This Little Art - Softcover

Briggs, Kate

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1910695459 ISBN 13: 9781910695456

Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Kate Briggs is the translator of two volumes of Roland Barthes’s lecture and seminar notes at the Collège de France: The Preparation of the Novel and How to Live Together, both published by Columbia University Press. She teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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 school-girl’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!’

About this edition

• Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1910695459
• ISBN 13: 9781910695456
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400