{"id":4456,"date":"2024-07-28T21:59:48","date_gmt":"2024-07-28T09:59:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/?p=4456"},"modified":"2026-01-24T23:01:15","modified_gmt":"2026-01-24T10:01:15","slug":"this-little-art-kate-briggs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/2024\/07\/28\/this-little-art-kate-briggs\/","title":{"rendered":"This Little Art \u2013 Kate Briggs"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I love this book. The more I read about translating, the more interesting it seems. It combines close reading with creative writing, psychology (what did the author mean by that phrase? What will the reader understand by this translation?) and more. Whenever I read a translation, I seek out anything the translator has written about the translation process. They have to solve a dozen problems on every page \u2013 the ingenuity that goes into a translation is quite amazing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kate Briggs writes about translations generally and specifically, from Helen Lowe-Porter translating Thomas Mann to her own experience of translating Roland Barthes\u2019 lectures. She has a lot to say about that, and it\u2019s interesting and insightful even if she\u2019s much more of a Barthes fan than I am.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I noticed that there is a blurb from Lydia Davis, who recently translated Proust\u2019s first volume. Unfortunately I was so immersed in this book, and later in Proust\u2019s book itself, that I can\u2019t remember whether Briggs writes about Proust. And it\u2019s not that easy to find out because, despite the many many authors and translators cited, This Little Art<\/em> has no index! It\u2019s the only real flaw in an otherwise wonderful book.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I love this book. The more I read about translating, the more interesting it seems. It combines close reading with creative writing, psychology (what did the author mean by that phrase? What will the reader understand by this translation?) and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4457,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4,249,271,102],"class_list":["post-4456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-books","tag-kate-briggs","tag-translation","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4456"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4626,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4456\/revisions\/4626"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}