This Little Art

by Kate Briggs

  116 Here is life ‘in the form of a sentence’: The Preparation of the Novel, p. 97.

  116 ‘Has it never happened’: Barthes, ‘Reading Writing’, The Rustle of Language, translated by Richard Howard (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), p. 29.

  118 he makes an inventory of some of them: The Preparation of the Novel, p. 133.

  120 Elena Ferrante has written: all quotations in these pages are taken from Elena Ferrante, ‘What an Ugly Child She Is’, translated by Ann Goldstein, The New Yorker, 31 October 2016. Stylistics of being: See, for example, the section ‘Se donner des modèles’ in Marielle Macé, Façons de lire, manières d’etre (Paris: Gallimard, 2011), which discusses at length Barthes’s notion of life ‘in the form of a sentence’; see too Macé’s more recent book, Styles, critique de nos formes de vie (Paris: Gallimard, 2016).

  121 ‘stylistics of being’: See, for example, the section ‘Se donner des modèles’ in Marielle Macé, Façons de lire, manières d’être (Paris: Gallimard, 2011), which discusses at length Barthes’s notion of life ‘in the form of a sentence’; see too Macé’s more recent book, Styles, critique de nos formes de vie (Paris: Gallimard, 2016).

  121 ‘formed, fashioned (remote-controlled)’: Barthes writes: ‘Madame Bovary … her loves, her dislikes, come from Sentences (see the passage on the books she reads in the convent and what follows), and she dies by the Sentence…’ A moment later he says: ‘Many – if not all – of us are Bovarys: the Sentence directs us…’ The Preparation of the Novel, p. 99.

  124 ‘I know the novel is dead’: Barthes is quoted as saying ‘I think of myself not as a critic but as a novelist – not of the novel but of the novelistic. I love the novelistic but I know the novel is dead.’ In ‘Twenty Key Words for Roland Barthes’, The Grain of the Voice, Interviews 1962-1980, translated by Linda Coverdale (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), p. 222.

  125 a certain constitutional weakness: The Preparation of the Novel, p. 15; here I am translating from the transcribed audio recordings, La preparation du roman (2016), pp. 43-4.

  129 vast, dying sea: Nicholson Baker, U and I: A True Story (London: Granta, 2011), p. 15.

  131 ‘For the other’s work to pass in me’: I am paraphrasing this scene here, lifting some lines directly from Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel, p. 134.

  135 Barthes cites Julio Cortázar: from Conversationes con Cortázar (1978), The Preparation of the Novel, p. 280.

  135 a more recent interview with Javier Marías: Nicholas Wroe, ‘Javier Marías: A Life in Writing,’ The Guardian, 22 February 2013.

  136 the sight of a mother walking out of step with her son: How to Live Together, p. 9.

  137 ‘Translation stops me in my tracks’: Jen Hofer, ‘Proximate Shadowing: Translation as Radical Transparency and Excess,’ Poetry Foundation, 30 April 2016.

  142 Lydia Davis explains: cited in Julian Barnes, ‘Writer’s Writer and Writer’s Writer’s Writer,’ London Review of Books, 18 November 2010

  144 her recent inventory of the pleasures of translating: Lydia Davis, ‘Eleven Pleasures of Translating’, New York Review of Books, 8 December 2016.

  146 ‘the dribble of money’: In Another Language, p. 21; ‘in the intervals of rocking the cradle’, p. 180; ‘ten-year stint’, p. 27.

  147 ‘the job is to some extent an artist job’: wrote Lowe-Porter in a letter to Alfred Knopf, dated 20 December 1947, quoted in Thirlwall, In Another Language, p. 105.

  148 ‘hidden masters of our culture’: Maurice Blanchot, ‘Translating’, Friendship, translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 57.

  151 ‘It makes me very happy to feel’: Selected Letters of André Gide and Dorothy Bussy, pp. 21-2.

  151 ‘it was with a very keen emotion’: Selected Letters of André Gide and Dorothy Bussy, p. 155; on reading her annotated copy of Tacitus’s History, pp. 289-90.

  152 For Éric Marty: ‘Gide et Dorothy Bussy,’ André Gide et L’Angleterre, edited by Patrick Pollard (London: Birkbeck College, 1986).

  152 will be loved back: on this, I recently read Brian Dillon quoting from Maggie Nelson’s Bluets: ‘And what kind of madness is it anyway to be in love with something constitutionally incapable of loving you back? Are you sure – one would like to ask – that it cannot love you back?’, Essayism, (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017), p. 40.

  153 ‘Which is all well and good’: Peter Cole, ‘Making Sense in Translation: Towards an Ethics of the Art’, In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What it Means, edited by Susan Bernofsky and Esther Allen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), p. 7.

  153 ‘I cannot enter into the work of other writers’: Thirlwall, In Another Language, p. 21.

  153 ‘For thirty-five years I have had a secondary but constant side job’: Anita Raja, ‘Translation as a Practice of Acceptance’, translated by Rebecca Falkoff and Stiliana Milkova, Asymptote, 2016.

  156 I don’t like translations: here I am translating and paraphrasing lines from the transcribed audio recordings, La préparation du roman (2016), p. 528.

  156 Richard Howard narrates an early incident: ‘Editor and Author: Marion Duvert and Richard Howard on Barthes,’ FSG Work-in-Progress, October 2010.

  157 ‘As a general rule, translations present a very serious obstacle to my reading’: here I am translating from the transcribed audio recordings, La préparation du roman (2016), pp. 63-4; see also, The Preparation of the Novel, pp. 24-5.

  158 ‘Why is it that I have such little taste for foreign languages?’: Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard, p. 115.

  159 ‘constant summonings’: Nicholas Baker, U and I: A True Story, p. 30.

  160 new ways of thinking relationality on a micro-scale: Adrienne Ghaly, ‘Cultural Theory on a Micro-Scale: Roland Barthes’s lectures at the Collège de France’, What’s so Great about Roland Barthes? Special Issue of L’Esprit créateur, guest edited by Thomas Baldwin, Katja Haustein and Lucy O’Meara, Vol. 55, No. 4, Winter 2015, pp. 39-55.

  162 ‘Again, after overcast days’: ‘Deliberation’, translated by Richard Howard, in Barthes: Selected Writings, pp. 484-5.

  162 ‘If I were a haiku-writer’: I am translating and quoting here from the transcribed audio recordings, La préparation du roman (2016), pp. 111-2.

  163 ‘Roland Barthes and Poetry’: Barthes Studies Vol. 2: Roland Barthes and Poetry, guest edited by Calum Gardner, 26 November 2016.

  163 Like a leaf falling: in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Barthes describes a project for a book called Incidents ‘(mini-texts, one-liners, haiku, notations, puns, everything that falls, like a leaf, etc.)’, translated by Richard Howard, p. 150.

  165 one must never underestimate the layout of a haiku: see the section titled ‘Typography. Aeration’ in The Preparation of the Novel, p. 26. The hand-out or ‘fascicule’ is reproduced in La préparation du roman I et II, Cours et séminaires au Collège de France (1978-1979 et 1979-1980), edited by Nathalie Léger (Paris Seuil / IMEC, 2003), pp. 461-63.

  166 It’s very important to me but: here I am translating and paraphrasing on the basis of the transcribed audio recordings, La préparation du roman (2016), p.72.

  167 Spring, Summer-Autumn, and Autumn-Winter: Haiku, 4 vols., edited and translated by R.H. Blyth (Tokyo: The Hokuseido Press, 1949-1952).

  169 ‘the gay specificity’: D. A. Miller, Bringing Out Roland Barthes (Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford: University of California Press, 1992), p. 16.

  169 erotics of proximity and distance: How to Live Together, pp. 72-75.

  169 the fantasy of the dressmaker: The Preparation of the Novel, p. 22.

  176 let pass apparently untouched: on the untranslated status of proper names see Jacques Derrida, ‘from Des Tours de Babel’, translated by Joseph G. Graham, Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, edited by Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 199
2), pp. 218-227.

  178 ‘One Always Fails in Speaking of What One Loves’: translated by Richard Howard in The Rustle of Language, pp. 296-305.

  179 ‘Attention! when I speak of these writer-heroes’: ‘Take note: the great writer isn’t someone you can compare yourself to but someone whom you can, whom you want to, identify with, to a greater or less extent.’The Preparation of the Novel, p. 3 (although the refrain is repeated a number of times throughout the course: see, for example, p. 129).

  181 ‘It’s not true that the more you love’: A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), p. 135.

  182 ‘When you are translating, you are working in partnership’: Lydia Davis, ‘Eleven Pleasures of Translating’.

  183 Barthes announces the good news: here I am translating and paraphrasing from the transcribed audio recordings, La préparation du roman, p. 74.

  187 Blyth, after all, ‘was a brilliant translator’: Adrian James Pinnington, ‘Haiku in English Translation’, Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English: Vol. 1, A-L, edited by Olive Classe (London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2000), pp. 604-6.

  188 ‘A UK view of Pinks vs. Carnations’: Caroline Whetman, ‘A UK View of Pinks vs. Carnations’, The Flower Expert, 13 July 2006.

  188 Like the physicists: The Preparation of the Novel, p. 75.

  189 stoppeuse: here I am translating and paraphrasing from the transcribed audio recordings, La préparation du roman, pp. 464-65.

  195 ‘amator: one who loves and loves again’: Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard, p. 52.

  197 ‘passages whose meaning I understood perfectly: Simon Leys, Notes from the Hall of Uselessness, translated by Dan Gunn, The Cahier Series no. 9 (Lewes: Sylph Editons, 2008), p. 27.

  198 ‘Translation as Scholarship’: Catherine Porter, ‘Translation as Scholarship’, In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What it Means, pp. 58-66.

  200 ‘how much we need to know’: the essay is also a review of Alex Beam’s The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson and the End of a Beautiful Friendship (Pantheon, 2016), Caryl Emerson, ‘Word Wars,’ The Chronicle of Higher Education, 29 January 2017.

  201 ‘It is a pleasure’: Selected Letters of André Gide and Dorothy Bussy, pp. 141-2. Line breaks are my own.

  205 Lydia Davis had recently published some of her own translations: we have been working on A. L. Snijders’s De Mol en andere dierenzkv’s (AFdH Uitgevers, 2009); Davis’s translations have been published in Asymptote and The White Review.

  207 The idea of the unschooled: see Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, translated by Kristin Ross (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).

  210 ‘If you are interested in talking about the other’: Gayatri Spivak, ‘The Politics of Translation’ in Lawrence Venuti, ed., The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd edition (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), p. 407.

  213 ‘The middle-class maiden’: Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard, p. 52.

  215 as Adrien Chassain argues: Adrien Chassain, ‘Roland Barthes: « Les pratiques et valeurs de l’amateur »’ Fabula, 1 October 2015.

  216 a lesson plan for children: ‘Literature / Teaching’, The Grain of the Voice, translated slightly modified after Linda Coverdale, pp. 233-42.

  218 ‘A society is beautiful’: ‘Concert de musique de chambre par trois étudiants de Belledonne’, Existences, 1945, republished in Roland Barthes, Oeuvres complètes, 5 volumes, (Paris: Seuil, 2001), vol. 1, p. 83. quoted by Chassain

  219 the way our reading informs our living: see Marielle Macé, Façons de lire, manières d’être (Paris: Gallimard, 2011).

  224 some fifteen hundred: Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard and Pécuchet, translated by Mark Polizzotti (Dalkey Archive Press, 2005) p. vii.

  227 idiorrhythmy: see the section titled ‘My Fantasy: Idiorrhythmy’ in How to Live Together, pp. 6-9.

  230 Living with the Tudors: Living with the Tudors (UK, 2007), a film by Karen Guthrie and Nina Pope.

  232 ‘a dismal book’: George Orwell, ‘Charles Reade’, The Collected Non-Fiction, edited by Peter Davison (London: Penguin, 2017), p. 671.

  233 an oddly event-less novel: How to Live Together, p. 84.

  234 ‘And here I must needs observe’: Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (Wordsworth Classics, 1995) pp. 51-2

  236 ‘Labours of Love’: Boyd Tonkin, ‘Labours of Love: Literary Translation Inside and Outside the Marketplace’, Taylor and Francis Online, 24 February 2017.

  237 produces only for use, not for exchange: See Stephen Hymer, ‘Robinson Crusoe and the Secret of Primitive Accumulation’, Monthly Review, Vol. 63, Issue 4 (September), 2011 (a reprint of an article which first appeared in 1971).

  237 A proxemical object: How to Live Together, p. 111.

  237 no problem making rectangles: How to Live Together, p. 114-16.

  237 wheel in the wheelbarrow: for a fascinating discussion of circles and the effort to re-invent the wheel in Robinson Crusoe see Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign vol. 1, translated by Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

  238 projectile: The Preparation of the Novel, p. 149.

  241 ‘I wish more novelists translated novels’: Chad W. Post, ‘Interview with Adam Thirlwell’ Three Percent, 24 July 2008,

  242 ‘Glory, for the translator’: Tim Parks, ‘The Translation Paradox’, NYRB Daily, 15 March 2016.

  244 ‘the catalogue of their shared tastes’: A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, translated by Richard Howard, p. 199.

  250 de- and re-contextualisation: Lawrence Venuti, Translation Changes Everything: Theory and Practice, (London and New York: Routledge, 2013). Venuti makes this point repeatedly throughout his work but see, for example, p. 180.

  252 ‘As a temporary or permanent substitute for creation’: Simon Leys, Notes from the Hall of Uselessness, translated by Dan Gunn, p. 30. ‘with just a slight hesitation’: Dan Gunn, ‘The Lydia Davis Interview’, The Quarterly Conversation, 10 March 2014.

  257 ‘One of the ways to get around the confines of one’s “identity”’: Gayatri Spivak, ‘The Politics of Translation’, p. 369.

  258 ‘which scraggly oak leaf’: Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2015), pp. 20-21.

  261 The Nature and Art of Workmanship: David Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship (London: The Herbert Press, 1995), pp. 20-29.

  263 ‘Here am I working eight hours a day in an insurance office’: George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, (London: Secker and Warburg, 1997), p. 186.

  266 ‘Gotcha!’: Michelle Woods, Kaka Translated: How Translators have Shaped Our Readings of Kafka, p. 85.

  267 soundness and comeliness: Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship, pp. 30-31.

  269 practical writing matters: The Preparation of the Novel, pp. 20-22; here I am also translating and paraphrasing from the transcribed audio recordings, La préparation du roman, pp. 55-56.

  271 ‘Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure’: here I am slightly modifying and writing into Richard Howard’s translation, ‘Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure’, The Rustle of Language, pp. 277-78.

  273 a domestic working practice: The Preparation of the Novel, p. 22.

  274 ‘“thin” or minimalist relations to the world’: Adrienne Ghaly, ‘Cultural Theory on a Micro-Scale: Roland Barthes’s Lectures at the Collège de France,’ pp. 47-8.

  275 There’s an essay by Paul Valéry: ‘Variations on the Eclogues’, translated by Denise Folliot, Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, edited by Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 113-126.

  279 I hardly knew any Latin: all these lines are lifted from Denise Folliot’s translation of Valéry’s essay (the line breaks are my own).

  281 what Anita Raja calls i
ts ‘inequality’: Anita Raja, ‘Translation as a Practice of Acceptance’.

  283 by a guy whom Barthes once sat next to on a bus: in fact, it was almost every line, not every single line. But my misremembering speaks to the point I want to make about translation, I think, which is that the translator must indeed reproduce every single line of the work-to-be-translated. See The Preparation of the Novel, p. 191.

  284 Abbé Prévost’s French version of Pamela: see Lawrence Venuti, ‘Translation, Community, Utopia’, The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd edition, edited by Lawrence Venuti (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 484; H. M Parshley’s translation of The Second Sex was first published in 1953; the book was recently retranslated in full by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (London: Cape, 2009); Paul Legault, The Emily Dickinson Reader (McSweeney’s, 2012).

  286 the point that Jacques Derrida makes: Jacques Derrida, ‘What is a Relevant Translation?’ translated by Lawrence Venuti, The Translation Studies Reader 2nd edition, p. 427.

  286 ‘footnotes rising up the page like skyscrapers’: Vladimir Nabokov, ‘Problems of Translation: Onegin in English,’ The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd edition, p. 83.

  286 ‘one seventh’: David Damrosch, ‘Translation and World Literature: Love in the Necropolis’, Lawrence Venuti, ed. The Translation Studies Reader, 3rd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 419.

  288 ‘a certain approximation of form’: Valéry, ‘Variations on the Eclogues’, p. 120.

  290 There’s a panel discussion you can watch on YouTube: ‘Translating Kafka’, London Review of Books event, 2012.

  292 ‘When I had wrought out some boards’: Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, p. 52.

  294 Philosophy, observes Sara Ahmed, is full of tables: Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 3.

  294 Marx, too: Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol 1., trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977), p. 163fn.

  294 ‘all the tables’: Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), p. 190.