Intriguing meditations on translation, writing, and literature

The little art Kate Briggs writes about is translation. She attributes the description to Helen Lowe-Porter, the first translator of Hermann Mann’s Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain. Briggs’s book is an extraordinarily rich series of meditations—I hesitate to call them essays, some are no more than a sentence—on writing, literature, translation.

Briggs herself is a translator and, based on the evidence within This Little Art, was simultaneously translating Ronald Barthes’s The Preparation of the Novel as she wrote the book. Because I’ve never read Barthes, Briggs’s writing about him and her engagement with his lecture notes has piqued my interest; I now have two books of his waiting on my to-read shelf.

Until I began doing it I never gave translation much thought. With my interest in things Japanese, I was aware I could not have read Kawabata, Mishima, or Tanizaki without their translators. I heard the rumor that Kawabata would not have won the Nobel Prize in 1968 (the first Japanese to do so) had the judges not been able to read his works in translation. But what is there to say about it this little art? One so little that publishers occasionally leave the translator’s name off a book’s cover.

As it turns out there’s lots to say. And Briggs says a lot to say and says it well: “When I teach translation (I am a translator and a writer and a tutor), I am often surprised by how often students are surprised to discover that translating involves writing, that its most vital prerequisite is an interest in writing, for the reason that written translations have to be written.”

That made me wonder whether it is possible be a good translator and a poor writer? How do translations fail (other than misunderstanding the original)? My questions provoked a lively discussion among a private translators group on Facebook (and I will post about it). But what does a translator do these days in contrast, apparently, to the time when the goal was replace every word in the original language (then usually Greek or Latin) with an equivalent English word. 

(Do that and you get something like: “The friends him they abandon, the father not approve the his decision, only the mother him is close” from “Gli amici lo abbandonano, il padre non approva la sua decisione, solo la madre gli è vicina.”)

Briggs quotes Douglas Robinson: “Translators are never, and should never be forced to be (or to think of themselves as), neutral, impersonal transferring devices. Translators’ personal experiences—emotions, motivations, attitudes, associations—are not only allowable in the formation of a working [translation], they are indispensable.”

She says that the translator knows that the work “she is translating is not hers: she knows that it didn’t originate with her; it not something that she has already written or said.” Indeed, she may believe she’s not capable of writing something like the original, “and perhaps this is part of its appeal.”

Barthes cites Julio Cortázar, who translated Defoe into Spanish, as writing, “I would advise a young writer who is having difficulty writing—if it’s friendly to offer advice—that he should stop writing for himself for a while and do translation; that he should translate good literature and one day he will discover that he is writing with an ease he didn’t have before.”

This Little Art is not light reading (or not for me). It raises all kinds of interesting questions. What do you do if you are translating from the German (or whatever) and a character speaks briefly in French (or whatever)? Leave the French and trust your English-speaking readers will get the gist? Translate it into English and tag it “she said in French”? 

(To indicate characters were speaking Japanese in one of my novels, I italicized that dialogue rather than tag it. I’m not sure that works either.)

What do you do if you’re translating Barthes (or whoever) into English and he himself translates into French Japanese haiku that have already been translated into English—and he does not cite a source? Briggs managed to identify the source and then struggled to identify the poems Barthes translated. She then apparently went back to the English. Forget the original Japanese.

But while This Little Art may not be light reading, it is certainly worth reading if you have any interest in translation, writing, or literature. Indeed it’s worth reading more than once.  And although it does not have an index or a bibliography, it does have extensive notes with enough citations to keep a diligent student occupied for a good long while.