This Little Art

An essay with the reach and momentum of a novel, Kate Brigg’s This Little Art is a genre-bending song for the practice of literary translation, offering fresh and timely thinking on reading, writing, and living with the works of others. Taking her own experience of translating Roland Barthes’ lecture notes as a starting point, the author threads various stories together to give us this portrait of translation as a compelling, complex and intensely relational activity. She recounts the story of Helen Lowe-Porter’s translation of Thomas Mann, and their posthumous vilification. She writes about the loving relationship between André Gide and his translation of Dorothy Bussy. She recalls how Robinson Crusoe laboriously mad his first table while on the deserted island.

With This Little Art, a beautifully layered account of the subjective translating experience, Kate Briggs emerges as a truly remarkable writer: distinctive, wise, frank, funny and utterly original.