TLA, p. 136-139: I'm intrigued by the problem of saying things too fast -- I think I remember that it was Kasey who commented here about how Briggs wanted to recreate the path of her thinking and make it slow enough so the reader can spend time with the ideas and really feel them. To live with them for a length of time. And I suppose it's true that the ideas Briggs is working with can be boiled down to a few sentences, as she shows us on p. 138. But she does also make them feel very complex and rich by taking her time exploring them! And I can see how that idea led her to what goes on in The Long Form with the story of a day stretched out over 500 or so pages, so we really live that day fully and get a taste of what it's like to spend a day with a baby. Brilliant!
So many wonderful lines and ideas in the Session of Feb. 24! "The haiku can't be enlarged, its size is precise...it makes no leap into the symbolic, it's not a trampoline -- and the stars are too far away!"
"Dare I extend this hypothesis around Absolutely to the whole of literature? For, in its perfect moments, literature...tends to make us say: 'That's it, that's absolutely it!'" I love this idea and feel that it's true -- yes, we can interpret literature, but you can't say what's in it in any other way other than the thing itself.
"The 'truth' is in difference, not in reduction. There can be no *general truth*: this is what haiku says, one haiku after another."
"The *founding premise* of haiku; its nature (its aim) is to *silence*, at last, all metalanguage; therein lies haiku's *authority*: perfect harmony between *this* speech and my (rather than anyone else's) "incomparable" self."
TLA p. 128-135: I'm happy to find Nicholson Baker's U&I appearing in This Little Art (to rediscover it). I'm afraid to reread U&I because I found it so delightful, so wild, so fun, so NEW -- it was a book that opened my mind to the wild things a book could be -- and I'm afraid if I reread it I won't like it as much. But I think of it very fondly.
All these ways of transforming language that Briggs discusses -- Baker's misremembering of an Updike line, getting lyrics wrong, etc. -- are such wonderful ways of rethinking creativity, and I love the idea of jump-starting one's writing by doing translation, that it will open up your own writing somehow. That translating allows a writer to "open her own writing up to its [the source book's] difference, its independence: to the instruction of its different energy, its unfamiliar thinking, its other rhythms." Translation as a way of meeting someone else's mind, somehow, in such a way that changes your own.
This makes me want to read Baker’s book! I am not an Updike fan… but this does sound amazing. And I also know that feeling, of being tentative about revisiting a beloved book for fear my relationship with it will have changed. And and, I adore this idea of doing translation as a way of opening oneself to a different way of writing, thinking, being. I still don’t feel compelled to actually do translations (the time it would involve!), but I am wondering what other practices might work in similar ways? Actually, I’m feeling like our slow, thoughtful group reading and conversation is working on me in some deep ways…
Yes, not really an Updike fan here either, but that didn't matter to my experience of U&I. My self of 25 years ago strongly recommends it :) It's lovely to think of our slow reading group doing work of some kind on you and me and others. Part of what I'm feeling in response to the group is a desire to slow down even more! I frequently use phrases like "I want to live in this book" and now I'm thinking of what that means. Translation is one way of living in a book, and slow reading and rereading is another. And conversations about it.
TLA, p. 148-150: "I am passed over and profoundly influential; my work is fascinating and derivative and determining and necessary and suspect. It is everywhere taken for granted and then every so often singled out to be piously congratulated. Or taken apart." I like this quotation, and I like even more the way, on p. 149, Briggs uses space to get us to slow down as we read descriptions of Lowe-Porter as translator -- a new line for each accusation or bit of praise. I feel the contradictory judgments piling up and weighing me down.
I also like how, p. 150 and elsewhere, Briggs keeps asking "Who cares? Who else really cares?" On the one hand, the answer is hardly anyone cares. Who wants to hear about this obscure experience of a privileged person? On the other, it's a genuine question and one to be answered seriously. Lots of people don't care, but WE care, and Briggs cares, and it actually does matter. In some sense.
I am going to try and cover several unrelated thoughts in one post. First, thanks to Rebecca Hussey for all the work she is doing to make this endeavor more enjoyable for us. I am not one who usually appreciates all the pictures and links, but find them all very helpful in my understanding of appreciation of this project
2) I also want to draw attention to Rebecca Cullen's wonderful post on Week 4 of #KateBriggs24. I have been over to read it a couple of times and found it a lovely post and urge everyone to visit if they haven't yet. I apologize for not responding on her page but I am still not that comfortable with the platform, but someday...
3) This pertains more to thoughts from last week's reading, but for readers like myself, there is a small subplot going on in This Little Art, concerning the translations of The Magic Mountain and. I was one of the readers who attempted that book under H.T. Lowe-Porter's translation and did not finish it. I did not finish the book nor appreciate it till the John Woods' translation came out and I read it. At the time, I was among the many who applauded the Woods and snubbed the Lowe-Porter, (not to the point of joining in the TLS debate) but silently in my thoughts. Thus I feel complicit and deserving of whatever Briggs doles out in criticism against us "Woodsy's" as she defends H.T. Lowe-Porter's reputation. As an aside, it was much more common at the time to judge translations as just good or bad rather than seeing them as the translator's interpretation and vision of a work.
4) Barthes discussion on haiku in anticipation on writing a novel led me consider sharing some thoughts and a poem of a more recent poet, Miho Kinnas, whose poem in The Best American Poetry of 2023, builds on haiku and tanka forms and extends in time beyond the immediate. I am leaving a link to an interview in the December 2023 World Literature Today with her which has the poem and an audio link of her reading it as well as her comments on the poem and her other work.
Miho is also a translator of Japanese poetry and her thoughts on translation, quoted from that interview above, I find quite beautiful and also are closer to my present views on translation as interpretation.
"Translating poetry is interpretation. It’s a close reading; probably the closest reader of anything must be the translator. Translation is also a collaboration with the writer of the original work. Haruki Murakami says translation is kindness. Being generous and kind to someone else’s work means doing one’s best to understand the work and present the best reflection of it in the destination language. So, at a certain point, writing and translation become one thing. What the direct influence is on my writing, I don’t know, but it adds a layer inside me. That’s something I absorb by being able to read and write in more than one language, perhaps. That’s a definite advantage. It is like having a mirror in my mind so I can see things from at least two directions. And I have access to excellent Japanese books that have never been translated into another language."
Thank you so much for this, Sam! So much here to think about. First, thank you for the shout-out to me :) I love Rebecca Cullen's posts as well. I'm proud to say she's a friend and we used to be in a book group together!
I love what you had to say about Mann translations -- there's certainly nothing wrong with having a preference for one translation over another, and that you didn't finish the Lowe-Porter says something. Clearly, a different translation style works better for you and for others as well. And I'm thinking about how much TLA has changed the field of translation and people's understandings of what translation is. We think differently, I feel, because of Briggs's work. Your last sentence about Briggs brings that home to me -- not that she's solely responsible for the shift you describe, but her book was a part of that.
Thank you for the World Literature Today link! I love that quotation and will include it in the next newsletter.
TLA, p. 136-139: I'm intrigued by the problem of saying things too fast -- I think I remember that it was Kasey who commented here about how Briggs wanted to recreate the path of her thinking and make it slow enough so the reader can spend time with the ideas and really feel them. To live with them for a length of time. And I suppose it's true that the ideas Briggs is working with can be boiled down to a few sentences, as she shows us on p. 138. But she does also make them feel very complex and rich by taking her time exploring them! And I can see how that idea led her to what goes on in The Long Form with the story of a day stretched out over 500 or so pages, so we really live that day fully and get a taste of what it's like to spend a day with a baby. Brilliant!
So many wonderful lines and ideas in the Session of Feb. 24! "The haiku can't be enlarged, its size is precise...it makes no leap into the symbolic, it's not a trampoline -- and the stars are too far away!"
"Dare I extend this hypothesis around Absolutely to the whole of literature? For, in its perfect moments, literature...tends to make us say: 'That's it, that's absolutely it!'" I love this idea and feel that it's true -- yes, we can interpret literature, but you can't say what's in it in any other way other than the thing itself.
"The 'truth' is in difference, not in reduction. There can be no *general truth*: this is what haiku says, one haiku after another."
"The *founding premise* of haiku; its nature (its aim) is to *silence*, at last, all metalanguage; therein lies haiku's *authority*: perfect harmony between *this* speech and my (rather than anyone else's) "incomparable" self."
I think I need more haiku in my life...
TLA p. 128-135: I'm happy to find Nicholson Baker's U&I appearing in This Little Art (to rediscover it). I'm afraid to reread U&I because I found it so delightful, so wild, so fun, so NEW -- it was a book that opened my mind to the wild things a book could be -- and I'm afraid if I reread it I won't like it as much. But I think of it very fondly.
All these ways of transforming language that Briggs discusses -- Baker's misremembering of an Updike line, getting lyrics wrong, etc. -- are such wonderful ways of rethinking creativity, and I love the idea of jump-starting one's writing by doing translation, that it will open up your own writing somehow. That translating allows a writer to "open her own writing up to its [the source book's] difference, its independence: to the instruction of its different energy, its unfamiliar thinking, its other rhythms." Translation as a way of meeting someone else's mind, somehow, in such a way that changes your own.
This makes me want to read Baker’s book! I am not an Updike fan… but this does sound amazing. And I also know that feeling, of being tentative about revisiting a beloved book for fear my relationship with it will have changed. And and, I adore this idea of doing translation as a way of opening oneself to a different way of writing, thinking, being. I still don’t feel compelled to actually do translations (the time it would involve!), but I am wondering what other practices might work in similar ways? Actually, I’m feeling like our slow, thoughtful group reading and conversation is working on me in some deep ways…
Yes, not really an Updike fan here either, but that didn't matter to my experience of U&I. My self of 25 years ago strongly recommends it :) It's lovely to think of our slow reading group doing work of some kind on you and me and others. Part of what I'm feeling in response to the group is a desire to slow down even more! I frequently use phrases like "I want to live in this book" and now I'm thinking of what that means. Translation is one way of living in a book, and slow reading and rereading is another. And conversations about it.
TLA, p. 148-150: "I am passed over and profoundly influential; my work is fascinating and derivative and determining and necessary and suspect. It is everywhere taken for granted and then every so often singled out to be piously congratulated. Or taken apart." I like this quotation, and I like even more the way, on p. 149, Briggs uses space to get us to slow down as we read descriptions of Lowe-Porter as translator -- a new line for each accusation or bit of praise. I feel the contradictory judgments piling up and weighing me down.
I also like how, p. 150 and elsewhere, Briggs keeps asking "Who cares? Who else really cares?" On the one hand, the answer is hardly anyone cares. Who wants to hear about this obscure experience of a privileged person? On the other, it's a genuine question and one to be answered seriously. Lots of people don't care, but WE care, and Briggs cares, and it actually does matter. In some sense.
I am going to try and cover several unrelated thoughts in one post. First, thanks to Rebecca Hussey for all the work she is doing to make this endeavor more enjoyable for us. I am not one who usually appreciates all the pictures and links, but find them all very helpful in my understanding of appreciation of this project
2) I also want to draw attention to Rebecca Cullen's wonderful post on Week 4 of #KateBriggs24. I have been over to read it a couple of times and found it a lovely post and urge everyone to visit if they haven't yet. I apologize for not responding on her page but I am still not that comfortable with the platform, but someday...
3) This pertains more to thoughts from last week's reading, but for readers like myself, there is a small subplot going on in This Little Art, concerning the translations of The Magic Mountain and. I was one of the readers who attempted that book under H.T. Lowe-Porter's translation and did not finish it. I did not finish the book nor appreciate it till the John Woods' translation came out and I read it. At the time, I was among the many who applauded the Woods and snubbed the Lowe-Porter, (not to the point of joining in the TLS debate) but silently in my thoughts. Thus I feel complicit and deserving of whatever Briggs doles out in criticism against us "Woodsy's" as she defends H.T. Lowe-Porter's reputation. As an aside, it was much more common at the time to judge translations as just good or bad rather than seeing them as the translator's interpretation and vision of a work.
4) Barthes discussion on haiku in anticipation on writing a novel led me consider sharing some thoughts and a poem of a more recent poet, Miho Kinnas, whose poem in The Best American Poetry of 2023, builds on haiku and tanka forms and extends in time beyond the immediate. I am leaving a link to an interview in the December 2023 World Literature Today with her which has the poem and an audio link of her reading it as well as her comments on the poem and her other work.
https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/interviews/poet-translator-mirror-conversation-miho-kinnas-renee-h-shea
Miho is also a translator of Japanese poetry and her thoughts on translation, quoted from that interview above, I find quite beautiful and also are closer to my present views on translation as interpretation.
"Translating poetry is interpretation. It’s a close reading; probably the closest reader of anything must be the translator. Translation is also a collaboration with the writer of the original work. Haruki Murakami says translation is kindness. Being generous and kind to someone else’s work means doing one’s best to understand the work and present the best reflection of it in the destination language. So, at a certain point, writing and translation become one thing. What the direct influence is on my writing, I don’t know, but it adds a layer inside me. That’s something I absorb by being able to read and write in more than one language, perhaps. That’s a definite advantage. It is like having a mirror in my mind so I can see things from at least two directions. And I have access to excellent Japanese books that have never been translated into another language."
Thank you so much for this, Sam! So much here to think about. First, thank you for the shout-out to me :) I love Rebecca Cullen's posts as well. I'm proud to say she's a friend and we used to be in a book group together!
I love what you had to say about Mann translations -- there's certainly nothing wrong with having a preference for one translation over another, and that you didn't finish the Lowe-Porter says something. Clearly, a different translation style works better for you and for others as well. And I'm thinking about how much TLA has changed the field of translation and people's understandings of what translation is. We think differently, I feel, because of Briggs's work. Your last sentence about Briggs brings that home to me -- not that she's solely responsible for the shift you describe, but her book was a part of that.
Thank you for the World Literature Today link! I love that quotation and will include it in the next newsletter.