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- Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
An essay with the reach and momentum of a novel, Kate Briggs's This Little Art is a genre-bending song for the practice of literary translation, offering fresh, fierce and timely thinking on reading, writing and living with the works of others. Taking her own experience of translating Roland Barthes's lecture notes as a starting point, the author threads various stories together to give us this portrait of translation as a compelling, complex and intensely relational activity. She recounts the story of Helen Lowe-Porter's translations of Thomas Mann, and their posthumous vilification. She writes about the loving relationship between André Gide and his translator Dorothy Bussy. She recalls how Robinson Crusoe laboriously made a table, for him for the first time, on an undeserted island. With This Little Art, a beautifully layered account of a subjective translating experience, Kate Briggs emerges as a truly remarkable writer: distinctive, wise, frank, funny and utterly original.
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‘Kate Briggs’s This Little Art shares some wonderful qualities with Barthes’s own work – the wit, thoughtfulness, invitation to converse, and especially the attention to the ordinary and everyday in the context of meticulously examined theoretical and scholarly questions. This is a highly enjoyable read: informative and stimulating for anyone interested in translation, writing, language, and expression.’
— Lydia Davis, author of Can’t and Won’t
‘In This Little Art, Kate Briggs looks at the “everyday, peculiar thing” that is translation, testing it out, worrying at its questions. She deftly weaves her recurring threads (Roland Barthes, Crusoe’s table, The Magic Mountain, aerobic dance classes) into something fascinatingly elastic and expansive, an essay – meditation? call to arms? – that is full of surprises both erudite and intimate, and rich in challenges to the ways we think about translation. And so, inevitably, to the ways we think about writing, reading, artistry and creativity, too. As a translator, I’m regularly disappointed by what I read about translation – it feels self-indulgent, irrelevant in its over-abstraction – but This Little Art is altogether different. It comes to its revelations through practicality, curiosity, devotion, optimism, an intense and questioning scrutiny, as the work of a great translator so often does.’
— Daniel Hahn, translator of José Eduardo Agualusa and winner of the International Dublin Literary Award in 2017
‘Not so much a demystification as a re-enchantment of the practice of literary translation, that maddening, intoxicating ‘little’ art which yokes humility and hubris, constraint and creativity – in Briggs’s passionate telling, you can practically hear the sparks fly.’
— Deborah Smith, translator of Han Kang and winner of the Man Booker International Prize in 2016
‘Briggs interrogates and celebrates the art of translation. She wears her erudition lightly in this highly readable essay that makes intriguing connections and raises more questions than it answers. Urgent and pertinent questions that challenge us as readers, writers and translators and offer much food for thought.’
— Ros Schwartz, translator of Tahar Ben Jelloun, Georges Simenon and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
‘This Little Art maps the current landscape and disputed territories of literary translation with exquisite precision. With xenophobia on the rise across the western world, the complex art of translation has achieved a new level of relevance for English-language readers and Briggs has crafted an excellent exploration of the reasons why.’
— Idra Novey, author and translator of Clarice Lispector
‘Just as there is something intimate about the act of translation – the translator is inhabiting the text being translated, reading it as closely as possible – there is an intimacy to This Little Art, Kate Briggs’s wonderfully evocative essay on translation. We feel the author is talking to us from across the table about the most important things – novels, language, beauty, art – but in a confidential, friendly way, in a way that makes us listen more closely. Translation, Briggs shows us, is a conversation – between the author and translator, between the translator and reader – and it is this conversation that keeps literature alive. I hope this book will produce not only more readers appreciative of the art of translation, but also more translators willing to engage in the courageous and daunting task of true close reading, that most intimate act we call translation.’
— Charlotte Mandell, translator of Maurice Blanchot, Jonathan Littell and Mathias Enard
THIS LITTLE ART
KATE BRIGGS
CONTENTS
DRAGONESE
It’s Walpurgis-Nacht in the sanatorium and Hans Castorp, the hero of The Magic Mountain, has been made to feel hot and reckless by the atmosphere of carnival. Standing a small distance behind him, in the doorway of the little salon, is Frau Chauchat. She is dressed in a startling gown of thin, dark silk.
Was it black? Probably.
Or, at most, shot with golden brown.
Cut with a modest little neck, round like a schoolgirl’s frock. Hardly so much as to show the base of her throat. Or the collar bones. Or, beneath the soft fringes of her hair, the slightly prominent bone at the back of her neck.
But all the while leaving bare to the shoulder her arms.
Arms so tender and so full.
So cool and so amazingly white, set off against the dark silk of her frock.
To such ravishing effect as to make Hans Castorp close his eyes. And murmur, deep within himself: ‘O my God!’
He had once held a theory about those arms. He had thought, on making their acquaintance for the first time – veiled, as they had been then, in diaphanous gauze – that their indescribable, unreasonable seductiveness was down to the gauze itself. To the ‘illusion’, as he had called it. Folly! The utter, accentuated, blinding nudity of those arms was an experience now so intoxicating, compared with that earlier one, as to leave our man no other recourse than, once again, with drooping head, to whisper, soundlessly: ‘O my God!’
Later, agitated by the silly drama of a drawing game, he’ll walk straight up to her and boldly ask for a pencil.
She’ll stand there, in her paper party cap, looking him up and down.
‘I?’ she’ll ask. ‘Perhaps I have, let me see.’
Eventually, she’ll fetch one up from deep within her leather bag: a little silver one, slender and fragile, scarcely meant for use.
‘Voilà,’ she’ll say, holding it up by its end in front of him, between thumb and forefinger, lightly turning it to and fro.
Because she won’t quite hand it to him, because she’ll give it to him and withhold it, he’ll take it, so to speak, without receiving it: that is, he’ll hold out his hand, ready to grasp the delicate thing, but without actually touching it.
‘C’est à visser, tu sais,’ she’ll say. You have to unscrew it.
And with heads bent over it together, she’ll show him the mechanism. It would be quite ordinary, the little needle of hard, probably worthless lead, coming down as one loosened the screw.
They’ll stand bending toward each other. The stiff collar of his evening dress serving to support his chin.
She’ll speak to him in French, and he’ll follow her.
He’ll speak to her in French uneasily, feeling for the sense.
A little further on she’ll command, a bit exasperated and more impersonally now: ‘Parlez allemand s’il vous plait!’
And in the copy of the novel I have open next to me as I read and write, Hans Castorp replies in English. Clavdia Chauchat has asked him, pointedly, in French, to address her in German, and his reply is written for me in English. I mean, of course it is. It’s an everyday peculiar thing: I am reading The Magic Mountain in Helen Lowe-Porter’s translation, first published in 1927. A novel set high up in the Swiss Alps, one of Germany’s most formative contributions to modern European literature (so the back cover of my edition tells me) and here they all are acting and interacting – not always, but for the most part – in English. And I go with it. I do. Of course I do. I willingly accept these terms. Positively and very gladly, in fact. Because with French but no German – I look at my bookshelves: also, no Italian and no Norwegian, no Japanese and no Spanish, no Danish and no Korean (and so on and so on) – I know that this is how the writing comes:
An unassuming young man named Hans Castorp travels up from his native city of Hamburg to Davos-Dorf. When the train stops at the small mountain station, he is surprised to hear his cousin’s familiar voice: ‘Hullo,’ says Joachim, ‘there you are!’
Roland Barthes speaks into the microphone on 7 January 1977. It is the day of the inaugural lecture, marking his appointment to Chair of Literary Semiology at the Collège de France. Towards the end of his address he’ll speak of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and the strange age of his body. How he realized, upon rereading the novel the other day, that the tuberculosis he had experienced as a young man can’t have been the current treatable version of the disease. How it was, down virtually to the last detail, the disease of the novel, which is set in 1907. Barthes will speak of rediscovering Mann’s novel again the other day (for the purpose of preparing the lecture course on living-together he’d begin the following week), and realizing, quite suddenly, with a kind of stupefaction – the kind of stunned bewilderment, he says, that only the obvious can produce – that this made his body historical. In a sense, the contemporary of Hans Castorp’s. Its age much older than his own age on that January day, which was sixty-one. What to do? This is the question that the lecture comes around to ask. What to do in this old and untimely body – now, in this new setting, on this new public stage, in what he’ll call the new hospitality of the Collège de France? Forget, is the answer he’ll offer. Forget and be carried forward by the force of forgetting, which is the forward-tilting force of all living life: forget the past, forget age, and press forward. Which is to say: begin again. Even, be born again. ‘I must make myself younger than I am,’ he’ll say in Richard Howard’s translation of the lecture. ‘I must fling myself into the illusion that I am contemporary with the young bodies present before me.’ And so, right here, before those young bodies and witnessed by them, start ‘a new life’ with new concerns, new urgencies, new desires. Already he’ll have said: ‘I sincerely believe that at the origin of teaching such as this we must always locate a fantasy, which can vary from year to year.’
For a long time, the inaugural lecture was the only part of Barthes’s Collège de France teachings available for reading: first published as Leçon in French in 1978, Richard Howard’s translation was then included in Susan Sontag’s A Barthes Reader, which appeared in 1982. The notes for the lecture course he’d begin a week later – that is, on 12 January 1977 – would not be published in French until 2003, and the English translation a further decade after that. These lags in publishing and translating that produce new readerships: bodies like my own, as yet unborn at the time of the lectures themselves, listening now to the sound files of the audio recordings, reading the notes, making them speak and be spoken to by – making them contemporary with – my own present moment. ‘Who are my contemporaries?’ Barthes would ask in a lecture delivered a few months later: ‘Whom do I live with?’ The calendar, telling only of the forward march of chronological time, is of little help. The way it brackets together work produced in the same set of years, as if shared historical context were the condition or the guarantor of a relationship. The way it holds more distantly dated relations apart. My copy of The Magic Mountain lies open next to Howard’s translation of the inaugural lecture, the one that was delivered before a packed auditorium; all those young bodies, they must be older now, pressed together in their seats, the aisles, out into the corridors. ‘I should probably begin with a consideration of the reasons which have led the Collège de France to receive a fellow of doubtful nature,’ is how Barthes opened his address. Although that can’t really have been what he said.
What then? What, really, did he say? Or, to put the question another way: What is it, exactly, that the translators are asking me to go along with? Not that Barthes’s public discourse or that Mann’s prose should appear in English – the idea that this is all wholly normal. I know, on some level, that it’s not. I know that Mann wrote in German. I know – really, I know – that Barthes wrote and delivered this lecture in French, in Paris, at the Collège de France (he’ll even speak, in the lecture, of what it is to speak in French). I know it in the sense that, if queried, I’d be likely to say: Yes, yes, of course, I do realize this. It’s not quite that I am thinking, when I read Barthes’s address in English, that this is all exactly as it should be. It’s more that when it comes to writing and reading translations the question of what is wholly normal or truly plausible, of what was really said or written, gets suspended, slightly. The translator asks me to agree to its suspension. To suspend, or to suspend even further, my disbelief. This can’t really have been what he said (Barthes spoke in French; he claimed to barely speak English at all); nevertheless, I’ll go with it. In this sense, there’s something from the outset speculative and, I would say, of the novelistic about the translator’s project, whatever the genre of writing she is writing in. The translator asks us to go with the English of Joachim’s greeting, the English of Barthes’s lecture, in much – or is it exactly? – the same way as the fiction-writer asks us to credit the lake just visible from the station; to see rather than query the grey waters, how the firs on its shores are dense and then thin.
Here’s a novel with a mountain on the cover. A novel set high up in the Swiss Alps, one of Germany’s most formative contributions to modern European literature. I turn to the first chapter, the small opening paragraph: ‘An unassuming young man was travelling, in midsummer, from his native city of Hamburg to Davos-Platz in the Canton of the Grisons, on a three weeks’ visit.’ And the magic of it is that I get caught up – to begin with unexpectedly, and then really quite quickly and for a long while caught up – with this journey, the steep and steady climb that never comes to an end. Which means that somewhere I must have already said: Yes. Okay, I accept. Look at me: I’m gone, I’ve gone with it.
‘But there really is not room to dance,’ she’ll say – eventually, when I reach this scene. This strange, abruptly and extensively bilingual scene, marking the midway point of The Magic Mountain.
‘Would you like to dance?’ he’d asked, some pages after the exchange with the small silver pencil.
And then again: ‘What do you say, shall we dance?’
‘But there really is not room,’ she’ll reply. ‘Et puis sur le tapis –,’ switching without warning from English to French and back again – ‘Let us look on:’
In the scene I am reading, Clavdia Chauchat and Hans Castorp speak to one another in French. Which both presents and stages a problem:
‘Winter is descending on Minnesota and I’m thinking I’d like to give Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain a second reading,’ writes a reader named nanojath. It’s 8.19 p.m. on 29 October 2008 and he has just posted for advice on ask.com:
‘Problem: in the translation I own, the extensive French dialog, most particularly in the Walpurgis-Night section (last section of Chapter 5) is not translated, and I don’t speak French.’
‘I’ve looked for translations online a couple of times but this machine translation’ – the link he provides is broken – ‘is the best I’ve come up with, and although a reasonable amount of semantic content can be dredged out of that, it just won’t do (for me) as a companion to reading the actual novel.
My ideal would be a proper literary translation I could grab online. Second choice would be input on translations that render this dialog in English, so I can troll around the local library system for a copy to photocopy the relevant section.
I really don’t want to buy another copy of The Magic Mountain.’
This scene presents a problem – a translation problem whose solution here clearly presents a reading problem – but it also lays bare the fiction, the thin layer (or degree of slight separation?) of further fiction that the translation introduces and asks us to accept. (Fiction, writes Barthes – I’m paraphrasing here: like the transfers used in transfer-printing, like the technique of printing onto ceramics; ‘a slight detachment, a slight separation which forms a complete, coloured picture, like a decalcomania.’) To be clear, if Hans Castorp is prepared to address Clavdia Chauchat so hesitantly and uneasily in French, it is in the first place because he can: twenty years old, a serious young man in pre-War Europe, he could speak more than one European language, at least a little bit. But there’s more to it than that. If Hans Castorp is prepared to announce, in French, his decision to address her in a language he doesn’t speak well – ‘moi, tu le remarques bien, je ne parle guère le français’ – speech-acting it, as the philosophers might call it: saying it and doing it at the same time. Here I am writing in English (so I am). Now I am writing in French (no, and this is the problem: no you’re not). If he is actively choosing, in this moment of observing the dancing, the strange spectacle of the masked patients of the sanatorium, dancing now, on the carpet before them, it is because he prefers it: I prefer this language to my own, he says, ‘je préfère cette langue à la mienne, car pour moi, parler français, c’est parler sans parler, en quelque manière – sans responsabilité, ou comme nous parlons dans un rêve. Tu comprends?’ It is because speaking in French, for him, is like speaking without speaking somehow. It is like speaking without responsibility – or in the way we speak in a dream. Do you see?
Yes, French. Addressing her, speaking with her, he prefers French – he chooses French.
But over what?
Over German. It would have to be German of course.
Of course, of course.
Suddenly, and as if for the first time, this scene makes me aware of the agreement I made. I come up against the belief I suspended:
So this was never in English, then. This was always in German.
And German as a language quite different from the French that the characters are now choosing to speak.
Or, this was always supposed to have been in German, and to be received as if it were still, somehow, in German, and I did know this, implicitly, even as I accepted the novel in English. This is the belief-suspension that reading a translation requires: even when all logics point to the characters speaking, acting and interacting, to the prose having been written, the feelings and ideas having been articulated, in German (the story of an unassuming young man making his way, in midsummer, from his native city of Hamburg to Davos-Platz), here it all is in English, and here I am being invited – expected? – to go with it.
And I do. Clearly, I do.
It’s an everyday peculiar thing: an altogether obvious and necessary thing, only right now producing a whole new bewilderment.
And then it occurs to me: if the novel that Mann originally wrote in German has been translated, comprehensively, into English (since this is, after all, TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN, as the title page of my edition announces in full caps) then the long sections of French in this exchange can’t have been translated at all. I mean, these passages, the lines of French that I have been copying out – which appear in French on the page, ‘even in the English translation’, as nanojath points out – can only be transcribed Thomas Mann.
The translator has lifted the French passages directly from the German edition and is hoping for enough familiarity on the part of her readers that they’ll be capable of reading them.
Or, if not that, then enough goodwill on the part of her readers that they’ll be willing to skim over them.
Then again, what else was she going to do?
A note. It’s true. She might have translated the French into English and written a note, making us nod as we read: flagging up from the bottom of the page or somewhere else in the book that what we’re about to read or have just read is/was said in French, the rest of it in German, and here is all of it in English. Which is what John E. Woods does in his retranslation of the novel, published in 1995. (The newer translation that jedicus, another ask.com poster, answering back from across the internet just twelve minutes later, will direct nanojath toward: have a look on Google Books, he suggests; there might be a few pages of the Woods translation missing, but you should now be able to read most of Chapter 5.)
Or italics. She might have translated the French into English and marked the difference between the English-translated-from-the-French and the English-translated-from-the-German in italics. Or a new font maybe, like in the dragon-training book I have been reading aloud to my sons at bedtime. When the hero speaks a bit of Dragonese, and in all the places where the dragons speak to one another in their peculiar deep-sea language, their words are written out in English but printed in something like Adobe Gothic. Which makes for an interesting evening conundrum: should I assume a dragon accent when I read the dragon bits aloud? Like the villains once did in the movies? Or should I just tell them, announcing as I read: right, okay, so, listen boys, you’ll hear this bit in English, but since it’s a dragon who’s speaking, and speaking in a language that no human, bar the hero, is supposed to understand, what you’ll truly be hearing, according to the logic of the book, is a kind of live instant translation. A bit like that scene in the Bible, the New Testament, which I realize that perhaps you don’t know, but there’s this scene where the Apostles speak and the miracle of it is that everyone hears their words as being spoken directly and simultaneously in their own languages, with no delay and with no interval. Speech multiplied and diversified but in this moment without difference – as a counter to the story of Babel, this time without it apparently making any difference. Or the scenes in Elena Ferrante’s novels, the ones I have stacked in a pile by my bed, when her characters abruptly switch from Italian into dialect and back again but rather than producing passages of dialect on the page, Ferrante asks me to imagine it. Even in the Italian, so I learn from an interview with her translator Ann Goldstein, she asks her readers to imagine it. And to hear the switch, to hear the sudden change in cadence, in vowel-sounds, in familiarity, in violence and in urgency, and in this instance to register what this switch means, and all the real and powerful difference it makes, but without actually seeing it or hearing it or reading it. And all these further invitations to suspend my disbelief, to note without having to contend with the very real and very material differences between these different languages, recalling somewhere, for me, a difficulty that Gilles Deleuze sets out at the beginning of an essay called (in Daniel W. Smith’s translation) ‘He Stuttered’. It has to do with dragons (really, it does. Or at least to my mind and on some level it does). It’s often said that you can tell a bad novelist by his over-use of speech tags, writes Deleuze, in my memory of how the essay begins. You know, the kind of writer who wants to distinguish between his characters. But instead of introducing variety into their manners of speaking, will simply write: ‘he murmured’, ‘he sobbed’, ‘he giggled’ and so on. We can laugh at this, but in fact it’s a tricky thing. Because, say you’re a writer and you want your character to stutter. Or, say you’re a writer and you want the dragons in your story to speak in some ancient icy reptile tongue. What do you do?
Well, it would appear that you can only do one of two things. Either, you can say it. You can say to your reader: this is how they speak. You can announce it. You can indicate the stutter, tagging it, but without actually performing it:
‘No!’ he stuttered. (‘Yes!’ iced the dragons, in their cold lizardy language, which no one bar the hero is supposed to understand.)
Or, you can write the stutter out. You can show the stuttering on the page, you can perform it, but without announcing it:
‘N-n-n-n-o!’ he said. (‘Yes!’ said the dragons.)
What else are you going to do?
In fact, it soon becomes clear that I don’t need to do anything. My kids don’t need me to keep reminding them of the dragon-difference. They’ve got it; they get it: this is what books do, Mum. Or, this is what good books do: they make us hear the different voices. They make us feel and in this way believe that they are written in different languages, in different orders of language here competing against each other, even when they appear to be, or when convention or convenience or the contested boundaries of so-called national literatures insist that they are written in just one. And they’re right, of course they’re right. And this might be somewhere along the way towards what Deleuze is saying in his essay too, in relation to what he’ll come to offer as a third option available to or thrust by circumstance upon the writer, which would be neither to announce it, exactly, nor quite to perform it but to write in such a way that would make the language itself stutter. And stammer. To write – perhaps? – in the way Hans Castorp speaks French. How he can say, in English, ‘Oh I speak German, even in French,’ and I can see that this is true: that his hesitant and uneasy French does indeed appear to have been somehow modulated, patterned – stuttered? – by the difference of the other language, as well as his agitation, his nerves. I’d like to talk about all this a bit more: to find the passages in the dragon-training book where we think we can hear and feel the charge, the strange tremor of the ‘dragon-speak’ even when they’re not actually speaking, where we feel that language itself has been made colder, or older. But you know, it’s bedtime, and it’s no surprise that my kids have not been listening for a while now. They were long ago already somewhere else: scaling the cliff-face above the sea, into the black cave with the bag for the hunt. I’m the one who wants them to pause on the threshold of believing for a moment, and think for a bit longer about how this translation pact works: the translator as necessarily invested in instating her own further fiction, and working to make it hold. Not because it is her all-purpose and always default intention to produce unremarkable English. To write German, or Italian or French prose again as if it had all been originally produced right here, and then to insist that this is all normal and how things should be. But for the prior reason that before we’re in a position to register the strangeness, the stuttering or otherwise of the prose – the ways in which the project of translating Mann or Ferrante or Dragonese might put new pressures on the English language, forcing the discovery of new, or tapping into old and neglected resources. Which is to say: before we’re even in a position to critique or worry over the decisions made by the translator, some provisional agreement has already been made. We have accepted the book in English. We have accepted that the book is now written in what appears to be English. The translator has made this thing that we now have at least minimally in common. And we share it – we are already sharing in it – in the most basic sense that we can at least now hold it and read it and copy out from it. I am a translator, responsible in part for the delayed appearance of Barthes’s lecture notes in English: beginning work on translating the first Collège de France lecture course some thirty or so years after the fact. I am also an invested reader of books in translation, altogether willing to go with what the translator is asking me to accept. And it occurs to me that if I keep returning to this scene in The Magic Mountain, to this extraordinary scene of difference and desire as played out by the offsetting of one historical language against the other, and by speaking the one inside or while at the same time speaking the other, and with all of it happening for me in a third, it is because when reading translations I, too, seem to have trouble making myself pause, and registering for a moment. And registering not just like some box I might tick, unthinkingly, casually, on some webpage or other – yes okay cookies, yes okay translation, I get it, I’ve got it, I accept your terms – but to stop and properly register. With a small gasp in the course of reading. That if the French is still Mann’s, lifted intact and unaltered from the German text in which it was once embedded. Then what this means. What this also means. What this must also mean is that all the pages of prose framing the conversation written in French. Which is to say, the whole novel: the great climb and descent of The Magic Mountain, including the midpoint sentences I read and wrote out above – I’m thinking again of the thin, dark silk. Yes, and – what was it? The soft fringes of her hair.
The slightly prominent bone at the back of her neck.
The amazingly white arms.
The mechanism with its hard little needle of lead – were handled by Helen Lowe-Porter.
We receive them twice-written; the second time by her.
DON’T DO TRANSLATIONS
Don’t do translations, I remember being advised, about a decade ago, by a well-meaning professor. At least, not if you’re planning on making a living. Or, let’s say, on getting a job in the university. It’s a thankless thing, really. A ‘little art,’ Lowe-Porter called it, despite the great determining resonance her own work would have. You could try writing a monograph instead. Perhaps a monograph about translation. But don’t spend your time, and certainly not all your time, on doing them.
The first time I heard the word monograph I wasn’t exactly sure what it meant.
The dictionary offers ‘a learned treatise on a small area of learning. Or a written account of a single thing’. Which makes things difficult. Because translating is not a small area of learning, and nor is a translation ever an uncomplicatedly single thing. But it turns out that academics use the word to mean something different, making the mono, the just one, refer not to the subject matter – which might be a vast area of learning, or a book about many things – but to how the book is written. A monograph is a book written by just one person: a singly-authored original contribution to knowledge.
Don’t do translations, he said, a decade or so ago.
Not if you want. Well, what exactly?
What exactly did I want?
Now I think of it, a different question might have been: what is it that you have found in the practice of translation? That is, in the writing of literary translations – since, among all the many instances of translation currently happening everywhere and all the time in the world, this is the form your activity seems to take? What is it about this activity, in its difference from single-handed original authorship – the way it complicates the authorial position: sharing it, usurping it, sort of dislocating it. But the way it gets things said and written, heard and read nonetheless, by these other, more distributed means. What is it about the practice of writing translations? And how (in whose terms exactly?) do you propose to properly register what’s going on with this – with your – work?
The American-born Helen Lowe-Porter began her translation career in the early 1920s. She was living in Oxford, married to a university professor and the mother of three daughters. As John C. Thirlwall describes it in his account of her relations with Thomas Mann (In Another Language. A Record of the Thirty-Year Relationship between Thomas Mann and His English Translator, Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter, published in 1966) ‘she did not want to vegetate intellectually’, and so had ‘let it be known that she was available as a translator from Italian, French or German’. She was sent a copy of the German edition of Mann’s Buddenbrooks; she read it and liked it. In her own article, ‘On Translating Thomas Mann’, published in 1950, she writes: ‘to me personally Buddenbrooks was a welcome and delightful phenomenon’. Not at all sentimental; unlike so much of the work published in the wake of German Romanticism, here was ‘emotion cooled off and served up on ice’. She began work on a translation and ‘greatly enjoyed translating it’.
Early in 1924, Mann read parts of her work in progress and wrote in praise of her skill and sensitivity. He suggested that they meet. Perhaps he and Frau Mann could drop in to see her in Oxford? But they didn’t specify a date. As a result, when they did turn up, no one was at home; the Manns had to wait. Lowe-Porter imagines them passing the time: ‘I feel sure T. Mann looked over all the books in our scanty library … and did his best to size up this unknown instrument which – due to the vicissitudes of those war and postwar years – must willy-nilly (and of course unless he could find a better one) serve him to change the garment of his art into a better one which might clothe her for the market place until times changed.’ The translator as an unknown instrument: a tool to be used, a service provider, engaged in undressing and carefully re-dressing the literary work of art for the purposes of a new market. Like a lady’s maid. I know nothing, really, about lady’s maids, other than what I’ve seen in period dramas on the TV, but this is the first image that springs to mind. Like a lady’s maid who corresponded with Albert Einstein, Herman Broch and Theodor Adorno. An unknown instrument who was ‘known throughout her life for her passionate interest in literature and her outspoken liberal views’, as David Horton describes her in his recent book Thomas Mann in English. A stay-at-home mother of three who deliberately sought out complex translation work as a means to challenge herself intellectually. Only apparently to downplay its complexity, its intellectual challenge, in a published account of her work (let me just change the garment of your art…).
Then aged forty-four, Helen Lowe-Porter would continue work on the translations of Mann’s books for the next twenty or so years, stopping only in her late sixties, partly because of ill health and partly to pursue, and to resume, her own literary projects: poems, a play. Her translations would be extraordinarily successful in the new marketplace: fast-selling, popular with the reading public and the means by which Thomas Mann would secure his reputation as ‘one of the leading German novelists of the twentieth century’, which is how Todd Kontje puts it in the preface to the Cambridge Introduction to Thomas Mann, as well as ‘one of the few to transcend national and language boundaries to achieve major stature in the English-speaking world’. A line quoted by David Horton, who makes the point that this ‘major stature is to a very large extent the direct result of the efforts of his authorized translator’. New versions of Mann’s works have appeared in the years since Knopf’s claim on the rights expired in the 1970s, but Lowe-Porter’s work is still everywhere in print.
I read The Magic Mountain in Lowe-Porter’s translation, as part of the project of translating Barthes’s Comment vivre ensemble, the lecture course he began a week after the inaugural lecture, which in English is titled How to Live Together. My copy of the novel is a bit battered now – the cover is creased. One long crease runs up the front of it like a life-line, past the bright cluster of buildings foregrounded at the base of a mountain, through the black fir forest above them, scaling the greyer, more distant peak beyond it and then up and out into the white sky and off the uppermost edge of the book. The Magic Mountain, with its structured sanatorium-living, is a key text for Barthes in the lecture course, one of a small selection of tutor texts – or textes d’appui as he calls them. Supporting texts: the texts that brace us, the ones we lean on, testing them to see if they’ll support our weight; the texts we always seem to be in conversation with, whether directly or indirectly; the texts that enable us to say or write anything at all. Every discourse, says Barthes, is generated and sustained by its own more or less idiosyncratic, imperfectly remembered selection. This is not so much a comment as a principle. ‘There is an age at which we teach what we know,’ he’d said in the inaugural lecture. ‘Then comes another age at which we teach what we do not know; this is called research.’ In this digressive, excursive teaching (‘research, not a lecture,’ he’ll stress at the end of the first session), the practice was never to be exhaustive, or systematic: to work or walk in a straight line toward some generalizing theory, an ultimate grand idea. Instead, to set down a fantasy. And then to induce from the fantasy, a research project. The fantasy for this year of a form of living together that would accommodate rather than dictate the individual rhythms of its small-scale community. Allowing for something like solitude, as Barthes puts it, with regular interruptions. What kinds of structures, spatial or temporal, would enable this? Where to look for suggestion and detail, for models and counter-models that could be simulated, or already find their part-equivalents, in life? As materials to think with, Barthes compiles this unlikely corpus – an unexpected collection of writings and novels: The Magic Mountain, Robinson Crusoe, the texts of the Desert Fathers, Zola’s novel set in an apartment building, André Gide’s account of the real-life sequestered woman of Poitiers. The inquiry will proceed sketchily, says Barthes. Each lecture will offer just a few lines of approach; open a few possible dossiers. I’ll only be marking out the contours of these zones of interest. Like the squares on a chequerboard, he says, which perhaps one day I’ll fill in. Marking out the spaces, setting the places. A place for animals. Also for bureaucracy, for flowers and for food. I see it like a table: seating you next to you and you next to you, anticipating the conversations between topics, the arguments. The invitation to his audience was to collaborate actively in the inquiry. To fill in the suggested squares themselves, or to propose new ones. And they did: they spoke with Barthes between the sessions, or left notes, and wrote letters, asking questions, making corrections, providing alternative references, redirecting the path of the research toward their own different concerns, which might be one way of describing to myself what I think I am doing here.
It is easy not to think about translation. This has to do, of course, with the way translations typically get presented to readers: the name of the original author in full caps and bold; the translator’s name smaller or left off the cover altogether; reviewers failing to register the fact of reading in and the creative labour of translation. But perhaps it also has to do with the way we tend to talk about – and so also experience? – prose translations. That is, prose translations, as provisionally distinct from all the other ways an existing work of art can be reproduced, remediated or re-versioned. From all the many other practices of redoing, rewriting and remaking – of working with extant material – with which the writing of translations in the so-called ‘standard’ sense is always proximate and talking to, sharing gestures and problematics, but with which it is not, I don’t think, wholly interchangeable. The point is this: unlike those other re-mediations, which might require us to acknowledge the difference of their new materials as well as the intervention, the new gesture, of their reproducer, translations seem to give us the permission to say, quite unworriedly: that book? Yeah, I’ve read it. They give us the permission, or we take it. I’ve read Mann’s novels. I’ve read Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain, but not Doctor Faustus, or the Joseph books. I’ve read most of Flaubert. I’ve read Ferrante. And I really like her work a lot. I’ve read Barthes. It’s true that I might sometimes qualify this. I might say (or hear other people say): actually, no. You haven’t. You haven’t really read Barthes, for example, until you’ve read his work in French. But more often than not the possibility of reading in French is offered as a kind of surplus value. As in: there is reading. Yes, agreed. Let’s hold to that: there is something like the baseline of reading that is made possible by translation. And then, added to that, there is the additional value of reading in the original. Does the first assertion, the first reading experience, always have the other somewhere in mind? This is the question that Gérard Genette asks, briefly, in a book called The Work of Art, translated by G. M. Goshgarian. Or, to put the question another way: imagine I were to tell you that The Magic Mountain is in the living room. Imagine. The reason why you’re not a bit bewildered by this is because we both know – we both seem to already know – that what I really mean to say (what the work of metonymy is enabling me to say) is the novel is in the living room: my copy, our copy or someone else’s copy of the novel is in the living room. Does something of the same order happen when talking about the books I’ve read? When I tell you that I have read The Magic Mountain is this a quick small-part-for-the-whole way for me to tell you that I’ve read The Magic Mountain in English translation? The title here standing in for the translation which, in its own complicated way, is standing in for the original – each slightly smaller, reduced part (the title, the translation) pointing to some further, just out of reach and more expansive aesthetic experience (the real one this time, the authentic one)? Talking with you about the books I’ve read, and affirming that I have read them, is this what I mean?
Possibly. Or, no. That is, I don’t think so.
