#KateBriggs24 Part 2, Weeks 3-5
The Long View and Entertaining Ideas
Hi everyone! First, check out Kim’s collection of books from Ma Bibliothèque, including a couple books about Roland Barthes and one by #KateBriggs24 participant Isabella Streffen:
At this point, we’ve finished A Table Made Again for the First Time and are ready to move on to The Long View by Elizabeth Jane Howard, followed by (or read simultaneously with) Kate Briggs’s Entertaining Ideas. Neither Kim nor I have read these two books before, so we aren’t quite sure how to approach the pairing. We are truly making this up as we go along.
We thought we might read Entertaining Ideas at the same time as The Long View to see how the former rewrites or responds to the latter, and if that doesn’t work or feel right, to save Entertaining Ideas until we’re finished with The Long View. I’ll be curious to hear how you do this reading! We have a few days built into the schedule in late July for Entertaining Ideas if we need them. I’ve included the schedule for the next few weeks below.
Next, if you’re in search of further reading in the spirit of Kate Briggs and Roland Barthes, you might check out Index Cards by Moyra Davey. Here’s Kasey Jueds with a passage from the book on Barthes:
I heard some good news about a Kate Briggs project to look forward to: the journal Barthes Studies announced through its Bluesky account that its Volume 10 will be a special issue titled “Preparations” edited by Kate Briggs and Sunil Manghani. It will be available on November 12. It promises to be excellent reading!
Schedule
Here’s our reading schedule for the next three weeks:
Finally, for those of you who haven’t been able to read A Table Made Again for the First Time, here are some quotations from Kate Briggs in interviews from the book:
"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."
That’s all for now — thank you all for your company and your comments!
Rebecca and Kim