Barthes
I’m back on the Barthes train to Haiku Town this week. Haiku. Sure. Why not? I like haiku, I think it’s a fascinating and accessible verse form on the grounds that if you know words and can count, you can craft a haiku. I also think it’s a testimony to the fact that constraint is not alway a barrier to creativity. Writing haiku can be a fun game and I love the idea that in Japan it was/is an ongoing competition that anyone could participate in. There’s democracy in the arts for you.
On the other hand, I highly doubt that even the Japanese have been strolling through gardens of cherry blossom, whipping out the writing implements of the time and knocking up 17 syllables of elegiac wonder on the instant. But Barthes is building this subjective literary conceit so seeming-earnestly, I shall take it as offered.
Haiku then, are a capturing of the moment, transmuting even what might go unobserved into the gold of a future memory. They are specific: in content, to the individual and to exactly what the ‘referent’ is observing at that precise time. Barthes says ‘contingent’, as in haiku are a means to capture what happens by chance.
If I push this idea, then haiku centralise a first person perspective. If a tree falls in a wood and by chance, no one this there to write a haiku about it, then it doesn’t make a sound. But also, if ‘what happens must always be in the world surrounding the referent’ then it follows that haiku always describe what is external . They are grounded in ‘tangibilia’, and may be ‘gnomic’ and ‘symbolic’, from which I gather that the external may represent the internal for the referent. Any broader symbolism would risk becoming emblematic. That representation must also surely be grounded in the exact time when? You’d have to have a terrific memory to recall what about a captured moment was meaningful at the moment of capture. What precisely, did the on-the-instant symbolism mean to you, as referent, at that time? Hypotyposis can potentially evoke a stand in reaction, but haiku as a form don’t allow for hypotyposis. The brevity can only be suggestive.
Barthes has already said he hasn’t got the memory to take the Proustian route to writing a novel. I’m thinking that adopting haiku as a Notation method is not going to help. On the other hand, as all we know so far about the maybe-not-even putative Novel is what it won’t be, then it’s probably irrelevant at this point even to judge.
Briggs
Phew.
As I’m reading Barthes, I’m baffled as to how Kate Briggs made any sense of it at all in another language. Reading it in English is still like translating - grasping for meaning, knowing all the words but still striving to construct sense. I wonder how much criticism her translation of The Preparation of the Novel received, and whether it was brickbats or useful academic discourse?
I started reading H.T Lowe-Porter’s translation of The Magic Mountain, and knowing no German and nothing about Thomas Mann, it seems to me a perfectly good translation. I would stick my hand up with Briggs in response to Bucks though, and say ‘I'll take a bad translation’ and a process of continuance. Over no translation, for sure. Yes, because anything might be helpful, as with the free translation of Xenophon’s Anabasis I’ve referred to on Perseus. It’s loose and not grammatically accurate but if I’m really stuck it helps me plot a course. A bad translation can be interesting, even if any discussion it provokes is reactive.
I don’t believe anyone sets out to deliver and certainly not to publish, a poor work. Equally, no one can have the hubris going in to suggest that their’s is the definitive translation. (That’s a campus novel waiting to be written, as a middle aged white male academic is slowly driven mad in his attempt to create a definitive translation. The irony will be that it is received as definitive, but by then Hubris will have caught up with him.)
I do believe that the translator has the right to claim that she has created a work in her own right. The process of translation is one of interpretation, thoughtfulness, interrogation, consideration and context. Every word must be assayed. That is a creative process. Translation is important because I hold that understanding is important, because learning is important. However, also with Briggs, beyond the grammatical does a translation get objectively better? Or it is just that times change and words change their meaning and we can’t time travel to know, really to know, what concepts stacked behind the thoughts that led to the words that a writer originally wrote?
My other slow read is Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. That’s at a period when translation was a life or death matter. Owning a copy of The Bible in English, could get you killed.
Tyndale says, now abideth faith, hope and love, even these three; but the greatest of these is love.
Thomas More thinks it is a wicked mistranslation. He insists on ‘charity’. He would chain you up, for a mistranslation. He would, for a difference in your Greek, kill you.
(Wolf Hall p. 152)
(I’ve checked and the Greek is ‘agape’. I’m with Tyndale.)
Random Notes
Capturing the moment. The cat moved almost immediately after I wrote this.
Pale grey winter light
Last week’s daffodils drooping
Black cat looks outside
I’ve finally been prompted to get Proust vol 4. Maybe this will be the year I finish Proust, some 15 or so years after I started?
Fitzcarraldo, who are consistently one of the most interesting publishers at the moment (see also Galley Beggar Press) have just published Sheila Heti’s The Alphabetical Diaries - 10 years of journals put in a spreadsheet, sorted alphabetically and then cut and refined. Strikes me that is the sort of thing Barthes might have ended up doing.