation experience, with the live memory of my efforts and failed efforts, and the beat of my own racing heart. My reaction is to say: well, I do. In this case, perhaps I do. I choose Lowe-Porter’s version of The Magic Mountain. My precious copy with its creased cover. And I want to try taking seriously – I want to try embracing – the critiques that I hear levelled at her position and her work:

  Would-be writer, which sounds on the first hearing like a position no one would want to claim, really. Until it occurs to me that the whole of Barthes’s last lecture course is situated in this would-be: the lectures will tell the story, he says, of celui qui veut écrire, someone who wants to write – in his case a novel. The lectures will proceed as if this character, who happens in the lectures to go by the name of Roland Barthes, were writing a novel. In the context of a novel-writing project where the grounds for writing, the grounds for the very possibility of writing are never given in advance.

  Amateur translator. Likewise, Barthes’s longstanding investment in the amateur, in what he calls, in that lecture course, the practices and the values of the amateur.

  Maker of wholes. Translator as writer or maker? And of what kind of whole?

  Who refuses to let go of her translations until she feels she has written the books herself.

  These, I realize, are the positions I am interested in; these are the terms that speak most directly to my own experience. I claim them. I claim them as the headings under and in relation to which I propose to think a bit further about the interest of the practice of translation.

  Because there are deep pleasures in translating.

  There is amateurishness, and not-knowing, improvisation and instruction, as well as the reach for specialist knowledge.

  There is often a strong writing desire, great conscious audacity and difficult identification, somehow together with the more familiar humility and willing apprenticeship.

  There is the making of a piece of writing: a new volume in a new context with very different materials.

  And there is this close involving time spent with the sentence she is working on (then, the great sequence of sentences) that the translator is not wrong – or, I can’t see how she is exactly wrong; in no way straightforwardly or eventually wrong – to feel that she has written herself.

  WOULD-BE WRITER

  Every Saturday morning I put on a pair of white and turquoise lady’s trainers (lady’s, I think, is exactly the right word) and head to an aerobics class. It is a new breed of class, and very popular: aerobics with a dance emphasis, which in practice means a large group of women aged between around twenty and sixty doing an energetic workout in a large gymnasium above a swimming pool in an unloved area of Paris. Mixing up the more obvious cardio moves with ballet steps, hip hop, Bollywood, tango. It is all very incongruous. It feels a bit silly. And possibly a bit suspect, our easy appropriation of these dance traditions, our simplifying and untroubled corrupting of these moves. But also, insofar as such a thing ever is: sort of innocent. What we do – brushing our shoulders off to outmoded RnB, agitating in sync to the deep tug of its deeper, spitty bass – often makes me laugh out loud. No one really greets each other, just the smallest of acknowledgements. Weekly, we come together and weekly we leave to get back to all the other parts of our lives. There is only one man in our mostly anonymous group. An American guy, a bit older than everyone else, in his mid-sixties, I think. He always wears white: white shorts and white socks, white singlet vest, white headband against white skin, white hair and white beard, all white and wiry and closely clipped like a goat. I know he’s American because ever since David Bowie died he shouts ‘Let’s dance!’ in the moments before we begin and my heart lifts and invariably people smile. It still takes me by surprise: the degree to which it’s actually a joy, this being together, this moving in sequence together, even – somehow and perhaps especially – when we don’t quite. When one of us persists in dancing to her own inner rhythm, half a beat behind or ahead of everyone else. It is beautiful, I think, how hot we get, how willing we are to get hot, to leap and to sweat, the wet we make making dark patterns in our improvised sportswear, picking out the lines of our spin
es, the hollows of our armpits, the deep vees in between our legs that we forget – in our absorption for a short while we forget – to feel self-conscious about. One morning towards the end of class, in the last five minutes or so when everyone is breathing hard, feeling relieved and quietly in the process of gathering themselves back in together after having collectively let something powerful out, I watched as the sunlight from one of the high windows hit and appeared to glance off the fingers of a woman three women in front of me as she stretched up into it, and I thought: I want to film this. I have never especially wanted to film anything in my life but right now I want to film this. Of course, I don’t know how. I don’t know the first thing about film- or video-making. But new technology makes amateur video-makers out of all us. I had gone really quite far in my thinking of how I could do it, who I could enlist to help (whose better phone I could borrow), the permissions I’d have to ask, even the video-making artists I know whom I might ask for advice, before I came back to or rediscovered the thought that perhaps I could try writing it.

  Not because, when it comes to writing, I know how.

  I would go home, I think, and there I would probably open some of the books on my shelves. I would look, quite deliberately, at someone else’s sentences – wholly unrelated sentences, relevant only insofar as they’ve managed to phrase, for me, some small bit of life. ‘The coming day had thrust a long arm into the night.’ I came across this line recently, closing a chapter of Under the Net, Iris Murdoch’s first novel, which she published in 1954. A novel with a translator for a hero. Not a very heroic hero, it’s true, or a very invested translator: it’s all hack-work to him, the kind of derivative, unthinking thing a literary type might do to get by, en route to somewhere else. Translation becomes interesting in the novel only for a page or so, under the pressure of a conversation with a friend. A remarkable friend – the hero’s one remarkable friend – whose philosophical position seems to me to approach Barthes’s own, perhaps especially as it informs his book on photography. This friend – named Hugo – ‘was interested in everything. And interested in the theory of everything, but in a peculiar way. Everything had a theory, and yet there was no master theory. I have never met a man more destitute than Hugo of anything which might be called a metaphysic or general Weltanschauung. It was rather perhaps that of each thing he met he wanted to know the nature – he seemed to approach this question in each instance with an absolute freshness of mind. The results were often astonishing. I remember a conversation which we had once about translating. Hugo knew nothing about translating, but when he learnt that I was a translator he wanted to know what it was like. I remember him going on and on, asking questions such as:

  What do you mean when you say that you think the meaning in French?

  How do you know you’re thinking it in French?

  If you see a picture in your mind how do you know it’s a French picture?

  Or is it that you say the French word to yourself?

  What do you see when you see that the translation is exactly right?

  Are you imagining what someone else would think, seeing it for the first time?

  Or is it a kind of feeling?

  What kind of feeling? Can’t you describe it more closely?

  And so on and so on, with a fantastic patience. This sometimes became very exasperating. What seemed to me to be the simplest utterance soon became, under the repeated pressure of Hugo’s “You mean”, a dark and confused saying of which I no longer myself knew the meaning. The activity of translating, which had seemed the plainest thing in the world, turned out to be an act so complex and extraordinary that it was puzzling to see how any human being could perform it. And yet at the same time Hugo’s enquiries rarely failed to throw an extraordinary amount of light on whatever he concerned himself with. For Hugo each thing was astonishing, delightful, complicated and mysterious.’

  ‘The coming day had thrust a long arm into the night,’ so closes a chapter of Murdoch’s novel following an epic night of drinking. Her translator-character Jake, clever and lazy, had been pub-crawling around the East End of London. So here is the dawn, I remember thinking to myself, as I marked down the page. Here is the dawn in a sentence. Here is the dawn, actually, as I have never seen it before. But as I recognize it nonetheless (with the new knowledge that the line seems to be somehow inaugurating in me). Here is the dawn, then, as I now wish to have made it appear. Here is the dawn as I now might have wished to write it. And here am I amazed all over again by what a sentence – the right words in the right order – can do. No to film- and video-making, then. That short fantasy-incursion into another medium served, in the end, only to confirm what I have known for some time, perhaps since childhood even: that when it comes to responding to, or registering in some way, the matter of life – dust-expanded sunlight glancing off a hot woman’s fingers – I want to see it written. That is, I want to try writing it myself. Why is this?

  The question Why write? Why writing? Why do this rather than anything else? animates a whole section of Barthes’s lecture course on the novel, on his turn to the novel, his newfound desire to break with previous, more theoretical, more fragmented writing practices, and to embark on a different journey, a novel-writing adventure. Why the novel? we might ask. And Barthes gives some explanation: because it is long. Because, unlike previously tested forms – the fragment, paragraph as discrete unit, the note – it has this continuity, this differently expanded, stretched ongoingness. (‘While I may have often flirted with the novelistic,’ he says, ‘the novelistic is not the novel, and it is precisely this threshold that I wish to cross.’) But before saying anything further about the novel as a form in particular – about what one might want to write, and even this way of phrasing the question is new since he had previously thought that ‘to write’ was an intransitive verb (but, as he says, I’ve changed my mind; I’m not immobile) – the first, more fundamental question has to be: Why, for him, and of all of his other life activities – piano-playing, painting, drawing, teaching – should it be writing, still, the dominant one? The professionalized one, since here he is professing to it: the Professor of Literary Semiology, newly appointed to the Collège de France? Why, even at this life-juncture, following the death of his beloved mother, marked by a powerfully felt desire for change, should the change be envisioned as a switch within rather than a break from writing? Really, the question is ludicrous, says Barthes. And unanswerable, because: How could I, or anyone know? How could I, or anyone, plunge down deep enough into the secret sources of our desires to figure it out? Ludicrous and unanswerable. But then again. Perhaps there is one answer. One general answer, one very spare answer, the one most likely to be the most broadly true of anyone who has experienced the desire to write. That answer would be: I write because I have read.

  Recalling three scenes of reading:

  Coming to the end of the summer holidays aged ten or eleven, and bored, having run out of things to do and read. My mum presenting me with a book that didn’t look like a child’s book, and so like nothing I’d tried reading before. A brown textured cover with no picture on it; very thin paper, a grown-up font. It looked plain and small and wholly uninviting. But I was bored, and the book turned out to be Jane Eyre.

  French A-Level and it being announced that we were all going to be reading a novel. Which felt impossible, really: to read a whole novel in another language. We could imagine doing it, maybe, but only as a form of intensive reading labour: one resistant sentence after the other. It was hard for anyone to imagine actually enjoying it, getting caught up and transported by it. But then she gave us Gide’s La Symphonie pastorale, and I can still hear Gertrude asking what white looks like, and why other animals don’t – why only birds seem to sing?

  On my year abroad now, and feeling very abroad I would often go to the top floor of the local Gibert Jeune: the English-language section, where you could buy Wordsworth Classics for one euro. I’d select some novel in the series solely on the basis
of length. How thick was it, how many pages – how long might it keep me company for? Pamela! Or, better: Clarissa! Brilliant. Thank you: weeks and weeks and months and months (the perversity of reading in English while living the days in French. But then again: the novel as companionship).