#KateBriggs24 Week 16
This Little Art, p. 352-end
Hi everyone. We are about to begin our last week reading This Little Art and The Preparation of the Novel! To celebrate the end of this section of #KateBriggs24, Kim and I are hosting another video call, which will take place on Saturday, May 11th, at 12pm PDT, 3pm EDT, and 8pm BST. I will be back in a week or two with a reminder and a link. As with our other meetings, it will be an informal chat about whatever participants want to talk about. We will also talk about the project’s next stages.
We hope you can join us! Everyone is welcome, no matter how much you have or haven’t read.
For this week’s newsletter, I’m doing something a little different: below you will find our schedule for the last week, and after that, I’ve included a list of reviews of This Little Art that Kim and I compiled. They might be interesting to read as you finish the book. If you know of any that aren’t on the list, please let us know. I’m also including a list of interviews with Kate Briggs that came out in the years following This Little Art. You can find all these resources and many (many!) more at Kim’s website.
First, here’s a picture of Roland Barthes that Nora found:
Schedule
Here’s the schedule for Week 16:
This Little Art Reviews
If you know of reviews that aren’t listed here, please let us know.
‘Kate Briggs’s This Little Art’ by Carlos Fonseca, Bomb, 4 Jan. 2018
‘Kate Brigg’s This Little Art’ by Jan Steyn, Music & Literature, 18 January 2018
‘This Little Art,’ Publishers Weekly, 26 February, 2018
‘This Little Art’ by Ben Ratliff, 4Columns, 3 March 2018
‘Did He Really Say That? On the Perils and Pitfalls of Translation’ by Benjamin Moser, The New York Times, 28 Jun 2018
‘Letters to the Editor’ in response to Benjamin Moser’s review, The New York Times, 20 July 2018
‘A Precarious Privilege,’ by Annie McDermott, Review 31
‘The Art of Translation,’ by Rebecca Hussey, Reading Indie Substack, 11 May, 2021.
Interviews with Kate Briggs
These are interviews that came out after This Little Art and before The Long Form. If we are missing anything, please let us know.
‘Waiting Translations: A Conversation with Kate Briggs’ by Madeleine LaRue, Music & Literature, 20 Nov 2017
HowlRound Theatre Commons: On the Elusive Art of Translation featuring Kate Briggs & Tracy K. Smith, moderated by Magdalena Edwards, 22 Sep 2020
Community Bookstore: "Poetics of Work," with translator Sophie Lewis & Kate Briggs, 21 Mar 2021
Windham-Campbell Festival: Kate Briggs is joined by writer/translators Sawako Nakayasu, Johannes Göransson, and former Windham-Campbell recipient John Keene for a wide-ranging conversation on the possibilities of translation, 27 Oct 2021
Windham-Campbell Prize: Kate Briggs Q&A with Michael Kelleher, 15 Nov 2021
Windham-Campbell Prize: Peer-to-Peer with Kate Briggs, 17 Nov 2021
Thank you all for your company and your comments!
Rebecca and Kim
I just finished This Little Art, and I'm feeling sad about it ending! The ending was beautiful, though -- a perfect note of protest and care.
I've finished both as well, TLA at the end of last week and the Barthes over the weekend. And I'm sad too, to not be in the midst of these books with all of you (though also looking forward to The Long Form, and more Barthes). Yes, totally agree w/Rebecca: the end of TLA is fantastic. One of the things I most love about this now-beloved book are the sections about Dorothy Bussy and Gide, and because of these bits and others I cried multiple times over the last 30 pages or so. Something about the way this long, long, intimate and uneven and painful relationship is changed, in some deep but hard-to-pinpoint way, towards the very end of their lives and their relationship--as Briggs puts it, the way Gide chooses to address Bussy in "something like a third language--effecting a release, starting the game all over again--so late, after so many years...": something about all this is so moving to me. Perhaps just the sense that at any time, at any age, meaningful change is possible, can surprise us and bring us joy, rewrite what we thought were the rules, shake things up (which is such a key aspect of the Barthes as well). And that language has the power to bring that kind of change about, which has been part of KB's argument all along: that language can enable "new conditions of possibility." Which is a tremendous thing, really. These last pages feel like such a profound argument for--definitely for translation, but for all reading and all writing.