This Little Art

This Little Art

Kate Briggs

Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017
Genre: Long-form essay
Pages: 400 pages

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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.

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Awards

The White Review Books of the Year 2018

“Kate Brigg’s This Little Art shares some wonderful qualities with Barthe’s own work – the wit, thoughtfulness, invitation to converse, and especially the attention to the ordinary and everyday in the context of meticulously examined theoretical and scholarly questions. This is a highly enjoyable read: informative and stimulating for anyone interested in translation, writing, language, and expression.”

Lydia Davis, author of Can’t and Won’t.

“There have been many books written about translation, but few as engaging, intriguing or exciting as Kate Briggs’s exploration, with its digressive forays, infinite self-questioning, curiosity, modesty and devotion to the concrete – the very qualities, as it happens, that distinguish the translator’s labour.”

Natasha Lehrer, Times Literary Supplement

‘Maurice Blanchot once wrote that translators are “the silent masters of culture”. Kate Briggs amends this, commenting that Blanchot wrote “hidden masters of culture” and that it’s “our recognition” of translators’ “zeal” that “remains silent”…. Her engaging memoir unfolds in unnumbered, untitled, unstructured short chapters: a pillow book on the translator’s love affair with words and writers…. Briggs can sound like a visionary.’

Marina Warner, London Review of Books

Kate Briggs

Photo: Fitzcarraldo Editions

Kate Briggs grew up in Somerset, UK, and lives and works in Rotterdam, NL, where she founded and co-runs the writing and publishing project ‘Short Pieces That Move’. She is the translator of two volumes of Roland Barthes’s lecture and seminar notes at the Collège de France: The Preparation of the Novel and How to Live Together, both published by Columbia University Press. The Long Form follows This Little Art, a narrative essay on the practice of translation. In 2021, Kate Briggs was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize.

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Other titles by Kate Briggs

The Long Form

Kate Briggs

The Long Form
2023