#KateBriggs24 Part 2, Weeks 1 & 2
A Table Made Again for the First Time
Hello fellow Kate Briggs readers! We are about to begin Part 2 of the #KateBriggs24 project, which involves reading the books below.
Here is more information about them:
A Table Made Again for the First Time: On Kate Briggs’s This Little Art. This book is a collection of essays and interviews on translation and on Briggs’s work, including an interview with Briggs herself.
Entertaining Ideas (The Long View) by Kate Briggs. From the publisher’s website: this book is “an effort to perform a ‘good reading’ of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The Long View (1956), and to think about what a ‘good’ short reading of a long novel might mean, what it might look like or read like.”
The Long View by Elizabeth Jane Howard. This novel is the source of inspiration for Entertaining Ideas; it “presents a revealing portrait of a marriage -- that of Antonia and Conrad Fleming. Told through Antonia's eyes, it is a gut-wrenching and extraordinary look at marriage -- both from the outside in and from present to pass.”
As always, feel free to join us for all or part of Part 2, and if you’d prefer to wait for Part 3, which will involve The Long Form and How to Live Together, that’s great too.
Schedule
Here’s the first two weeks of our Part 2 schedule, which includes the entirety of A Table Made Again for the First Time.
Resources and Recommendations
There’s a new interview with Kate Briggs available! Lauren Goldenberg interviewed Briggs for Words Without Borders. It’s a wide-ranging conversation about her two books and connections between translation and parenting.
Kim’s website as a wealth of information and links about Briggs and her writing, and you can find the full Part 2 reading schedule there.
Dr. Andrew McInnes recommends Jennifer Croft’s novel Extinction for Kate Briggs readers:
If you’ve read this novel, let us know what you think!
That’s all for now — thank you all for your company and your comments!
Rebecca and Kim
A few favorite quotations from the first "collective discussion" with Kate Briggs in A TABLE MADE AGAIN FOR THE FIRST TIME, all quotations from Briggs herself:
"I have always found this idea that we can talk about translation in general quite problematic, since translation is always a relation: to talk about it means talking about more than one language, more than one situation, different bodies of work, different bodies of people. And these relations that are each time produced are sort of unreproducible, certainly ungeneralisable."
"What is not relevant to translation? What would not be pertinent to a discussion about translation? Translation raises questions about identity, repetition, representation, reproduction, responsibility, ethics, politics--it's life!"
In TLA, "I was trying to make an argument, to pursue a set of questions with the kind of narrative tension, and energy, and attentiveness to questions of pace that you tend to find in other kinds of writing -- novels, for example. I think it's very easy to say things fast about translation, too fast -- so fast they sound easy, or simple, and I wanted to do the opposite. I wanted to slow down and unpack and take the time to thick [think?] around apparently obvious truth until it doesn't sound obvious anymore."
"I did want to extend, in my own way, something of what [Barthes] was doing in his lectures, which were speculative, and vulnerable, and open to and actively responsive to the audience. I don't mind wobbling, or my conclusions feeling provisional. I was trying to make a space where the complexities and all the nuances of this practice could finally appear."
"And what I found deeply inspiring about the courses was how Barthes starts by saying: I will not repress the subject that I am. This is where I am speaking from."
I'm so glad this newsletter was sent out! I had completely lost track of the time. Looking forward to starting A Table Made Again this weekend.