Kate Briggs’ ‘This Little Art’

This Little Art is a dense, bold and thought-provoking essay which explores translation in a very personal, heartfelt way. It can be a great introduction to complex ideas about translation as it makes the reader feel intimately involved in the translator’s world. 

Briggs’s argument that it is “easy not to think about translation” shines a light on the way translation is represented (or not represented) in the literary world, with translators’ names not appearing on the covers of books and readers often not being aware that what they are reading has gone through an additional creative process. Questions of authenticity and value are brought forth by these considerations, encouraging the reader to think about the metaphorical and literal distance between the original text and its translation. 

According to Briggs, the translator cannot be, in the words of poet Rainer Maria Rilke, “clear as crystal”, nor produce translations that are “an obedient reflection” of the original. Briggs writes: “I read with my body, I read and move to translate with my body, and my body is not the same as yours”, suggesting that the translator exists as an almost embodied presence in the translated text. The physical, psychological, historical and emotional being of the translator makes it impossible for any translation to be completely impartial, especially given that there is rarely an exact linguistic and cultural correspondence between any two languages. 

In accordance with Virginia Woolf’s statement that literature is “the right words in the right order”, Briggs suggests that “in this sense, literary translation, as a labour of changing words, and changing the order of words, is always and from the outset wrong”, and yet, so very necessary. Briggs’s call resonates loud and clear throughout the whole book: “Do translations! Yes, yes, and absolutely.”