Description
An essay with the reach and momentum of a novel, Kate Briggs's This Little Art is a genre-bending song for the practice of literary translation, offering fresh, fierce and timely thinking on reading, writing and living with the works of others. Taking her own experience of translating Roland Barthes's lecture notes as a starting point, the author threads various stories together to give us this portrait of translation as a compelling, complex and intensely relational activity. She recounts the story of Helen Lowe-Porter's translations of Thomas Mann, and their posthumous vilification. She writes about the loving relationship between Andr Gide and his translator Dorothy Bussy. She recalls how Robinson Crusoe laboriously made a table, for him for the first time, on an undeserted island. With This Little Art, a beautifully layered account of a subjective translating experience, Kate Briggs emerges as a truly remarkable writer: distinctive, wise, frank, funny and utterly original.
Author: Kate Briggs
Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
Published: 04/17/2018
Pages: 392
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 7.70h x 5.00w x 1.00d
ISBN13: 9781910695456
ISBN10: 1910695459
BISAC Categories:
- Biography & Autobiography | Literary Figures
- Literary Criticism | Women Authors
- Literary Criticism | European | General
About the Author
Kate Briggs is the translator of two volumes of Roland Barthes's lecture and seminar notes at the Collège de France: The Preparation of the Novel and How to Live Together, both published by Columbia University Press. She teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam.