Poetry in translation rarely feels human to me, says Roland Barthes in La Préparation du roman, one of three lecture courses he delivered to the Collège de France before his death in 1980. The only exception to this was the haiku: ‘tiny instances of notation’, essential, indirect and absolutely human. Drawing on her experience of translating The Preparation for the Novel (2011), as well as the first of Barthes’s Collège de France lecture courses How To Live Together (2013), Kate Briggs is the author of This Little Art, a beautiful, urgent, incisive, provocative, intellectually and emotionally compelling essay on the practice of literary translation and its potential role in everyday life. Briggs explains that the handout Barthes prepared for his students was comprised of sixty-three haiku printed on the page. ‘As Barthes says,’ says Briggs, ‘one must never underestimate the layout of a haiku: the space, the spacing, the way each one appears as a thing picked out, appealing to the eye, surrounded by white.’ In This Little Art every unit of text, however short, is held by a full page. This winter, using a friend’s WiFi, I interviewed Briggs over Skype. We pick it up here, after half an hour in which I’ve referred to these units, again and again, and with startling presumption, as fragments.

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KB: One of the sections I cut from the book was about the translator as the maker not only of wholes, but of holes. Barthes has this lovely analogy about what happens when a book is read. It gets turned into a piece of lace, he says. It gets turned into this much flimsier thing, a thing full of holes. And of course, by necessity, the translator is a reader of the text: she makes her own holey but still somehow whole thing. When it came to writing my book, I wanted to make something that had quite a lot of space and openness in it, and one way of doing that was very literally: there is a lot of white space in the book. But I wonder what your thoughts are about ‘the fragment’? Because I’m not sure if—I don’t know if I was thinking of each unit of the text as a ‘fragment’—although I suppose I can see why they might be described as such...

KB: Hmm. [Pause] Can we stop for one second? I’m on a friend’s laptop and I’ve just noticed the battery is low. I think the plug in his room. Can we stop for two seconds and then return to the fragment?

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[Door whooshing open. Door whooshing shut. Pause.]

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I –

Which I now? Barthes, or me?

me: the translator, testing out and writing into a new translation of the recording of this lecture all these decades later, heartbeat racing in an effort to get this right: Barthes waiting by the telephone. Or not. No, and this is the thing: he’s somewhere else, interested and investing in something else. I think of Renee Gladman, poet, novelist, and translator, asking her interviewer in an interview: ‘When you’re reading translations, don’t you sometimes feel the racing heart of the translator trying to get shit right?’ Trying, in my case, to arrive at a new phrasing for Barthes’s beautifully unlaboured sentence: on pense toujours aux autres à disposition.

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[Door whooshing open. Door whooshing shut.]

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KB: Sorry. I’m back now. [Pause] I’m not sure why I was referring to those units as fragments. Whenever I refer to—sorry, are you there?

KB: [Pause.] Yeah. [Pause.] Just swallowing tea!

KB: Whenever I refer to ‘the fragment’ to friends, it tends to come out in vaguely self-deprecating tone, with defensive irony, distance.

KB: As though you were putting scare quotes around it?

KB: Yeah. I often apply the term inaccurately. I think it’s for want of a more suitable word for those short units of text that are prevalent in much recent non-fiction. What do you call the units in your book?

KB: I wonder what you mean by inaccurately? I liked the idea of working with each page as a page, of each page as essentially its own unit. I liked the idea that if you were to detach any of the pages from the book, you would have this bit of writing that, in some ways, would operate like a fragment—as in, we’d imagine it as belonging to a larger work—but that would also operate, be readable, be somehow whole, on its own terms. For the early readers who read the book at proof stage, every time there was a new unit, my editor had marked this as [New Page] in square-brackets, as a note to the designer at the top of the page. I wonder what that did to their reading experience, seeing that refrain over and over?

KB: Did you ever feel sad when a unit spills over onto a second page?

KB: Yes, sometimes! Perhaps I could have asked the designer to make page-extensions that you could fold down? Something like that might work! [laughs] But no: I was interested in playing around with different lengths of these units. I felt like that each one of them should hold their own thought, that each one should make its own particular contribution to the forward or sometimes looping movement of the thinking, the narrative. Some were able to do this in a couple of sentences. Others were better able to do it over three or four pages. It relates to what we were talking about earlier in relation to time and pacing and the telling of stories: perhaps my hesitation around the term fragment is that it suggests something broken, when here there has been this great effort not to break something existing up, but to make something. The sequencing of these page-units was intensely laboured! Do you find in your work—you were saying that you’re interested in paragraphs that sit alone and in working with different orders of material, juxtaposing them—that this mode of writing, using smaller parts, enables you to produce a different kind of texture, a different level of complication?

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The translator is not an impersonal transferring device but, as Michelle Woods puts it, ‘a gendered, holistic being’. In its efforts to drive this point home, This Little Art draws not only on Briggs’s own experience of translation problems, how her practice is touched by her family life, her gender and class position, even her own fitness routine—but also narrates a variety of other translation narratives as well: Helen Lowe-Porter’s insistence on her own creative authorship of her translations of Thomas Mann; Lydia Davis’s professional but unfelt approach to translating Madame Bovary; and the great asymmetrical romance contained in the Selected Letters of André Gide and Dorothy Bussy—for which translation, according to the critic Éric Marty, ‘served not only as its drive, but also its most apt and illustrative metaphor.’ This Little Art is a vast assemblage. Narratives unfold intermittently. Every page is textured and tacitly interpreted by the last. And the first? The first page of the book situates us inside The Magic Mountain: Hans Castorp approaches Frau Chauchat who is standing in the doorway of the salon. Reckless in the atmosphere of carnival, he asks her for a pencil. ‘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, in French in the English translation of a German novel. ‘You have to unscrew it.’

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KB: Among the book’s diverse threads and sub-threads, did you perceive there to be a hierarchy? And, if so, did it hold or fall apart?

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Too fast. This and the lived theme of what Barthes calls dysrhythmia, and the power dynamics that are in play, and the disturbances it can cause. The question of the lectures, then, will be how to find a way of walking (being living, also reading, writing, thinking) together that might somehow take account of our different rhythms, not through enforced synchronicity, but allowing for them: you read faster than I do, you get up earlier than I do, and eat later, you race ahead while I walk more slowly, and yet still (in this fantasy that Barthes is hoping to simulate in life) we’ll find way of coming together, points in the day for companionship, modulating, offsetting, interrupting our competing desire for solitude.

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KB: I’ll tell you the two ‘origin’ stories. As research for the Barthes translation, I read Robinson Crusoe for the first time in many years, and I became really struck by how proximate the description of making a table seemed to be to the writing of translations. And so initially I imagined This Little Art as a much smaller book: a kind of thought-experiment that would explore what it might mean—what other ideas it would give me occasion to think—if I were to accept and really push at this proposed analogy between making a table and making a translation. (I thought the book would be all about tables.) But the problem was, even as I was working to set up this analogy in a convincing way, I already knew that it would come to break down, that I would come to break it down, not only because analogies always do (at some point) but more specifically because it turns out I’d actually misread Defoe’s account of making a table. His excessively laborious, comically excessive method—is actually about making shelves, not a table. Even so, I wanted to write about it, and to think about translation in relation to tables, and to own my misreading—because that, too, seems to me to be part of the process and practice of translation: belatedly recognizing your own misreadings, and regretting them, perhaps, but also recognizing that they are now operating, they’re doing something nevertheless. They can be active, productive. The short piece that I wrote about Crusoe’s table was a much more depersonalized work: its ideas had little to do with my own life or particular circumstance. I sent a draft of it to my friend Natasha and she challenged me on this. I remember her saying: Yeah, okay, tables, I’m with you, but where are you? I realised that the idea of writing from the first-person and in the first-person was not an obvious thing for me to do at all. This might have had something to do with working as a translator for a long time. It isn’t what translators are asked to do. It’s the kind of opposite in a way. But that conversation was a massive permission-giving exercise for me. It really did open a door. I took what she said seriously. At the time, I felt it as a real provocation. Fine, I remember thinking—you want me? you want me?—okay, then I’ll give you me: me with my kids; me with my push chair; me with my big strides through the street. In the essay I wrote following that conversation—which was published in The White Review—I identify as a character in Barthes’s lectures: the woman he sees very briefly from a window walking, or failing to walk with her child—dragging him along, in ways that for Barthes crystalize the whole problematic of rhythm as power. In that essay, I make it very clear where I stand. Here I am, I say: I’m on the pavement, I’m outside this building, etcetera. That second piece came to act as a kind of ur-text. Part of the book’s opening section is taken from that essay; and the way the essay ends is also the ending of the book. And so, to answer your question about threads and sub-threads, I knew that there were these different spaces and different stories I wanted to move through, and give time and attention to, but I think I also knew that this scene with the woman glimpsed from Barthes’s window would come at the end, and that all the stuff in between— including but not limited to the table—would form part of a greater, digressive effort to reach her, eventually.

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When Kate Briggs first visited the Bibliothèque François Mitterand, with its tall glass corner towers, she had no idea about the sunken forest garden. ‘Approaching the library from a distance,’ she writes at the beginning of the book’s penultimate chapter, ‘I remember mistaking the trees for shrubs, which I assumed to be knee- or even ankle-height. It was this slow giddy tilt when I realized that in fact they were the crowns of tress, sprung from branches and then from trunks, and how deeply they plunged.’ One page and some time later, Briggs sits at a desk in one of the lower-level reading rooms of the library, looking sideways onto that transplanted portion of forest, when she hears about another researcher: who, in preparation for translating Bouvard and Pécuchet, has undertaken to read all fifteen hundred books that Flaubert is said to have read as research for his late unfinished satire about two floundering encyclopaedists and the fantasy of total knowledge. Briggs will learn nothing more about the project, not even the researcher’s name, but ‘the giddy tilt I felt upon discovering that the shrubs planted in the heart of the library were actually trees was the same unnerving delighted feeling when I first heard the story about her work.’ The line extends to the end of the margin. Then a white space, the size of a cigarette box.

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KB: All of the book’s principle narratives emerge from your research into the texts Barthes considers in the lectures: Robinson Crusoe; The Magic Mountain; André Gide’s account of the sequestered woman of Poitiers. Was it important for you to have this kind of, containment?

KB: Yes, that was a big question for me. How to talk about translation, a topic which is potentially so vast, opening out onto so many different domains, which is about so many different things, which is the engine of life itself, really… Well, one of the ways was, as you say, to try to contain it. I decided that I would only work with the materials I had read while I was translating the lectures and the thoughts I had been thinking while doing so. As in, not just: ‘How to translate these sentences by Roland Barthes?’; but also broader questions relating to what exactly I thought I was doing, what translating is like as much as what it does or means (I really wanted to give some kind of felt sense of what translating is like). With any kind of writing project, I think you do have to set parameters in order to produce anything at all. You have to narrow the space in which it is possible for you to work. The stories of Dorothy Bussy and Helen Lowe-Porter are there because I was using their translations for the purposes of my own work, but then felt curious to find out more about them. But to come back to writing in the first person, as well as daring to write from my own experience (and it did and still does feel a bit daring, and unobvious and risky to me) I wanted to make a book that was not precious about my own subjective experience. Your question was about a hierarchy among the different threads or stories: I wanted to make a book in which other people’s stories would hold equal or greater importance than my own, offering new or different points of entry into the common questions that the book is concerned with.

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KB: As a young man, Deleuze had a reputation for reading so-called secondary authors. Because he liked to know the entire oeuvre of an author, he read a lot of work by people who had written very little.

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KB: Really? So that he could achieve mastery? That’s funny! Actually, it reminds me of something a friend said a long time ago, when I first moved to Paris: when I moved I was 22, and I knew no one. I had one phone number, a friend of my sister’s, who had been an exchange student at art school with her. I phoned him up hoping that he might become my friend and, fifteen or so years later, he still is: so I was lucky: it worked! That first time I rang him, he invited me to this really boring black-and-white film which I watched with him dutifully. We sat through it together not knowing each other at all and I remember thinking: ‘Shit, I’ve got to find some intelligent things to say about this afterwards.’ But it turned out that he found it really boring too. But the reason he’d invited me was he was in this phase of watching as many films as he possibly he could: he had this idea that cinema is a medium where it is still possible, within a lifetime, to watch every single film ever made—to achieve mastery!—,because most films are relatively short, and the medium is still relatively young. At least, it’s kind of possible. Is it still possible, do you think? Clearly with books it just isn’t, there are too many. All the books in all the languages across time across the whole world. I think this does relate, in a way, to the project of my book, and to how it was written. Because how could anyone ever claim mastery or true expertise over the phenomenon we call translation? In all of its instances, its contexts, its dynamics, all of its unique pairings of languages and of people with books? It seemed to me that I had to be accepting of the bits and the parts and the, yeah, the lack of comprehensiveness.

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But then again, the more I think about it the more I wonder whether it is indeed identification that I feel: whether what I have termed closeness has identification at its source. Might it not more simply have to do with repeatedly-wanting-to-spend-time-with? With the long term company I want to keep: something like a desire for this companionship in particular. I would rather read Barthes than a great many other writers. I shelve and pile his books near me. Why? Not because I find myself and my own experiences in his work, always, or even often, but for the reason that I don’t.

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KB: Speaking about yourself as a translator, you define your role as a ‘maker of wholes’. Do you consider This Little Art to be a ‘whole’?

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KB: Um, perhaps we could rephrase the question. I mean, if you were to ask me ‘Do I consider the book to be finished?’, the answer would be, yeah, it is. I feel like all the things I wanted to say about translation, at this stage in my life and work, are in the book. That’s probably why it moves all over the place! Translation is something I have been thinking about for a long time, and I think I did manage to work in all of the questions and complications that have been most urgent and alive, that most matter to me, however partially or obliquely. Obviously the lives of Helen Lowe-Porter and Dorothy Bussy were far more complicated and detailed than what is narrated in my book; likewise Barthes’s lectures and seminars, likewise Robinson Crusoe and table-making, likewise my own life, really. Is it a whole? Maybe not. What I hope it has is a quality of finishedness, a kind of compositional satisfaction that makes it work as an experience. I like the idea of writing something—of making a reading experience for someone else—that has this quality of composed-ness but that, at the same time, isn’t totalizing. I’m anti-totality. Surely any translator is? Yeah, I’m anti-totalizing.