“’Please, sir, speak German!’ ‘Oh, but I am speaking German, even if I am speaking French.’” That, of course, is from The Magic Mountain. I remember vividly the frustration this chapter cost me when I first read the book as a teenager, in the translation of H.T. Lowe-Porter, who had elected to leave the French dialogue in French, carrying only the German over into English. I was studying German in high school, but knew not a word of French. And then imagine my dismay, twenty-five or thirty years later, when I picked up the more recent version of Thomas Mann’s great novel, in a translation by John E. Woods. This time I’ll be able to understand those French passages!—I thought. How crushed I was to discover that Woods had robbed me of the opportunity to congratulate myself my partial conquest of romance languages; he’d translated the French as well as the German, signaling the difference between the two, as in the passage I just quoted, merely through the use of italics. Kate Briggs starts by trying, maybe a little too adamantly, to make the reader more alert to the “novelistic” aspect of the translator’s métier, namely the way translation lulls the reader into suspending disbelief, for instance by pretending that someone who speaks German even when speaking French could somehow do so in English. Not, mind you, that her goal is readerly disbelief. What she desires is that one “pause on the threshold of believing for a moment, and think for a bit longer about how this translation pact works.” She’s not like the willfully demystifying early Barthes, but like the more novelistic, and seductive late Barthes whom she’s translated—or one might say, the latest-of-the-late Barthes, for she says that her Barthes is that of his final lecture course, The Preparation of the Novel, the one he concluded two days before the accident that would end his life a month later, and which she has also translated. (I hadn’t known about Briggs’ book when I read Barthes’ lecture notes, but when Lisa Robertson praised it in a comment on my Instagram, I had to read it posthaste.) Briggs is a bit like the character in an Iris Murdoch novel she mentions, who meets a translator and asks inconveniently Wittgensteinesque questions like, “What do you mean when you say that you think the meaning in French?” and “If you see a picture in our mind how do you know it’s a French picture?” What she says of this character’s questioning can also be true of hers: “This sometimes became very exasperating.” But this is the kind of exasperation I’d be happy to take more of. I’ve been thinking a lot about translation lately and trying my hand at it a bit (poetry, which compounds the some of the difficulties offered by prose, although thankfully, in most cases, offering its frustrations in bite-size doses—perfect for a dilettante like me, what Briggs calls, without limitation of gender, a “lady translator”). And I’ve been reading around, desultorily, in the theory of translation as well, but nothing has so heartened me in my own efforts (and encouraged my appreciation of others’ efforts) as this book—at least it makes the problems of translation humanly rather than just technically compelling. It’s even, at its core, at love story, a heartbreaking one, for the book’s most powerful image of the translator’s endeavor comes from the story of the lifelong unrequited passion of Dorothy Bussy for the man whose writing she’d dedicated herself to translating, André Gide. In their correspondence, it was the non-congruence of languages, the play of translatability and untranslatability, that allowed her love to persist and eventually to find a kind of return. According to one commentator on The Magic Mountain, “The characters’ use of French, which is hardly visible in Woods’ version, indicates a shift to a plane beyond the real and the rational, the entry into a dreamlike state in which social and personal barriers are suspended. The foreign language is…a mask which bestows freedom.” The protagonist then “can ‘speak without speaking.’” Shouldn’t we gather more often on that plane where Hans Castorp addressed Clawdia Chauchat and Dorothy Bussy met Gide? Meet me at 8, don’t be late.
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Kate Briggs, This Little Art is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, London, 2017.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.