#KateBriggs24 Week 7
This Little Art, p. 151-167 and Sessions of Dec. 2, 1978, and Mar. 10, 1979
I hope everyone is heading into a fabulous weekend. Kim and I are planning our next video call and would love your input on which day works best for you. If you’d like to participate in the next call, would you fill out our survey? Even if you’re only vaguely considering joining us, please go ahead and fill it out. We had a lot of fun last time. We had an informal chat on how everyone’s reading is going and what they thought of the books thus far, and it was great to see people’s faces and hear their voices. Of course, if video calls are not for you, we totally understand. As always, participate however you like.
How is your reading going? Let us know!
From Adam James Smith, who knows how to enjoy a book:
Schedule
Here’s our reading schedule for the upcoming week:
Resources and Links
Kim McNeill’s website is updated with SO MANY links and resources — check it out and check back again for more!
Also from Kim, here’s an essay on translation that might interest readers of Kate Briggs: “Language That Lives: How to Translate an Italian Master,” by Brian Robert Moore. It’s an essay on translating Verdigris by Michele Mari.
On p. 153 of This Little Art, Briggs mentions a quotation from Anita Raja that comes from “Translation as a Practice of Acceptance,” published on Asymptote.
From Adam James Smith, a podcast episode called “Uncut Leaves: On Literature and Its Uses” with material in it that relates to our Kate Briggs reading. It doesn’t have Briggs in it, but it could.
From Sam Moon, an article called “Poet, Translator, Mirror: A Conversation with Mino Kinnas” by Renee H. Shea in the comments from last week. The article is about Kinnas’s poetry and her thoughts on translation. Sam’s lengthy comment is really great — don’t miss it!
From Minx Marple, the book Setting A Bell Ringing: After an Unmaster Class with Anne Boyer, which is written by the Roland Barthes Reading Group and is a response to Barthes’s Session of February 24, 1979, in The Preparation of the Novel.
Discussion
Various social media posts from our readers:
From Catherine Eaton, here are some haiku by Richard Wright:
And some more:
From Sara Gore, a great book recommendation (I love Index Cards):
Slnieckar with a great Monty Python connection: the Summarize Proust Competition:
Kim McNeill found a book we may all be interested in:
Kim with another book we may all be interested in, Lecture by Mary Cappello:
Rachel Malik with a story we may all be interested in:
Nora with some thoughts on rereading:
Thank you all for your company and your comments!
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I just finished the "Would-Be-Writer" section and thought it ended beautifully -- the very end captures the paradoxes of translation so well:
"let me see what might happen if I were to try writing these lines, these lines that I know I didn't write, *again*--
only this time *in my own language*
and only this time *myself*."
Yes, a writer, not a writer, somewhere in the middle -- honestly, who knows what translation is! This section complicates the act of translation so beautifully. It makes me think about the range of translation activities in ways I hadn't before.
I was also moved by the ideas Briggs picks up from Adrienne Ghaly: the haiku allows "new ways of thinking relationality on a micro-scale; connecting, however fleetingly or long-lastingly, a body to the atmosphere, a body to an idea or to a line from a book and in this way, perhaps, to another reading and writing body, and doing so in a manner that is neither generalizing nor flattening, neither crushing nor reducing" (160). I'm not sure I fully understand that idea, but I love it. I downloaded Ghaly's essay from my library, although I haven't read it yet. If anyone wants a copy, let me know.
I'm thinking about how Briggs uses long quotations (something I tell my students not to do!) and also will recreate someone's thinking at length -- a lengthy paraphrase, in her own particular style. I'm thinking of p. 156 and the paraphrase of Barthes in the first two paragraphs and long quotation from Richard Howard in the last paragraph. The paraphrases are a sort of translation -- putting the ideas in her own words even if they were originally written in English, or recreating someone's general way of thinking in her own words -- and the quotations are a way of bringing other voices into the text. She leaves so much room for other voices! It's a form of generosity and also of setting up an ongoing dialogue, making the pages seem full and rich and busy, in a good way.