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Kate Briggs

This Little Art

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.
281 printed pages
Copyright owner
Bookwire
Original publication
2017
Publication year
2017
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Quotes

  • meggyesmakoshas quoted2 months ago
    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.
  • Gina Castañónhas quoted4 years ago
    ‘Who we choose to translate is political,’ write Antena in their ‘Manifesto for Ultratranslation’. ‘How we choose to translate is political.’
  • Gina Castañónhas quoted4 years ago
    Because it is this process of discovery, this adventuring into the writing of a sentence, with no clear idea of what will happen when I start to try, that makes for the real, lived-out difference between reading a sentence – even reading a sentence and speculating in advance how I might go about translating it – and the concrete task of writing it in my own language, again.

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