This Little Art by Kate Briggs

I’m back from a week in Northern Ireland, and I have a pile of books I’ve been meaning to talk about. Some of those are books that I read whilst I was away, but the first one I want to talk about is one that I read shortly before. It’s This Little Art (2017) by Kate Briggs, which I bought in Libreria – an independent bookshop off Brick Lane. I’d seen a few book bloggers writing about it, and I couldn’t resist.

The book is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, a beautiful and very simple edition – very sleek and chic and all things like that. It’s all about translation. Briggs is herself a translator, having translated some of Roland Barthes’ seminar notes from French to English. Don’t stop reading this review quite yet. While that may seem like the most niche thing known to man, this book is extremely accessible, even to people like me whose French is extremely rusty. Well, ‘rusty’ makes it sound like I once knew French, which is not true – or ‘vrai’. Ithankyou.

The book takes the reader on a discursive, surprisingly pacy adventure through the different facets of translation and how understanding translation can help you understand your relationship with authors, writing, books, and even one’s own self respect. the title is a quotation from Helen Lowe Porter, who apparently translated Thomas Mann works for much of his career, which became her career. She was using those three words to deprecatingly refer to translation, and Briggs looks quite a lot at how Lowe-Porter’s life and reputation were shaped by the debates relating to translation. Some of the most interesting sections, for those interested in literary feuding and scandal, were when Briggs talks about a famous demolition of Lowe-Porter’s work that appeared in some literary journal or other. But Briggs puts this into a fine tapestry of other debates about translators, including discussions about her own suitability to take on the work that she has done.

‘Tapestry’ is perhaps a good word to describe this book. It has the unconventional format of many areas of white on the page. While some pages are full of paragraphs, others have only a few lines at the top; each thought is given only the space it needs, and there’s a generosity with margins and white space that is very unusual in modern publishing. This feels perhaps odd at first, but soon becomes the only way that one could write or read a book like this. It is almost dream-like, how one thought leads to another, whether about Briggs’ own life or about the philosophy of translation or about particular nuances of individual words in different languages. I can only imagine that Briggs did have to do the usual editing that any writer has to do, but it is hard to believe that this book ever existed in any other form than that which it currently does. Each word leads so perfectly to the next, each moment follows beautifully and logically from the one that came before, that it feels as though it has emerged whole and wonderful from her pen.

As such, it is also difficult to compartmentalise. To pull any individual thought out from this book feels like pulling a thread from that tapestry – it only works at its finest when seen in the whole. And please don’t think that this is an unduly academic or self-indulgent book. The back cover talks about it having the momentum of a novel, and I was very sceptical – but that is exactly what it has. There is wisdom without sacrificing humanity; philosophy without losing humour or groundedness. I have a feeling that Briggs could write something brilliant on any topic, but choosing one about which she is so evidently passionate means that we have a true gem unfurled before us. I’ll leave you with a quote – the entirety of p.146, in fact – but I do encourage anybody to get a copy. (And, in passing, I will apologise for any odd typos in this review – I have been largely dictating it, as my RSI is playing up, this time in both hands. Off to a physio to see if she can sort me out!)

We need translations. We do, of course we do. The world needs them. And translation is work undertaken in response – direct or indirect response – to that demand. But the nature of the work involved, the time that writing a translation takes, together with its lack of material support, its little pay and uneven appreciation, will inevitably narrow the pool of people actually capable of answering it. Translation is necessary, vital work. It is also deeply pleasurable and instructive and intensely time-consuming work. Approaching a kind of leisure activity, then, but one with its own precarious economy;its per-word fees (as if translating one word, one sequence of words, one book made of words, were ever equivalent to translating another); its occasional prizes. It is not my aim to celebrate these conditions, exactly; it’s rather to recognise them in order for there to be a chance of varying them. As well to point out – no doubt too fast – that even these conditions (these apparently ideal conditions? The lady translator translating what she loves, working from home, grateful for but not entirely reliant on what Helen Lowe-Porter calls the ‘dribble of money’, or otherwise secure enough to risk trying to make the various dribbles of money work) are complicated.

5 thoughts on “This Little Art by Kate Briggs

  • November 18, 2018 at 9:04 am
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    This does sound really interesting – and very accessible, too. Fitzcaraldo seem to have published some excellent books over the last few years. We need forward-thinking publishers like this, especially in the current times.

    Reply
    • November 22, 2018 at 4:41 pm
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      We definitely do! I have been so tempted and not known quite where to start, so I’ll have to hunt for recommendations.

      Reply
  • November 18, 2018 at 5:58 pm
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    Ok, well I’m obviously going to *have* to read this, aren’t I? I’ve only read one Fitzcarraldo so far (Flights) but that was incredible so exploring their books could be another dangerous rabbit hole… ;)

    Reply
    • November 22, 2018 at 4:42 pm
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      You DO need to read it!

      Reply

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