This item is taken from PN Review 246, Volume 45 Number 4, March - April 2019.
LettersLetter to the Editor
ROBYN MARSACK writes · Dear Editors, I am writing in belated response to the editorial in PNR 243 (Sept–Oct 2018) as an occasional translator and an admirer of Kate Briggs’s This Little Art. I would not want PNR readers to dismiss the book after reading comments that seemed to be based more on Benjamin Moser’s review of it in the NYTBR, rather than a direct encounter with This Little Art itself. It is a pity that this editorial, which obviously wishes to take issue with ‘some of the easier rhetorical gestures of contemporary essay-writing’ – and may be right to do so – has chosen the responses to This Little Art as the vehicle.
First of all, Briggs does not behave like ‘a primary artist’. Indeed, her whole ‘meditation’ – a term to which I’ll return – considers the translator’s relationship to the original text; it is the crux of the matter. The translator, she suggests, is a ‘producer of relations’. (Even the blurb calls translation, as described in the book, ‘an intensely relational activity’.) As a translator, her relationship has been principally with Barthes, but also more recently with Zola, and in her book she describes the Dutch translation group she belongs to; there is a faint implication in the criticism that two volumes of Barthes scarcely qualify as a basis for her exploration.
On the very next page from what Moser calls her ‘assertion’ (not an ‘argument’, you see) that we are in need of translations, Briggs offers a reason for this need: ‘the translations we ...
First of all, Briggs does not behave like ‘a primary artist’. Indeed, her whole ‘meditation’ – a term to which I’ll return – considers the translator’s relationship to the original text; it is the crux of the matter. The translator, she suggests, is a ‘producer of relations’. (Even the blurb calls translation, as described in the book, ‘an intensely relational activity’.) As a translator, her relationship has been principally with Barthes, but also more recently with Zola, and in her book she describes the Dutch translation group she belongs to; there is a faint implication in the criticism that two volumes of Barthes scarcely qualify as a basis for her exploration.
On the very next page from what Moser calls her ‘assertion’ (not an ‘argument’, you see) that we are in need of translations, Briggs offers a reason for this need: ‘the translations we ...
The page you have requested is restricted to subscribers only. Please enter your username and password and click on 'Continue'.
If you have forgotten your username and password, please enter the email address you used when you joined. Your login details will then be emailed to the address specified.
If you are not a subscriber and would like to enjoy the 284 issues containing over 11,400 poems, articles, reports, interviews and reviews, why not subscribe to the website today?
If you have forgotten your username and password, please enter the email address you used when you joined. Your login details will then be emailed to the address specified.
If you are not a subscriber and would like to enjoy the 284 issues containing over 11,400 poems, articles, reports, interviews and reviews, why not subscribe to the website today?