This Little Art

Part-memoir, part-essay, Kate Briggs's THIS LITTLE ART is a genre-bending manifesto and song for the practice of literary translation, offering fresh, fierce and timely thinking about the various aspects of translation: what it involves, who does it, why they do it, its strange status and why it mat [...]
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Part-memoir, part-essay, Kate Briggs's THIS LITTLE ART is a genre-bending manifesto and song for the practice of literary translation, offering fresh, fierce and timely thinking about the various aspects of translation: what it involves, who does it, why they do it, its strange status and why it matters. 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 formative 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 Andre Gide and his translator Dorothy Bussy. She recalls how Robinson Crusoe laboriously made a table, for him for the first time, on a desert island. With THIS LITTLE ART, a beautifully layered account of a subjective translating experience, Kate Briggs announces herself as a truly remarkable writer: distinctive, wise, frank, funny and utterly original.