Everybody's talking about translation

#KateBriggs2024 week 3

(I’ve added Sections now, so I think that if you just want Wolf Hall or Kate Briggs or the general newsletter about neither, you can choose to subscribe to just those updates via your Substack settings? Thank you to anyone who has subscribed, I’m really trying not to spam you!)

Talking about translation without first acknowledging that the word itself is a translation seems like a missing step. So, ‘translation’, from the Latin compound verb trans+latus, ‘trans’ meaning ‘across’ and ‘latus’ the past participle of ‘ferre’, ‘to bring’. Something literally moved from one place to another, a meaning brought from one language to another and gifted to us by the translator.

Briggs says that the translator is in dialogue with the text and the author that has to continue throughout the work. That dialogue, a potentially unspoken question and answer between translator and text and the questions that the text provokes in the translator, takes ‘un-condensable time’. It must be intimate work to entangle oneself in the thought patterns and tricks of another’s writing, particularly non-fiction that was not intended for publication.

I’ve been reading Siri Hustvedt ‘The Delusions of Certainty’ from A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women. She says, ‘Words are at once outside us in the world and inside us, and their meanings shift over time and place. A word means one thing in one context and another thing elsewhere.’ (p. 278)

Briggs questions whether the translator is offering their work to the world; Barthes says that because literature knows about the mess of words, a translator must also be part of that world in which the mess of words exist. Briggs may not be able to relate her activities to the parkour happening in the world outside her window but her work affects and is affected by that world. Words outside us and inside us.

Back to Hustvedt:

Words accrue and lose meaning through a semantic mobility dependent on the community in which they thrive, and these meanings cannot be divorced from bodily sensation and emotion. Slang emerges among a circle of speakers. Irony requires double consciousness, reading one meaning and understanding another. Elegant prose involves a feeling for the rhythms and the music of sentences, a product of the sensual pleasure a writer takes in the sounds of words and the varying metric beats of sentences. Creative translations must take all this into account. If a meaning is lost in one sentence, it might be gained or added to the next one. Such considerations are not strictly logical. They do not involve a step-by-step plan but come from the translator’s felt understanding of the two languages involved. (p. 279)

If we are separated from the cultures of the original languages then we lose access to some of the mess of words, to semantic mobility.

Barthes choice of ‘my haiku’ for his notation method seems to link in with the idea that words are inside us and outside us, with meter ‘the world’s heartbeat’. Haiku become short, captured moments of truth that strike a resonance with the reader, even in translation in a language unsuited to their form.

But, words/lines can partake of ‘hakuity’ by replicating their layout on a page. That space around the haiku is indicative of its genre, its completeness as a work but also its lack of finite-ness. A book of haiku can be opened anywhere and read, as the poems do not have any logical relationship to those around them. Each is complete in and of itself.

Is this what Barthes aims at for his notations? Complete, individual moments of truth that can be woven together at some point in the future into whatever form his novel may take? Does he just really like haiku?

I struggled with Barthes this week, and I have to go back and re-read the second session’s notes again. I had a moment where I failed to suspend disbelief or have faith in his whole scheme and thought ‘He’s making this up. It’s an intellectual game to see what he can get people to swallow.’ Fair play if it was, I have to get myself back in the mindset of playing along.

In the meantime, did anyone get through all the haiku and not try writing one?

Haiku, caught ‘tween leaves

Isolated on a page

Be free, small poem