by Kate Briggs
Unless, of course: this counts.
Translating haiku in the context of and for the purposes of the lecture course, for the sake of others: putting the English haiku into French so that his audience could read and understand them, too.
But also and at the same time: translation as its own private writing experiment.
The project of translating like a weather simulator, like a little storm basin:
let me just see if I might be capable of re-effecting this minute event in language, somehow, the incident of it; like a leaf falling, writes Barthes, like a small fold;
let me see what I might make or fail to make happen right here and now, within this frame that the translation project offers, the conditions of new writing possibility that translation opens up;
let me see what might happen if I were to try writing these lines, these lines that I know I didn’t write, again -
only this time in my own language
and only this time myself.
AND STILL NO RAIN / ROLAND BARTHES RHYMES WITH
The handout that Barthes prepared for his students comprised of sixty-three haiku printed on the page. This mattered because – although he would be reading the poems out loud – as Barthes says, one must never underestimate the layout of a haiku: the space, the spacing, the way each one appears as a thing picked out, appealing to the eye, surrounded by white. A visual thing and at the same time a temporal thing, each poem effecting its own tiny movement, an unfolding over the extremely brief time of its reading. Here they are: sixty-three haiku on paper.
The handout was reproduced in Léger’s French edition of the lecture course when it was published in 2003. As part of the project of translating her edition into English, I would have to translate the handout, too.
How, though?
How to translate this haphazardly collected collection of poems, originally written in Japanese, drawn from various sources, printed here in French translation?
In fact there is this one book of haiku in particular, says Barthes, in the lecture delivered on 6 January 1979. It’s very important to me but: I’ve lost my copy of it. I’ve tried to buy the book again, but it no longer seems to be sold anywhere. I went to the library to find it – to a research library, the Bibliothèque nationale on the rue de Richelieu. But found it impossible to locate the bibliographical reference for a book that I once held in my hands. I did once hold it in my hands, he says, so it can’t be a hallucinated object. This book, he asks his audience: if you happen to find the reference, could you please pass it on to me – so I can share it with everyone else here? It’s a very complete collection of haiku in English, in four volumes.
If you find the reference, could you give it to me?
And if you happen to come across the book, could you buy it?
Please, and I’ll buy it back from you?
In 2008 I looked for and found the volumes Barthes was referring to – very easily now, because Léger supplies the full bibliographical details in her editor’s notes. And because there is now a copy in the national library, at its second site on the Avenue de France. I spent the last weeks of the summer in the library with Spring, Summer-Autumn, and Autumn-Winter, published between 1949 and 1952 and edited and translated by R. H. Blyth. They are thick books with pale, watery covers: a bird on a branch, perching next to a japonica blossom the size of its small head; a softly yellowing tree; a man and his donkey walking through the snow. I was looking through them for the thirty or so haiku that Barthes had picked out from those pages and translated into French. Thirty or so little poems, tiny incidents of language, working from Barthes’s French translations and trying to guess back at and in this way to locate the ‘original’ poems in Blyth’s English. Here is a Barthes translation:
Si rudement tombe
sur les oeillets
l’averse d’été
Oeillets. Paging through Summer-Autumn looking for ‘carnations’, I reached the end.
I had – I must have – missed them.
I am skimming not reading, I told myself.
Clearly not doing this attentively enough, slowly enough. Thinking of other things, probably of September, and what will happen then. No carnations.
Summer rain?
I’ll look instead for ‘summer rain’.
Surely the back-translation of averse d’été.
No? So how did you arrive at averse?
Could you tell me? Please. I’m a bit tired now. By what effort of the imagination am I supposed to think my way – from my new and distant setting, touching at your French translations – to reach, in these English pages, wherever you were then?
I was once asked, at the time of publishing and publicly presenting my translations, whether I had ever felt excluded from Barthes’s fantasies. The fantasy, for example, of living-together, as it manifests in the monasteries of Mount Athos: small, exclusively male communities; eight to ten men, finding a rhythm for their lives between separate rooms for sleeping and a common space for coming together, for prayer and eating. I was very struck by this. Excluded? Was I missing something? Or, rather, was the suggestion that I had clearly been missing something? Perhaps what D. A. Miller, in his beautiful Bringing out Roland Barthes, calls the ‘discreet but discernible gay specificity of Barthes’s text’? The erotics of proximity and distance, let’s say, as Barthes reads them in the texts of Saint Benedict, the codes around who could sleep between whom, who might have an excuse to touch whom. Had passages like this not always been, for me, all part of it? I took the question sensitively, I remember, as a public reminder of my difference. And so as an indirect querying of my identification with Barthes’s late work: my claim to having a relationship with it, to feeling addressed by and included in it. All of which, in the bright glare of the question, was now starting to look a bit improbable, perhaps; a bit inappropriate. I think I said something about the fantasy of the dressmaker, the seamstress who features in the lectures on the novel. The dressmaker who goes from house to house, gleaning bits of life, bits and pieces of life, collecting her materials before returning to her home to work on them, working them up, piecing them together: the dressmaker like the novelist. I pointed to her, I think. Offering her activity, or at least Barthes’s fantasized version of her activity (blurring and softening the edges of what must have been the reality of it), as one that I – with my domestic translation practice – might more legitimately claim to identify with. But the question and my on-the-spot answer – these are things I’ve thought a lot about since.
And on reflection I would answer differently now. I would argue that this is what reading offers us: occasions for inappropriate, improbable identification. For powerful reality-suspending identification with a character, a writer, an idea, an experience, a fantasy. Fantasies that apparently have nothing to do with me – isn’t this, in its way, the power of a fantasy? – that do not appear to directly concern or pertain to me. But that catch me up nonetheless. Like a complicated miracle. Like the everyday complicated miracle of reading books written by other people – especially, perhaps, books in translation, originally written in languages we will never speak, about places we will never visit and experiences we will never have. Books that, through the work of translators, address us nevertheless, include us in the remit of their address (not by expanding it, necessarily, to some broad and flattened out universal of shared experience but, as in the haiku, by narrowing it and sharpening it to the absolutely local, the absolutely particular). I would say – in the light of the question – that I was only just now registering how private my experience of that address had been. Working more or less silently at home on the translations, in the quiet of a reading-writing relationship developed over a couple of years, hearing it for the most part in my head. It was strange to speak of it out loud, I’d say. Very aware, now, and not really needing it to be pointed out, of the kind of speech-producing body I have. Holding the floor for a bit longer, I’d say something about my body’s capacity to make
sound: my keen awareness of the muscles in my mouth and the stress-rhythms of the language I grew up in. I would describe how, when I first moved to Paris, I worked as a language assistant teaching English phonetics at a university in the suburbs. How, as part of the standard pedagogy, a funny thing – funny at the time, and funnier as I think of it now – the first task of the year was always to have the students recite Humpty Dumpty.
It was an exercise in intonation, a workshop in sing-song:
Humpt-y dumpt-y sat on a wall is what I’d have them say.
Humpt-y, dumpt-y sat on a wall.
(Where did he sit? He
sat on a wall)
The students would laugh at me, disbelievingly: Non mais vraiment, Madame, vous rigolez! Surely you don’t – not really, not in real life, not in everyday real life – speak that way, do you? Come on, does anyone?
I do! I’d say (it was part of my job to insist on the weird value of simulating Received Pronunciation). But it was also, interestingly, true:
In English, in Eng-land, we do-o!
We start low, we go high, we sink again, we em-pha-size.
We do! Honestly, I’d say: we doooo.
But I know that in French you don’t. I know that when I speak your language I bring the inflections. I make it rise and fall in ways that even I can hear are quite unnatural to it. I do this without thinking and instantly it marks me out. You’re not French are you? No, you’re right, I’m English. Half a sentence and already you’ve placed me: in a body with a mouth that can’t help adding this peculiar signature as it speaks.
So much for stress-rhythm, though, what about the vowels?
Like the vowel in Barthes. I have sometimes tried practising saying the name Roland Barthes out loud on my own at home. In preparation for speaking of his work and my translator’s relationship to his work before an audience, any audience – by which I mean simply the audience that is other people:
Bah! That’s how I know it should go, having listened to friends, to colleagues say his name (there’s even a website for this: pronounceitright.com). Or at least that’s how it should start. A quick burst of sound.
Bah! A short tight but still rising vowel. Ba-AH – leading into the high r. Reaching for it up in the roof of my mouth. Then rolling it. Attempting now to roll it: chin tilted slightly to the ceiling, a high quick scouring: Bah-AHRR-before ending abruptly and cutting off all sound on the tuh.
Barthes.
This is silly, I know: it’s humiliating, really. I can’t do it; I find I can never do it without some great self-conscious effort.
But surely, I tell myself, it doesn’t matter. I mean, who cares? Who really cares?
(Perhaps I could do what I want.
Could I? I could just make something up…)
Surely it doesn’t really matter that when alone and left to my own devices, in the reading solitude in which this sense of a relation was formed in the first place, and with the inner voice that I use to speak silently to myself, a voice that sounds quite a lot like the one I use when speaking out loud: higher and reedier than I’d like, with long south-of-England vowels – in that voice, in my mouth:
Roland Barthes rhymes with
art
(with /a:t/)
It does though, doesn’t it? Is what I’d end up saying, in my late imagined response, my esprit d’escalier, my ‘staircase wit’, as the dictionary has it (its funny, awkward translation, but then: how else to do it?), inviting the questioner to agree with me. Clearly, it matters how we say each other’s names: those proper nouns – the names of people and sometimes of places – that we don’t translate, that we no longer tend to translate, but instead let pass apparently untouched from language into language. Names like Hans Castorp, like Tous-les-Deux. Although not exactly like Robinson Crusoe, whom in the lectures Barthes calls, casually, Robinson, as if he were a friend. How we say these names is one of the ways we display and lay claim to familiarity, to intimacy, to a specialist knowledge of each other, and of each other’s work. Who has not felt a bit of humiliation, a small flush of shame, when speaking out loud, at the realization that the name you’d thought you had a handle on pronouncing is in fact – according to some authority, some consensus, a more knowledgeable other – pronounced differently? Who has not used a private name, a pet name coined for a lover or a friend or a child out in public, as a covert but highly effective tactic, a way of announcing your relationship, making it clear to everyone around you who you are to each other, making the channel of familiar communication between the two of you suddenly appear to others, in a way that briefly blocks those others out, leaving the rest of us now scrambling to reimagine and reconfigure our relationships to you both? How we say each other’s names out loud is one of the ways in which we position ourselves, publicly, in relation to each other, to other people, to languages, to cultures, to knowledge, and to power – consciously as well as inadvertently. It’s how we intimidate each other, patronize each other, how we surreptitiously deny each other the right to speak. It’s also how we approach each other, show affection, show our care and our love. It’s how we get close and bear witness to our closeness, our long-term or short-lived bonds. It’s how we create these relations, one-directional, or reciprocal, passing names like warm pebbles amongst ourselves. It’s how we work out who we will have conversations with, how we decide who we can and who we want to talk to.
It does matter, is what I would say, in the end. I realize this. I took your query, sensitively, to be about who I am, about who on earth I think I am (to be identifying, to be claiming to identify, with this work, with its queer fantasy scenarios, its late-in-life urgency and grief, its novel-writing projects, its ideas about reading and writing). And perhaps you’re thinking: is this closeness then?
Is this what closeness looks like?
The lady translator, shouting vowels at her ceiling in preparation for speaking out loud, out of a concern to protect her reading relationship, to not have it publicly queried and thereby taken away from her. Out of an anxiety that the audience might very well find grounds to question her claim to familiarity, her sense of being spoken to by that work, from the instant they hear her speak, or fail to speak, of it.
To speak, that is, of the late work of a critic, theorist and writer whose very last piece of writing, the one that was left on his desk on the day of the accident that led to his death, was titled: ‘One Always Fails in Speaking of What One Loves.’
Or, in an alternative translation: we always fail to speak of what we love.
Or alternatively again: you (a general you that includes me, the you we use in English, sometimes, to embrace both you and me),
you always fail to speak, when you speak of what you love.
‘Attention!’ says Barthes at key moments in the last lecture course. In French, he says: ‘Attention!’ Take notice, take care, be careful, hold on.
It’s a note of caution that he is careful to sound – that he repeatedly sounds – whenever he finds himself directly relating his own novel-writing project to the lives and works of the writers he admires (Dante, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Proust, Kafka…). It goes like this: ‘Attention! when I speak of these writer-heroes, I am identifying-with, not comparing-myself-to.’ There is a difference, insists Barthes: ‘the great writer, like Dante, is not someone to whom one can compare oneself, but whom one can, and one wants to, more or less partially, identify with. (I don’t have the right to compare myself with Dante but I have the right to identify with him.)’ The right to identify-with without risking the presumptuousness of comparing-oneself-to: is this not one of the basic freedoms of reading? The right to identify-with: with Barthes, for example. But also, and perhaps more closely still, with Helen Lowe-Porter, with Dorothy Bussy, with these extraordinary women translators whose stories I am so interested in, whose positions and feelings I want to understand in order to better understand my own.
Yes, I think so.
But then again, the more I think about it the mor
e I wonder whether it is indeed identification that I feel: whether what I have termed closeness has identification at its source. Might it not more simply have to do with repeatedly-wanting-to-spend-time-with? With the long-term company I want to keep: something like a desire for this companionship in particular. I would rather read Barthes than a great many other writers. I shelve and pile his books near me. Why? Not because I find myself and my own experience in his work, always or even often, but for the reason that I don’t.
‘It’s not true that the more you love, the better you understand,’ writes Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse, translated by Richard Howard, under the heading ‘The Unknowable’. ‘[A]ll that the action of love obtains from me is this wisdom.’ Then, in the next paragraph: ‘Or again, instead of trying to define the other (“What is he?”), I turn to myself: “What do I want, wanting to know you?” What would happen if I decided to define you as a force and not a person? And I were to situate myself as another force confronting yours?’
I’m not sure it’s true that I identify with Lowe-Porter, the professor’s wife, with her ‘little art’, her translator’s notes, so over-the-top in their self-deprecation, so very excessive in their humility (thanking the scholars, the ‘authorities in the various special fields entered by The Magic Mountain’, she goes on to write: ‘without whose help the version in all humility offered here to English readers, lame as it is, must have been more lacking still’). Likewise, do I identify with Bussy, with everything she says about translating in her correspondence? Or is it more that this is the body of writing, these are particular ideas and positions that I choose – that for the moment I am choosing – to be with: to think and argue and write with and against. These are the forces that I am drawing on and confronting with my own, getting sometimes bewildered by and uncomprehending. Lydia Davis has written about taking pleasure in the company afforded – the energy that is tapped - by the work of translation. In her inventory of the pleasures of translating, pleasure no. 4 is all about not thinking or writing alone. She writes: ‘When you are translating, you are working in partnership with the author; you are not as alone as you are when writing your own work. You sense the author’s hovering presence, you feel an alliance with him, and a loyalty to him, with all his good and his less good character traits, whether he is neurotic and difficult, and at the same time generous and funny, like Proust, or tender toward his family and at the same time full of contempt for a great many people and types of people, like Flaubert. Perhaps it is that you overlook his less admirable qualities in admiration for what he has written; or your judgment of him is tempered by your awareness that you have a degree of power over his work – to do well or ill by him in the small arena of the translation.’