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This Little Art
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This Little Art
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This Little Art
Ebook413 pages5 hours

This Little Art

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

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About this ebook

An essay with the reach and momentum of a novel, Kate Briggs’s This Little Art is a genre-bending song for the practice of literary translation, offering fresh, fierce and timely thinking on reading, writing and living with the works of others. 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 intensely relational 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 André Gide and his translator Dorothy Bussy. She recalls how Robinson Crusoe laboriously made a table, for him for the first time, on an undeserted island. With This Little Art, a beautifully layered account of a subjective translating experience, Kate Briggs emerges as a truly remarkable writer: distinctive, wise, frank, funny and utterly original.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 20, 2017
ISBN9781910695463
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This Little Art
Author

Kate Briggs

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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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Perfect for me: an essay about translation, which is also an essay about Kate Briggs, and about a whole bunch of great books and a whole bunch of interesting translators, largely women (whither Margaret Jull Costa in this book?!). It's beautifully written. It's essayistic and has short sections. I am old and can only deal with short sections, and can only be bothered reading beautiful prose. This book was so targeted at me that I didn't even mind Briggs' love for Roland Barthes, whom I find increasingly irritating and whose appeal I find incomprehensible. I look forward to flicking back through this when I'm 80, when I'm even grumpier than I am now (as well as long before then).