This Little Art

by Kate Briggs

  Yes, but (Bussy asked): ‘Why would someone who understands a book so little … want to translate it? Why should someone who knows so little of a language … think he [or she] is capable of translating it?’ I’ve not forgotten her bafflement at the bad translation, her dismay at the presumptuousness of the unnamed translator. Nor indeed Timothy Buck’s inventory of Helen Lowe-Porter’s translation mistakes.

  I think again of Barthes’s imagined lesson plan, the way it seems to prefigure, so unexpectedly, the project of the last lecture course. Not a little bit of writing now and then, to be picked up and dropped again, casually, when the mood takes him. That doesn’t describe the intensive and durational writing project he set himself late in life, in the form of a two-year series of public lectures. The point was rather to ‘create’ – (to have the opportunity of creating) – ‘whole objects, over a long period of time’. Whole objects like a whole work of literature. Like, for example, the entirety of a very short short-story. Like, in Barthes’s case, a novel. Like a lecture course on the preparation of a novel. Or indeed its translation. The translator as a maker of wholes. Where the requirement of the whole, the requirement that the translator attend to the whole, serves not as a safeguard against ‘utterly, hopelessly, impossibly bad’ translation. But more as an indication of the work still to come.

  MAKER OF WHOLES

  (LET’S SAY OF A TABLE)

  The first time I visited the Bibliothèque François Mitterand, with its tall glass corner towers, I had no idea about the sunken forest garden. Approaching the library from a distance I remember mistaking the trees for shrubs, which I assumed to be knee- or even ankle-height. It was this slow giddy tilt when I realized that in fact they were the crowns of trees, sprung from branches and then from trunks, and how deeply they plunged. It turns out that the tallest are sycamore pines. On the library’s website you can read about how, as part of the construction of the new site in the mid-1990s, hundreds of trees – birches, oaks and hornbeams, as well as the 165 sycamore pines – were uprooted from a real forest two hundred kilometres away, to be transported and replanted here, making a replica forest garden. And, it so happens, a passing home for starlings. Pasted every now and then along the inner windows of the research rooms are these big blue stickers: graphic shapes of bigger birds silhouetted from above or below. I think the idea is to startle the starlings, and make them indirectly aware of the glass.

  Looking sideways onto that transplanted portion of forest, at a desk in one of the lower-level reading rooms, I’m told there is a researcher currently working on Bouvard and Pécuchet, Gustave Flaubert’s last, unfinished novel.

  As part of his novel-writing project, Flaubert is said to have read a great many books. The final estimate is something extraordinary. In the introduction to his recent retranslation of the novel, Mark Polizzotti puts it at some fifteen hundred.

  And the researcher, well.

  The story I heard about the researcher is that she is reading them again. That is, every single one of the books that Flaubert read in order to have his characters read them, or bits of them, as they try and mostly fail, comically, to apply their learning to life.

  In the same sequence? I don’t know.

  I hope so.

  I can’t tell you any more about the researcher because I’ve never spoken to her. I don’t know her name. I’ve never even had her pointed out to me. I have no idea how she thinks about her project: this dedicated retracing of someone else’s reading path, cut through the stacks of some other reading room well over a century previously. Whether she is close to finishing, or – perhaps? – has given up altogether. But the giddy tilt I felt upon discovering that the shrubs planted in the heart of the library were actually trees – it was the same delighted unnerving feeling when I first heard the story about her work.

  I’ll read the books that Barthes read, I told myself, when starting out on the project of translating his lectures. Ideally, in the order in which he read them. This would be my own directed reading programme. For what purpose, exactly? To find the passages in the works he quotes, of course; also, to be in a better position to follow the arguments he makes. Yes, but what else? To know something, a part of what he knew? To experience some thing – even to feel something – that he felt and he experienced? The desire for a novel, for example, so wholly bound up with his reading of Tolstoy, and especially, essentially, of Proust? It sounds a bit unlikely now.

  Reading the same books as someone else is a way of being together. This is the premise of seminars, book-clubs, of so many friendships and conversations. What it is to discover that you’re currently reading the same book as someone else – especially someone you don’t know all that well. The startling, sometimes discomforting, effect of accelerated intimacy, as if that person had gone from standing across the room to all of a sudden holding your hand.

  But then again, what kind of shared experience is this? Who’s to say that when reading The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, for example, a novel which occupies a privileged place in the first lecture course, I’ll notice what Barthes noticed, think what Barthes thought, experience what he experienced? Or even: that I’ll pause where he paused, looking up from the page where he did? The novel is of interest to Barthes because of its status as a novel of solitude, or living-alone. In How to Live Together, it offers a way into thinking about what might be community’s opposite term. A lecture course whose founding fantasy, he tells us, developed out of the chance encounter with a word. It was while reading an academic article on the monasteries of Mount Athos, says Barthes, that I happened across this beautiful new word: ‘idiorrhythmy’. A chance encounter, a chance reading: Barthes’s phrase is une lecture gratuite, an adjective I turned over and over in the effort to translate it. Not a gratuitous reading or a purposeless reading exactly. But something more like an as-yet-un-instrumentalized reading: reading for its own sake; reading with no expectation of being made useful or for the purposes of anything else. It was in the course of such a reading, says Barthes, that I came across the word that would open out a whole new direction of inquiry: the forms of community that might accommodate the particular life-rhythms of each individual (‘idiorrhythmy’ is made from idios + rhythm). Barthes’s deliberately unsystematic method is to go where the word leads him: to be led, to be pulled by this word, and to attend to those various tugging forces: to allow himself to stumble, as he puts it, among snatches, fragments, between tastes and flavours, the bounds of different fields of knowledge (again, the proximity he points up, in French, between the words saveur and savoir). An unorthodox mode of proceeding, perhaps, for a lecture course delivered in the academic setting of the Collège de France. But is this not how reading generally happens? The point seems to be this: left to its own devices, the path of reading is very rarely chronologically ordered, thematically coherent, limited by language or respectful of borders. Books open out onto, they cross with and follow haphazardly on from one another. Left to its own devices, the path of reading strays all over the place.

  And then along comes the translator, thinking of the researcher in the library, determined to walk that straying path all over again.

  There can be many different motivations for doing or making something again, only this time in your own setting and doing it yourself. It might be that you need your own version of it, or others do. It might be a way of bringing the extant thing closer, or for you to draw closer to it. It can be a way of understanding what the extant thing is or was, and a way of making it behave or mean differently – producing new knowledge and understanding. It can also be a form of entertainment. A friend tells me about a film called Living with the Tudors by artists Karen Guthrie and Nina Pope, which narrates their time spent living among a community of historical re-enactors. She describes a distinction that Guthrie and Pope posit in relation to their work. Which is the difference between doing something again in the name of newness and doing something new in the name of againness. I’m delighted by this: giddy a
gain, and unnerved. And after some deliberation I think I would place translation in the second category. Here is a translation. Here is a thing often (if not always) conscious of and keen to gesture toward its origins, to its already existing first manifestation. This is the frame of againness, the name in which you are invited to receive it (and indeed compelled, by copyright law, to receive it). Even as the materials and the manner, the agent and the occasion of making, as well as the thing itself, are all new.

  Look to the whole, Helen Lowe-Porter asked (of the readers of her translations).

  But what kind of maker and of what kind of whole is the translator with her translation?

  Let’s say – I want to propose now, as a device to think awhile with – a table-maker. The maker of a table.

  But with a very specific scene of making in mind: Robinson Crusoe on his undeserted island, making a table again in what for him will be the first time.

  Robinson Crusoe – what ‘a dismal book’, declares George Orwell in an essay from 1949 on Charles Reade, the nineteenth-century novelist, whose Foul Play is for Orwell an altogether superior example of the desert-island novel. Unlike Defoe, Reade was ‘an expert on desert islands,’ writes Orwell. ‘Or at any rate he was very well up in the geography textbooks of the time. Robinson Crusoe,’ on the other hand, is a book ‘so unreadable as a whole that few people even know that the second part exists.’

  For Barthes, too, by far the best bit is the long first part: all the small differences it makes between the days. Here is Robinson Crusoe alone on and anxiously claiming his island. Here he is planting things, sometimes writing. Here he is recording the weather. It is, Barthes remarks, an oddly event-less novel; its charm lies in its low-key unfolding.

  Yes, it’s truly ‘a dismal book’, wrote Orwell. That said, no desert-island story ‘is altogether bad when it sticks to the actual concrete details of the struggle to keep alive’. In this regard, even Defoe’s novel ‘becomes interesting when it describes Crusoe’s efforts to make a table’. From my Wordsworth Classics edition of Robinson Crusoe:

  ‘And now I began to apply myself to make such necessary things as I found I wanted, particularly a chair and a table; for without these I was not able to enjoy the few comforts I had in the world; I could not write or eat, or do several things, with so much pleasure without a table. So I went to work.

  And here I must needs observe that as reason is the substance and origin of the mathematics, so by stating and squaring everything by reason, and by making the most rational judgement of things, every man may in time be the master of every mechanic art. I had never handled a tool in my life, and yet in time, by labour, application, and contrivance, I found at last that I wanted nothing but I could have made it, especially if I had had tools; however, I made abundance of things even without tools, and some with no more tools than an adze and a hatchet, which were perhaps never made that way before, and that with infinite labour. For example, if I wanted a board, I had no other way but to cut down a tree, set it on an edge before me, and hew it flat on either side with my axe, till I had brought it to be as thin as a plank, and then dub it smooth with my adze. It is true, by this method I could make but one board out of a whole tree, but this I had no remedy for but patience, any more than I had for the prodigious deal of time and labour which it took me up to make a plank or board. But my time or labour was little worth, and so it was as well employed one way as another.’

  To be clear: in this account, it takes one whole tree to make but one solitary board.

  Then, eventually, in the long run of it, enough whole trees are fashioned into a table.

  So this is infinite labour.

  Immeasurable, boundless labour.

  Labour that’s invested in reason but on the side of the unthinkable, the impossible.

  Labour that’s invested in making the most rational judgement of things but on the side of the excessive, the irrational.

  Labour that’s framed as necessity, undertaken in response to a pressing demand. But when the demands are so diverse and so many – Why a table right now and not a boat? – it springs (it must spring?), also, from desire and out of curiosity.

  Labour that seems to aspire, at the outset, only to repetition. But turns out to require contrivance. That is to say, new skill, improvisation and different invention.

  Labour that’s for the moment undivided (he will make the whole table himself).

  Labour that’s quite comically laborious.

  But then again, as Robinson Crusoe points out: Why not? It’s not as if there’s any urgency. Or, to put it another way, cast alone upon a desolate island, who’s to say what urgent means? Presumably, the matter of how fast things need to get done, what counts as quick here and what counts as slow, can be decided again.

  When people discuss the economic realities of literary translation, they often point out how difficult it is – to the point of impossible, as my professor warned me – to make a living from it. Boyd Tonkin, the founder of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, makes the point in a recent article titled ‘Labours of Love’. Despite the increasing interest in literature in translation (the boom sounded by Rachel Cooke in the Observer) ‘the translation of literature,’ he writes, ‘will seldom seem like a sane choice of career. Although rates and contracts vary enormously, the UK Translators’ Association currently advises that “we have found that UK publishers are prepared to pay in the region of £90 per 1,000 words.” Labours of love, indeed.’ Insane, then, because the work involved in writing a translation seems to be so clearly in excess of – so out of proportion and unbalanced in relation to – its small material returns.

  ‘And now I began to apply myself to such necessary things as I found I wanted.’

  Is the table, for Robinson Crusoe, a necessary thing?

  Yes, of course. Yes, on the one hand. Yes, in the sense that everything he makes on his island will be useful. Robinson Crusoe, the careful recorder of his time and investment, balancing in his journal his input and output, produces only for use, not for exchange. Although it is true that there’s no one (or not yet anyone) around to exchange with.

  Robinson Crusoe needs a table.

  But the further point seems to be: he would like a table. A table is among the necessary things ‘he found he wanted’. He wanted a table because it was wanting. Or, the table was wanting because he wanted it. For the enabling comforts of a surface to write on, to eat off. But also: the table as the marker, the proxemical centre of the European home, of what will become Robinson Crusoe’s castle, standing in for the power he’ll come to wield over his remade civilization. A proxemical object like the fireplace or a lamp or the TV – the kinds of objects that Barthes discusses in a session of How to Live Together: objects that we tend to gather around, in proximity, configuring our bodies, our spaces and our other objects in relation to them. In his lectures, Barthes notes how Robinson Crusoe seems to have no problem making rectangles (the chair, the table, the walls of his fortress), but a good deal of trouble with circles (the wheel in the wheelbarrow, the barrel). ‘The rectangle [is] the basic shape of power,’ he writes. And the table is desired, ultimately, for its powerful symbolic value. But in the meantime there’s also the invested occupation that making it provides. A further motor of the project is curiosity: the fantasy of a table set down as a problem to be solved. What would it entail for Robinson Crusoe to make a table here and now, in these new, rough and rude circumstances? Will he – with his limited skills, his different materials, his faith in reason – be up to the task of finding out? For the instruction of it? For the life-structuring project of it? Elsewhere in the lectures Barthes describes the project – in French the pro-jet – as a kind of projectile, something a person throws out ahead of themselves, as one way among others of organizing the days.

  Given the way the translator’s per-word fee refuses to tally with the time and effort involved, and given how hard it is (how hard I find it) to speed up – to translate faster in order to mak
e this per-word fee work in the translator’s favour – perhaps somewhere in the mix of her motivations there’s the different promise of cultural capital. Tonkin’s article, with its investment in the translator’s selflessness, her generosity, her altruism, her uncomplicated love, makes no room for this at all. But perhaps the translator is betting on the possibility, somewhere out there on the horizon, that she might one day exchange the fact of having translated this writer’s work into English, a writer whose already established prestige and recognition – or as yet untapped potential for prestige and recognition – she is drawing on (or indeed, positioning herself as being the very first person to point to: ‘Spotlight your favourite underrepresented languages!’ ran the tagline for a recent competition for emerging translators). Exchange it for a new translation commission, or a teaching post, or a publication contract to write an essay on the practice of translation. Indeed, if I am now gainfully employed (as a part-time tutor in a university and an art school), perhaps it is in large part down to having done this; down to the five or so years it took to translate the two volumes of lecture notes having its own currency, a currency that I was eventually in a position to exchange for a job.