This Little Art
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295 ‘Think of a kitchen table … when you’re not there’: Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Wordsworth Editions, 2002), p. 17.
297 the way Oana Avasilichioaei and Erín Moure run the word ‘translation’: ‘Anatomy of a Temperature’ (from Expeditions of a Chimaera), excerpted in I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women, edited by Caroline Bergvall et al (Los Angeles: Les Figues Press, 2012), pp. 32-33.
306 one of the reasons given for publishing the course again: see Bernard Comment, ‘Avant-propos’, La préparation du roman (2016), p. 10.
307 ‘What work goes into the making of things’: Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, p. 40.
308 some of the pioneering work of Translation Studies: see Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet’s ‘A Methodology for Translation’, in The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd edition, pp. 128-137; Susan Bernofsky, ‘Translation and the Art of Revision,, In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What it Means, pp. 223-33; Jacqueline Guillemin-Flescher, Syntaxe comparée du français et de l’anglais: problèmes de traduction (Paris: Editions Ophrys, 1981).
311 ‘everybody laughed’: Horton, Thomas Mann in English, p. 68.
312 ‘Each time that in my pleasure, my desire’: The Neutral, translated by Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier, p. 36.
314 translation can make authorial ownership nervous: Emily Apter, ‘What is Yours, Ours and Mine: On the Limits of Ownership and the Creative Commons,’ October 126, Fall 2008, pp. 91-114.
318 ‘It lodged now in the fork of a pear tree’: Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, p. 17.
322 Clearly, observes David Horton, ‘Lowe-Porter felt empowered to intervene’: citations here are from Horton’s Thomas Mann in English; see also Theo Hermans’s discussion which opens Translation in Systems.
324 A decisive principle of the oeuvre: I am translating here the entry titled ‘Délicatesse’ in Tiphaine Samoyault’s ‘Lexique’, in Roland Barthes: L’inattendu, Le Monde Hors-Série, No. 26, June 2015, p. 113.
325 they acquire their meanings relationally: Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, translated by Roy Harris (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), see for instance, p. 25.
326 ‘domestic inscription’: Lawrence Venuti, ‘Translation, Community, Utopia,’ The Translation Studies Reader, p. 485.
327 ‘A fine responsiveness to the concrete’: Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 39, but see also the whole section titled ‘The Priority of the Perceptions (Priority of the Particular)’, pp. 37-40.
327 Dutch housewife: The Neutral, translated by Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier, p. 30.
328 for as long as I can oppose it to trivial: I have in mind here a line from Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors (New York: New Directions, 2016) where she writes of the ‘“small” as opposed to the “minor.”’
328 ‘a special attendant was detailed to wait upon each flower’: see The Neutral, translated by Rosalind Krauss and Denis Hollier, p. 31.
330 ‘And now I am going to say something very serious.’: Selected Letters of André Gide and Dorothy Bussy, pp. 248-50.
331 ‘debased’ and ‘a continuing scandal’: cited in Theo Hermans, ‘Preamble: Mansn’ Fate’, Translation in Systems: Descriptive and System-orientated Approaches Explained, p. 3.
332 tact is scared, it is hurt by repetition: The Neutral, translated by Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier, p. 36.
333 ‘I know you so well and so secretly’: Selected Letters of André Gide and Dorothy Bussy, p. 133.
334 ‘I did it because there is a residue’: The Neutral, translated by Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier, p. 32.
335 ‘I am to see Madame Knopf this afternoon at 4’: Selected Letters of André Gide and Dorothy Bussy, p. 130.
335 D. B.’s translations were poor: Selected Letters of André Gide and Dorothy Bussy, p. 130.
336 the fontaine Médicis where the young lycéens would gather: André Gide, Les Faux-monnayeurs (Paris: Gallimard, 1925).
338 ‘a sore point in [her] professional career’: Selected Letters of André Gide and Dorothy Bussy, p. 177.
339 ‘What I should like,’ said Lucien: The Counterfeiters, translated by Dorothy Bussy (London: Penguin, 1966), pp. 15-16.
340 Claude Coste calls her ‘the bad mother’: How to Live Together, p. xviii.
341 A translation should be redone every twenty-five years: The Preparation of the Novel, p. 23.
341 Elisabeth W. Bruss shows how the timings of those translations imposed a new rhythm of reading and reception: all of the citations in this section come from the chapter titled ‘Roland Barthes’ in Bruss’s Beautiful Theories: The Spectacle of Discourse in Contemporary Criticism, pp. 362-461.
344 ‘How does one organize one’s sense of being in the world?’: Lucy O’Meara, Roland Barthes at the Collège de France (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), p. 202; Adrienne Ghaly also cites these lines in her ‘Cultural Theory on a Micro-Scale: Roland Barthes’s Lectures at the Collège de France’, p. 47.
347 The love letter is ‘a special dialectic’: A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, p. 157.
347 ‘Allow me to write in French’: Selected Letters of André Gide and Dorothy Bussy, p. 5.
347 Jean Lambert expresses regret: Jean Lambert, ed. Correspondance André Gide–Dorothy Bussy (Paris: Gallimard, 1979, 1981, 1982).
349 ‘My dear Friend,’ Bussy writes to Gide: Selected Letters of André Gide and Dorothy Bussy, p. 4; p. 116.
351 ‘It is no use telling you that I am growing very old now’: Selected Letters of André Gide and Dorothy Bussy, p. 231. The epilogue to the Selected Letters reproduces a page: Selected Letters of André Gide and Dorothy Bussy, pp. 306-7.
352 ‘De tout mon coeur bien fatigué’: Selected Letters of André Gide and Dorothy Bussy, p. 286.
353 ‘Like desire, the love letter waits for an answer’: A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, translated by Richard Howard, p. 149.
354 ‘Je-t’-aime / I-love-you’: A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, translated by Richard Howard, p. 158.
355 Bussy’s reply to Gide is dated six days later: Selected Letters of André Gide and Dorothy Bussy, pp. 286-7.
356 In the preface to his Critical Essays: Critical Essays, translated by Richard Howard (Evanston, III.: Northwestern University Press, 1972), p. xiv.
358 ‘P.S. One word more’: Selected Letters of André Gide and Dorothy Bussy, p. 287.
360 ‘What I liked best about that game’: Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard, p. 50.
363 in the black-and-white photograph I have seen of it: in Roland Barthes: L’inattendu, Le Monde Hors-Série, No. 26, June 2015.
Acknowledgements
Early versions of some passages of this book appeared first in The White Review, Translation Studies and L’Esprit créateur. Many thanks to the editors of those publications.
There are a number of people whose work, conversation, generosity and support have directly or indirectly informed the writing of This Little Art. Thank you to Céline Surprenant, Laura Marcus, Derek Attridge, Nicholas Royle, Diana Knight, Nathalie Léger, Jennifer Crewe and Ron Harris of Columbia University Press, Bryan Eccleshall (for David Pye), Chris Pearson and Patrick Wildgust of Shandy Hall, Nina Wakeford and Raphaël Zarka. Thank you to the translators with whom it was my great privilege and pleasure to translate in the context of a workshop titled ‘Translation as Experimentation’ (which ran as part of the Masters in Cultural Translation, directed by Geoffrey Gilbert of the American University of Paris, between 2011 and 2015). Thank you also to the artists with whom it is such a privilege and pleasure to write (and to get energized and emboldened by) on the Masters in Fine Art at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. Thank you to my colleagues in both institutions, especially Dan Gunn and Daniel Medin of AUP for the Cahier Series, Vivian Rehberg, Petra van der Kooij and Steve Rushton (my Calvino-reading friend) of t
he Piet Zwart Institute. Special thanks to Niels Bekkema, Madison Bycroft, Ash Kilmartin and Katherine McBride who together form our Dutch-English literary translation group. I am very grateful to Daisy Hildyard, Lucy O’Meara and Moosje Moti Goosen who read and commented on the manuscript at different stages of completion, and to Jacques Testard for freedom, reassurance, editing and everything else. There are four close friends and readers whose company in life and whose long-term engagement with this project neither I nor this book could have done without: thank you Daniela Cascella, Geoffrey Gilbert, Anna-Louise Milne and Natasha Soobramanien. Thank you to my Mum and Dad and to Chloe, Tom and Jackson. Finally, thank you to someone whose presence is barely felt in these pages but who has accompanied them and me throughout: Anthony, I dedicate this book to you – and to our sons Arthur and Sam.
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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.
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Copyright © Kate Briggs, 2017
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