#KateBriggs24 Week 4
This Little Art, p. 81-97, and Sessions of Jan. 27 and Feb. 3rd
Part of our idea for #KateBriggs24 is to have an occasional online event where we meet and chat about the books, and the time has come to make some plans. To that end, we have a poll with a few possible meeting days and times for you to vote on, and, if those possibilities don’t work for you, a place to tell us what might work with your schedule. We’d love to get the chance to have a conversation with you! If this sounds like fun, please take a moment and fill out the poll.
How is your reading going? Let us know!
Kim shared this quotation from This Little Art with the accompanying gorgeous photo: “There is the sentence that she is focused on, and the way the action of translating it, of touching it in this way, makes it start to unfold, to open out into a series of discrete or connected questions and challenges” (70).
Schedule
Here’s what we are reading for the upcoming week:
Resources
The lovely folks at the Barthes Studies journal have an updated list of all the English translations of Roland Barthes’s work. It is 76 pages long!
Thank you to Mel for pointing the way to “Calvariae Disjecta: The Many Hauntings of Burton Agnes Hall,” a project Kate Briggs was a contributor for.
On p. 86, Briggs mentions a “recent exasperated critical review” of Spikav’s Of Grammatology translation: “Embarrassing Ourselves” by Geoffrey Bennington, from the LA Review of Books.
On p. 89, Briggs quotes from “Impossible Wishes” by Michael Wood, from the London Review of Books.
On p. 89, Briggs references a broadcast by Virginia Woolf, “On Craftsmanship.”
Discussion
Here are some social media posts that caught my eye:
From Anna MacDonald:
From rpmoon:
From Nicholas Greco:
From Adam James Smith:
From Dr. Minx Marple, with a copy of Anne Carson’s Nay Rather mentioned in This Little Art (p. 47).
From Deidre Lynch:
And, finally, Kim McNeill, with a quotation that has inspired many people to think about their own “supporting texts”:
Thank you all for your company and your comments!
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The TLA reading for yesterday (p. 89-92), the very end of the section we've been in, is so characteristically Briggs, I think. The idea of not just "taking seriously" but "embracing" the criticisms against Lowe-Porter and using them as a jumping-off point for the rest of the book is so great. She's "embracing" them in the sense of looking at them very closely, up close and personal, and seeing herself -- and Barthes! -- in them. She's taking them on and living them out. She is so willing to experiment and play and see where it takes her. I see similarities in the way her mind works and in how Barthes's does -- they both follow ideas as though going on an adventure, ready to see what new places they might travel to. And they find the most lovely, the most surprising places to start those adventures!
TLA, pl. 86-88: "It has to be possible to continue this inexhaustible work together: to query and vary each other's decisions, holding to or elaborating alternative measures of precision and care, without quarrelling, necessarily, or policing. And without shaming? This, it seems, is less clear."
I love the vision of what's possible here, where translation is a never-ending project of changing and correcting, but one done without arguing or shaming. It seems idealistic, in the best way -- holding up the prospect of how things can be, even if they currently are far from that way.
I'm also thinking about embarrassment: "Perhaps embarrassment is simply what comes -- what has to come -- with the territory of claiming to have written a translation." How much bravery it takes to make a new thing, a translation or any other new thing, and send it into the world. It will absolutely have mistakes in it. You will feel embarrassment. Can you/I do it anyway?