Talking with Kate Briggs
Our conversation with Kate Briggs begins with a discussion of her work on her most recent translation - the novel Lili Is Crying by Hélène Bessette - and explores the notion of the 'poetic novel'.
Drawing from Kate Briggs' vital essay on translation 'This Little Art', the conversation moves through ideas of embodied translation, generosity in writing and in translation, doing translations differently, and much more.
Kate McNamara
To begin, could you give us a little background into your involvement with Hélène Bessette and her work: How did you discover it? And why have you chosen to translate her work now? You were awarded the Windham-Campbell prize in 2021; was your decision to translate Bessette’s work related to the freedom offered by the Windham-Campbell prize?
Kate Briggs
To take the last part of the question first: when I won the prize, I was still really in the middle of writing The Long Form, which was taking some time. But there was an invitation from the prize to publish with The Yale Review. The Yale Review publishes a special edition each November with work by those awarded the Windham-Campbell prize in the spring. So the invitation came, and with it a question of what work-in-progress I might want to publish. The conversation about translating some works by Bessette was already underway with Fitzcarraldo, and The Long Form still felt too fragile to publish an excerpt from, or too provisional, as did the translation at that time, since I had only just started working on it. So there is a deliberate provisionality to the excerpt. But publishing it definitely accelerated the process in the sense that while the translation was already on the horizon as something I was sure I wanted to do next, having that deadline meant actually writing the introduction, drafting the first version of the opening scene. So, it wasn't quite the same as winning the prize, and then thinking: Okay, now this enables me to work on the Bessette. But of course, it did allow me to pursue a project without worrying too much about how much I would earn from doing it.
Coming back to the first part of your question, interestingly, I went recently to Paris to meet La Société des ami∙e∙s d’Hélène Bessette, a relatively recently founded group of researchers and writers and readers and advocates for her practice, including the publisher who's now republishing all her books in French. This was how people were invited to introduce themselves: by describing their own first encounters with the works of Hélène Bessette. And everyone had their own story, and unique path to her work. For me, I was reading Iris Murdoch's letters, in a publication called Living on Paper, edited by Avril Horner and Anne Rowe. This was during lockdown. Iris Murdoch was a friend of Raymond Queneau, who was Bessette’s editor at Gallimard and also the founder of the Oulipo. Iris Murdoch and Raymond Queneau were actually correspondents; they were deeply interested in each other’s work and they sent their books to each other, which I didn't know. I was discovering this through reading her letters. It's a one-sided correspondence in the sense that you only have Iris Murdoch's selected letters, not the replies or the letters that she was receiving. In one, from the mid-1950s, she writes something like: Thank you, Raymond, for the package of Hélène Bessette novels. And I thought Who? I had never heard this name before. Hélène Bessette? I did a simple online search, and on the French Wikipedia page I found the titles of her thirteen novels and a description of her work. I discovered that she’d founded something called ‘Le Gang du roman poétique’ or ‘The Gang of the Poetic Novel’ which sounded fantastic to me. I thought: what was that? And how do you join? [laughter]
I was especially interested in what I read about her third novel, called maternA, first published in 1954, which is set in a maternelle. I'd never heard of an experimental novel set in a preschool before – I found the prospect of that thrilling. I wanted to read it, but again this was during lockdown. I knew that some of her novels had been briefly republished but that most of her work was out of print. So I did a public library search. And it so happened that the médiathèque in Paris 13ème, had a copy of the 2007 Laureli re-edition of maternA. So I asked my friend who lives nearby if he would go and take some photos of the opening pages for me. So my first encounter with her prose was via a photograph from a friend. And just seeing the first sequence of maternA – it was startling! So surprising, and direct, and intriguing, in terms of her use of the line, of rhythm, this play with sound, this inquiry into what a novel could be…
So that was the beginning of understanding and learning about her work.
Out of curiosity, I also remember looking up whether anything of hers had been translated into English, and discovered that in 1990 that opening section of maternA was translated by the poet Keith Waldrop. Keith and Rosemarie Waldrop, who co-founded Burning Deck Press, are huge figures for me, so that too felt very exciting…
Kate McNamara
Yes I was excited by the concept of maternA as well and looked it up, but it’s quite unavailable…
Kate Briggs
It's coming! It will be republished in French relatively soon, I think. Le Nouvel attila are slowly publishing her complete works.
In terms of why me and why this work, there was this initial startling encounter with what was going on in maternA and that led to me buying more of Bessette’s recently republished novels in French, including Lili pleure, her first novel, published by Gallimard in 1953. Around the same sort of time, I had a phone conversation with Jacques Testard, the publisher of Fitzcarraldo, who was talking about possibly starting a classics list. Up until that point, Fitzcarraldo had published only contemporary work by writers in fiction and non-fiction, in English and in translation. Jacques’s idea was to publish works by non-contemporary, non-living writers, with some deep resonance or relation to the contemporary list. And during this conversation, I said, you know, if you're going to do it, then I would really love to translate Hélène Bessette. And I posted him my copy of Lili pleure, which is her first and her most narrative novel — the work which feels most novel-like in terms of structure and its attachment to some kind of plottedness…
Kate McNamara
Yes, I was wondering why you chose Lili pleure in particular to translate. Are you translating other works of hers now?
Kate Briggs
We felt that given that this is a writer whose name still is barely known in France and is only slowly now getting new attention and energy around her work, it made sense to start with what felt like the most… I was going to say accessible, but all her works have a kind of directness, and she would insist that her work is not difficult. She was emphatic about this, you know: My work is not difficult. But it's true that Lili pleure was both her first published novel and the most novel-like, let's say. So that felt like an interesting place to start.
I've also translated Vingt minutes de silence or Twenty Minutes of Silence, first published in 1955 and that's coming out next spring. And actually a number of other translators with a strong, long-term attachment interest in Bessette’s work have written to me since they've become aware of these first two books being published. So I hope that once this translation process has been initiated, and interest in Bessette’s work has started to kindle, this will lead to other translations of her later works, which are singular and extraordinary, by other translators. I very much like the idea of there being a chorus of Bessette’s translators in English doing different things and finding different solutions and talking to each other…
Kate McNamara
That’s really exciting to hear.
Claudia Marzollo
I would like to talk more about the success of Bessette in her lifetime. She was praised by critics, and she won a literary prize for Lili pleure but she was destitute, and her works never sold many copies. As you said, her works are only now being republished in French, so she was quite forgotten for a while. In This Little Art, you mention that there was a large chunk of time between the publication and the translation of Barthes’ lectures and you wrote that the lags between the publication and translation of Barthes’s lectures produced ‘new readerships: bodies like my own, as yet unborn at the time of the lectures themselves, listening now to the sound files of the audio recordings, reading the notes, making them speak and be spoken to by - making them contemporary with - my own present moment.’
I would like to apply this to Lili is Crying and to Hélène Bessette’s work more generally, and ask you: what do you think the contemporary readership will make of these new bodies of work by Hélène Bessette, especially the Anglophone readership that will meet Bessette for the first time through you. Is this something that you were thinking about while you were translating her work?
Kate Briggs
Absolutely, and I think this really speaks to your previous question: Why now?
As much as being an invitation to read this work in particular, a translation is also an invitation to open up a conversation about the relationships between practices.
I can think of a number of exciting contemporary writers who are reaching for the resources of poetry within narrative forms, within the novel. I'm thinking of Ali Smith, for example, who uses lineation in her novels, or Max Porter. Or I've just been reading Goodlord a novel which is a long narrative poem in the form of an email to address to a landlord by Ella Frears. Or Rebecca Watson would be another example: someone who's committed to narrative, but is really exploring the potentials of line breaks, the use of white space on the page…
I feel there's a lot to say about this zone of practice, which is obviously not a stable zone, but it's certainly one with histories and precedents. And part of what translation can do is establish a lineage, establish not only a lineage in terms of backwards in time, but also sideways, across. I think within Anglophone publishing there can be a sense that if it's not happening in English, it's not visible, or it's not legible, or it doesn't matter. But publishing translations can be a way of stretching, or sort of cracking open that space and showing up affinities which aren't bound by national borders or linguistic borders or even temporal borders.
So my aims with the translation are not only to advocate for Bessette’s practice, and stand in solidarity with it. It has been very powerful to learn about how Bessette persisted with her work and her vision for her work throughout her long-life, without support, or recognition, in conditions of great precarity and financial difficulty. But there’s also the fact that she founded this ‘Gang’ of the ‘poetic novel’ – that she had a so much to say about why she was activating the tactics of poetry within the space of the novel. For her, it had to do with giving expression to suffering, and a sense of brokenness, and the failed promise of capitalism, especially in times of war and the immediate aftermath of two world wars. Does that resonate with us now, those of us who are working in adjacent ways? And if not, what do we mean, what do we intend by our ‘poetic’ novels? Rather than get excited about ‘originality’, I find it far more interesting to ask: who or what are these contemporary practices in conversation with? Who are they inheriting from? Even if they are not fully aware of that inheritance. Who can we now claim as an ancestor, or a contemporary, in this weird way that translation produces a new now, an encounter between books published 70 or so years apart…
Kate McNamara
It’s so exciting to hear about all this. I would like to talk to you more about this idea of literary inheritance, and how the words that we use, and our ways of phrasing, they are all an inheritance from other works, other minds. I love the thought that there are many people inside each use of phrasing or words. But I also want to talk a little more about Bessette’s engagement with the book form itself. In The Yale Review essay, you say that Bessette wrote a kind of manifesto ‘for what she called a new “force”: a nonconformist novel-writing practice free (her term—absolutely “free”) to draw on resources typically deemed incidental (accessory) to it. Such as: typographic presentation, the disposition of words on the page, the introduction of color, the use of white space, the cover space, the thingness of the book object.’
I wanted to ask you whether there were any conversations around the presentation of Bessette’s work with your publishers? Obviously, Fitzcarraldo has a very clear, neat presentation for all of the covers of their books. I'm assuming there was never any question changing that. But perhaps with New Directions it was different? I would like to hear what it was like to transform Bessette’s structured writing into an English version: what conversations were had around how her work is presented? Are you familiar with how Bessette’s original publications looked? Were they exciting as objects?
Kate Briggs
Those are amazing questions. There are the Hélène Bessette archives at IMEC —or the Institute for Contemporary Publishing Archives— you can now go and consult some of Bessette manuscripts in Normandy and see how they looked as a typed and corrected pages. That would be a very exciting thing to do, which I haven't yet done myself. For the translation of Lili pleure, I was working directly from the most recent French version, published by Le Nouvel attila. And I have to say I am very attached to these editions. I find them very beautiful and generous. I love the diagram of her life that you get on the front cover. It really situates the book in the context of a constellation of her other books, other life events…
There were indeed conversations about how to lay out her work. Conversations happening in two different, but integrated channels, because I was working with one editor, Joely Day at Fitzcarraldo, and another editor, Maya Solovej at New Directions. The books are coming out within a month or so of each other in the UK and the US. The New Directions edition is a different size and does have an image on the cover. So they are two quite different types of book objects.
One thing that I was really pushing for was a sense of spaciousness — as far as possible within the design constraints. And also play: Joely and I talked a lot about the differences between section headings in the novel, and the parts that are more like shouts, or exclamations. Bessette plays a lot with capitalization, and at one point, for example, it is written L O V E. We wondered: How big can we go with LOVE here?
As you'll have noticed also, there are moments in Lili Is Crying where the lines seem to cascade; at the end of the novel the language gets broken. Different characters are speaking simultaneously. It starts to stutter across the page… it was so important that none of this got accidentally corrected as the book moved through type-setting and proof-reading, and that the energy of what Bessette is making happen with layout was somehow represented.
Kate McNamara
I'm excited to see the New Directions edition when it comes out! I’d like to turn now to talk more about the translation of the actual words of Bessette. Something that Claudia and I said when we read Lili Is Crying is that it feels really close to your own way of writing already. Reading it feels a bit like reading a Kate Briggs book. Obviously, this is your writing: Bessette’s words come to us through your choice of words, your rephrasing and rewriting. But it also feels like there’s a similarity in her work when I read the French. I think this is partly because of the way the rhythm of the words is structured through the lines, but also it is to do with the language and the way it has an openness that seems to vibrate with your own way of writing. Lili is Crying allows so much space for uncertainty. In your essay about Bessette, you quote her as saying ‘Sentences mislead us because language imposes on us more logic than there often is in life, and because what is the most precious in ourselves is what remains unformulated.’ I was hoping you could talk to us about what it was like for you to translate her work: how it was to translate Bessette’s words and to try to maintain that kind of openness and its lack of imposition?
Kate Briggs
I am so moved by this question, that you felt that there is a relationship between Bessette’s work and my own, a kind of shared set of concerns or urgencies. It’s true that as a translator… well, it's complicated. On the one hand, obviously, the project to translate Bessette was in some way connected with my own interests. I do feel like there are things that Bessette is doing with form, with the novel and its relation to the poem and the way she folds in her thinking about both into her writing… There is a kind of energetics to her use of the page speaks to me very directly. Directness, your term is openness. I feel that, too, and respond to it. So I do see a relationship, perhaps not so much with the work I've done but more work that I want to do. Part of my motivation for translating these early works of Bessette’s was to learn from her – how much she achieves in such a short form, for example.
But I feel conscious, also, of not wanting to co-opt a practice that is wholly distinctive and important and meaningful on its own terms. What matters most is not how it relates to my body of work. So that's where the complexity and the tension arises. A translation is written for others. But it is also to some degree a self-interested project. I am, in my own way, asking her to teach me. The opening scene with the shepherd, and this kind of song, or is it a lament? The lighting of that scene, the colour, the storm… everything that Bessette manages to achieve in a page and a half, two pages… it is so powerful, intensely visual, almost cinematic.
Kate McNamara
Yes! The drama of that opening scene, and the intensity of it! It’s so cinematic, like you said. I also like the asides that Bessette makes to the reader, where she is directing the reader. There’s that section where she writes that the next two scenes happen simultaneously, so you (the reader) will have to follow one with the left eye, and one with the right.
Kate Briggs
Yes! What she is doing, or proposing in relation to time is incredible. It relates, I think, to her interest in poetry. And it is very specific. The novel is a linear form. The novel is, generally speaking, a form that progresses sequentially: And then what happened, and then, and then, and then what happened. But Bessette is quite deliberately introducing simultaneity. She's saying, as in life, these two things happened at the same time. And that's what poetry can do, no? I mean, because the poem is generally so much shorter, because it doesn't unfold over a great duration. Because it has a promise at least of giving itself up all at once. As a layout on a page, a poem offers that immediacy or that coincidence of its different time-frames. And I do think that's what Bessette is proposing when she speaks of the poetic novel. It’s not just a vague attention paid to words, or the balance of a line, or the introduction of line breaks. It’s something more like What can the poem do that the novel can’t? I think for her it has something vital to do with their different operations on time.
Kate McNamara
And again that feels immediately connected to what your own work was already doing. For instance with your writing of This Little Art, and the way it plays with structure through its different sections. It has these refrains, these stories and ideas that you keep returning to, as though playing with the question of how long you can keep these different elements apart before returning to them, and putting them back in conversation together.
Kate Briggs
There is a funny story about the connections between her work and my own. Bessette makes the point somewhere that Writing novels isn't difficult. Anyone can write a novel. It's not a complicated thing that I'm doing. Then she pauses, or at least in my mind she pauses, and she adds, Apart from Roland Barthes, he probably would find it hard to write a novel. And that really made laugh, because of my work translating Barthes’s long lecture course on his desire to write a novel, because of my own novel, The Long Form. And actually that phrase is printed on the back of the French edition of Les Résumés, a recent collection of Bessette’s self-published writings along with some interviews: Je ne sais pas si M. Roland Barthes serait capable d'écrire un roman. So for me, of course, you’re right, there are all these resonances…
Claudia Marzollo
I love that! And I agree with everything you said about Lili is Crying and how energetic it is, how vivid the settings are. It felt almost as though I was reading a play. But even better, as if I was seeing it at the same time, and I don't think I've experienced that with anything else I've read. It was fabulous.
Kate Briggs
I feel the same. I do feel like Bessette is doing something very novel, very specific, very particular. Exactly as you say: she was working at the edges of the novel form, where it interacts with both the poem and the play for voices. She felt this, too. And had confidence in her work, in her literary research, as she called it, even in the face of indifference.
Claudia Marzollo
You talk in This Little Art about the translator as an embodied being, rather than an impersonal transferring device, and this is something that Kate and I talk about a lot. We often return to the sentence: ‘I read with my body. I read and translate with my body, and my body is not the same as yours.’ It's one of my favourite parts of This Little Art. I love that when I am reading a translated text, I am reading the translator’s words, the text after it’s gone through the translator’s body, a collaboration between translator and author.
In these interviews, we often ask translators about their working relationship with the author. You, of course, couldn’t have this relationship with either of the writers you have translated: neither Barthes nor Bessette. Were there moments in the process of translating Lili is Crying when you felt like you wanted to ask Bessette any questions about the works? Did you find yourself thinking about what she would have said about the choices you were making, and did that influence your work?
Kate Briggs
These are wonderful questions: with each one we could talk for half a day! Something magic about translating Bessette has been getting to know other people who are engaged with her work. For instance, Julien Doussinault who has been instrumental, maybe the strongest initial energy behind the renewed interest in Bessette’s work. He wrote his Masters thesis on Bessette back in the 2000s, I think, and then wrote her biography, which is extraordinarily beautifully written and informative and fascinating. I was aware of the existence of this biography, but I knew it was out of print. I thought perhaps I should go to Paris and go to the BNF and find it. But I am now in touch with Julien who generously sent me a PDF – the biography itself going to be republished soon. So I can't ask Bessette, but now when I have questions there are more and more people I can ask, who have a really deep and strong understanding of the of the totality of her practice, who are able to range and move across the thirteen books with ease. And in fact, I was recently able to meet Silvia Marzocchi, who's the translator of Vingt minutes de silence in Italian. And also Emet Brulin who is working on a Swedish translation of Vingt minutes de silence. So I do feel extraordinarily lucky to have found a community of people through this process, which is growing.
Another thing to say is that Bessette was a huge Anglophile. Specifically, she was a big reader of Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Raymond Chandler, a lot of her influences were from Anglophone literature. She also wrote in English. There is an unpublished novel called Paroles pour une musique which was written in French and English. There was also a novel drafted in Australia, La Route bleue, where she spent some time when she was first separated from her husband, which has substantial sections written in quite a curious, non-normative English, let's say. I think she would have been intrigued and excited by the translation process…
So that's a long way of saying that I think Bessette was probably a very complex, very interesting, very formidable presence. I feel grateful for the ways that she's offered insight into her practice through her own writings, giving me a sense of what mattered to her. Principles that I'm now trying to channel in some way, as rigorously and as carefully as I can.
Kate McNamara
We were thinking earlier about this idea of the embodied translator, and as you were talking just now I was wondering, was there a strong difference in the embodied experience of translating between Barthes and Bessette? Barthes being your first published translation, and such a huge, renowned cultural figure, and a man. Did you notice a difference, not so much in the feeling of responsibility towards each writer, but in your embodied connection as a translator?
Kate Briggs
I thought perhaps I would feel less anxious this time around, with more translation experience. But I didn't. I don’t. [laughter] One major difference between the projects is that with Barthes, although there are many, many images and scenes in the lecture courses and the notes for the lecture courses, I was mostly translating argumentation. I was translating something like a discursive performance, which moves from proposition to proposition. What mattered was understanding the unfolding of that oration. Or, rather, the score for an oration to come, since I was translating the notes.
With Bessette, I'm translating fiction. So that did feel very different. In the lecture courses there are images and scenes, as I said, but these flicker in and out. Whereas in Bessette, as you know, it’s scene after scene after scene. So for me, some of the translation choices and decisions had to do with how far I felt I’d made an image come alive. I would ask myself: Can I see this? Have I actually made this appear in English? Sometimes I would depart from the specificity the French word order to ensure that this was happening. Because the prose moves very, very fast. It bounces you through time and from space to space very quickly. We are never landing in any visual scene for very long and yet each one is very precise. Other choices had to do with the way a line lands. I did a lot of reading aloud to myself. I never wanted the lines to feel overburdened or too heavy because they have that, as you said, that directness. They are voiced. Between the three friends, Marthe, Élise and Lili, for example, there's this bouncing to and fro, and I wanted the English to have a similar kind of unburdened, unlaboured quality….
Kate McNamara
Absolutely. And it's not even just the conversations, it’s the descriptions too. Bessette writes in compact lines — very short and yet so expansive within that.
This leads on to quite a specific question I had about some translation choices you made. I was reading Lili pleure and Lili is Crying in tandem, and there was one part where you added words and phrases to the English version. I felt that there must be a rationale behind it, so I wanted to ask you about it. In the early pages of the book, Lili is described as a ‘girl from Arles’: in French, her face is the ‘jeune visage d’Arlésienne’, her waist ‘sa taille d’Arlésienne’, her tears as ‘ses larmes d’Arlésienne’ which you translate mostly as ‘the girl from Arles’, but then for the third phrase there you translate ‘the tears of the girl from Arles’ and follow it with ‘who never appears in the story, whom no one can ever remember having seen’. And a few pages later, in the French Lili ‘noue le cordon de sa taille d’Arlésienne’. In your English this becomes ‘Like the girl from Arles, she knots the tie around her forgettable waist.’ Would you be happy to share with us the thought process behind why you added those phrases into the English translation? And/or perhaps you could tell us about some of the specific vocabulary choices you made when translating this work?
Kate Briggs
Yes! This was a really tricky, interesting passage. For a long time it puzzled me. Why is Lili being described as the Arlésienne? Are we to understand that she is from Arles, or that the novel set in Arles? Also, what about the ‘jeune homme’ in the passage? This young man and his death, his suicide, over ‘la jeune fille’ — what exactly going on? So that led to some pondering, thinking, researching, and I found that ‘L’Arlésienne’ is actually the title of a story by Alphonse Daudet which, I think, Bessette is referencing. The story describes a young man's suicide over a ‘jeune fille’ from Arles, but what's crucial about it is that she never appears in the story, so no one has actually ever seen her. And ‘l’Arlésienne' has since become a key term, a catchphrase as it were, for types of stories where a character exerts an immense influence, but never actually appears. But of course, in Bessette’s novel, Lili does appear. She is both omnipresent and at the same time peculiarly effaced, or reduced. It seemed to me like Bessette was doing something strange and unknowable with this particular intertext. So I wanted to do enough in the translation to kind of raise a question. But how to give enough information to direct you to a story that, if you wanted to, you could go and read. But again, without over-labouring it. Because Bessette herself doesn't really explain this.
However, now your question is making me think: there’s a translator’s note where I say some of the punctuation is non-normative, and these are not proofreading errors, it's Bessette. I did at one point intend to flag the Daudet reference in a longer translator's note, and then, in the end, I didn’t. And your question makes me think that perhaps this passage would make a reader stall and wonder. But at the same time, in the French, there is no further elaboration...
Kate McNamara
I don't think it makes the reader stall in the English. It’s only because I was reading the original and the translation in tandem that I could see sections added that didn’t exist in the French.
Kate Briggs
Ah yes. Well, I love that you asked. So often translations come in for criticism simply because they are different. They are doing something a bit different – there’s been an addition or an omission. Sometimes, of course, there are mistakes. But I appreciate the rarer forms of critique which, when faced with difference, say something like: I would imagine there has been a thought process here. Probably. I'll give the translator benefit of the doubt that there has been some thinking here, rather than just assuming she’s got it wrong.
There were other choices, like the castellas which becomes ‘tower’ in the translation. It felt important that the reader immediately see what kind of structure that is. I think in French you would know what a castellas, whereas perhaps as an Anglophone readership wouldn't necessarily see that very instantly or immediately. Bessette has another book titled La Tour, so is it right to use ‘the tower’, given that she's not writing ‘la tour’ in this book? I had ‘castle’ as a placeholder for a very long time, with a very specific image of a small-ish ruined structure in my own mind, until a last-minute conversation made me realise that of course for a reader coming at this for the first time a castle is far too big. So there were many of those sorts of decisions.
Kate McNamara
Hearing about the nitty gritty of translation is really exciting. I did want to ask you about the translator’s note as well, so it's nice that you've touched on that. The one that you have written for Lili is Crying is very short, and I would be interested to know, if you had the opportunity to write a longer translator’s note, are there other things that you’d like to talk about?
Kate Briggs
I mean, there's so much… If I did, I think I would want to account for everything. With translator’s notes, it’s a curious thing. On the one hand, they could be like Nabokov talks about: his dream of translator’s notes like skyscrapers that descend from the page. A great volume which swamps the original. So it feels like either it tries to be comprehensive, or it's very minimal and just drawing attention to a few things… It's a strange genre, isn't it? It would be a shame if the translator's note were solely a place of justification. where you're saying You might have thought that this was a mistake, but in fact, it isn’t. It’d be a shame if that was the only thing it were doing, and to be honest here I don’t feel I have explored its potential as fully I as might have. But it did feel important to flag some of the special things that Bessette is doing, especially around punctuation, for example, her non-systematic punctuation. And also the way the speech is laid out, and why we're using the French em-dash…
Kate McNamara
As a reader, I find that the joy of a translator’s note is how it allows the presence of the translator to be felt more clearly in the text, to be reminded of the translator and who they are and what their connection to the book is.
Kate Briggs
Yes, I agree. You know, I haven't thought about it in exactly those terms, but I enjoy that as a reader, too. You're reminded that this is the result of someone else's hands and body and labour and that another body would do it differently — without taking away from the responsibility and rigour and the levels of care which were required to produce what we’ve now been enabled to read. It makes me think of Keith Waldrop's translation of the first eight pages of maternA. I did finally get hold of a copy of the journal, published in 1990. And I was so excited to read it. But when I read it, and read it again, I thought, Hmm, I would do it differently. As we all would. Because we are all different readers, and writers, writing in different situations for different reasons. And that’s not a problem. I don’t see that in any way as the problem with translation. That’s the beginning.
Claudia Marzollo
One of my favourite things about This Little Art is the recurring idea that things and people keep moving and changing - for example, Barthes changing his mind about the death of the author. In a conversation with Jennifer Hodgson you mentioned that both This Little Art and The Long Form could’ve gone on even longer, there was more to say, more to explore. And in my head, I was thinking, I wish they were longer.
Kate Briggs
I don't think every reader has felt that, Claudia! [laughter] But I’m grateful.
Claudia Marzollo
I was wondering, did translating Bessette give you new or different thoughts about translation? Do you have more to say about translation? Would you revisit anything that you said in This Little Art?
Kate Briggs
That's a great question. Thank you. But, actually, no! If anything, I feel more committed to what I was trying to set out in that book. For example, my strong belief that the reflection — I would do it differently — not mark the end point of an arc of critical thinking, as it so often does in translation criticism, but the beginning of one.
As you know, there’s a whole sequence of images around table-making in This Little Art. I do consider translation a making project, we’re involved in making a new object. And one of the terms I introduce (borrowing from David Pye’s book on craftsmanship) is this principle of ‘soundness’, which I really like. Soundness. Is the new object sound? Does it hold? Does it hold and function as a composition on its own terms? I still think about this.
There are various other ways that I’ve been trying to put the principles of This Little Art into practice. This includes supporting new translators, emerging translators, amateur translators. The German translation of both This Little Art and The Long Form are written by Sabine ßoss; This Little Art was her first translation. Carlota Melguizo wrote the Spanish translation of The Long Form, and this was also her first book-length translation. And This Little Art eventually, wonderfully will soon appear in French. The only reason it has reached this point is thanks to the investment of Arianne Des Rochers, the translator. But also, more generally, through the different forms my teaching takes, inside and outside institutions, and the small press I co-run here in Rotterdam, I have been trying to advocate for translation as an accessible practice with own distinctive, intensely valuable forms of knowledge, for translation as research and exploration, a place for reckoning with care and responsibility, for doing politics… There are many new questions that have emerged through translating Bessette, but I don’t think I’d change the ethos of This Little Art, I'd hold my ground.
Kate McNamara
I wanted to ask you about the concept of generosity in your work, which you are already touching on there in terms of an opening up of translation to emerging translators, the invitation to people who want to translate to go ahead and do it. But generosity is an idea that appears repeatedly, both in your own conversations around your work and also in the ways that other people talk about your work: Lydia Davis highlights the way This Little Art is in part an ‘invitation to converse’; Wendy Erskine calls The Long Form ‘a lively and generous book’; and Preti Taneja says that through The Long Form, ‘one is immersed in the radical generosity of this writing’.
When you were asked about the generosity of your writing at an event with Brian Dillon, he responded that he would hate to think of the term ‘generous’ being associated with his work, but it is clearly something that is important to you. Could you talk about how you see generosity, and invitation, as playing a role in your writing, across all its forms – novel, essay, and translation? And does the way you imagine or invite your audience to interact with your work change across these forms?
Kate Briggs
Yes, thank you. It moves me to hear that you feel generosity is a quality in the work. How to answer this… maybe I can relate it to yesterday, and this will be a roundabout sort of answer. Yesterday, I was in an audit meeting here in Rotterdam, our Masters programs were being audited, and one of the questions we received from the panel was: Why don't we have external examiners coming in, as other programs do? Often in a program like ours, you’d have tutors supporting practices, and then an external examiner will come and judge its worth or its quality in relation to the professional field in that moment of final assessment. And we don’t. We support the work over two years, and we also assess internally. And in that pressurized moment I found myself saying – speaking for myself and my colleagues – that it comes down to whether we are invested in assessing processes or final products. In a way, it’s a deep, fundamental, almost philosophical question. Are we interested in successful finished artworks or in the processes of inquiry and testing and experimentation that are sustaining them? Maybe another way of putting it would be: do you want the practice to keep going? Beyond this or that accomplishment? Do you want there to be more art, more writing, by different people, by more people, outside of the context of the institution? Outside the established systems of value and visibility. I do. It’s one of the reasons why I founded this micro-publishing project, called Short Pieces That Move, which for many years now has been attached to free writing workshops. I’m interested in things – practices — starting and being enabled to continue rather than being stopped. I’m telling you all this because I think it relates to the qualities I seek when I’m reading. There are books which have that quality for me, which make me feel energised and galvanised to do my own work. There are practices which manage to share something of the permission that has been bestowed upon or that they have claimed for themselves with others – and invite you to start rather that stop at a wall of unachievable style. Obviously, all this depends to some degree on character and personality — perhaps you are someone who encounters something extraordinarily well-executed and take that as a prompt or challenge to begin. But for me… well, take Bessette’s work: you feel that here's this strong, strong intention but at the same time there's something open-ended and somewhat ragged about it. It's not sealed. It’s not clean. Actually, Cédric Jullion, a writer and musician who has written a lot about Bessette and is deeply involved in her work, spoke to me about looking at her manuscripts and there being something almost grubby about them. That was the word he used, sale, something un peu sale qu’elle aimait. I really respond to that! That's where I find inspiration, actually: in work that feels alive and human and has the mark of the human hand, which can sometimes look like a bit mistaken or a bit wobbly or a bit uncertain. And if that is received as generosity… If my books have those same human invitational qualities that I find in others, then that means a huge amount to me.
Kate McNamara
I think there’s possibly also a difference in generosity when you are writing your own fiction and essays, compared to when you are translating. The concept of generosity could maybe be a little bit more problematic in translation, not only in terms of the amount of flexibility you have to change and shape the text, but also because of the general perception of what a translator is, and this ingrained idea of the translator’s work as generous. So perhaps there's a little shift in this idea of generosity there.
Kate Briggs
Yes, when generosity is synonymous with selflessness, then I think it is problematic. There is a problem with the image of translators as endlessly, tirelessly self-less – I think this both underplays the immense fascinations and transformations and gains that come with writing translations and can sound like a way to excuse not paying us properly. But you know – I do think there’s something to be said for these qualities. Generosity can often get paired with niceness, or something like sweetness, or charm. An adjective I’ve seen used to describe my books is ‘charming’. And we tend to dismiss these qualities as sort of boring, sort of conforming – as if challenge, intellectual challenge, aesthetic challenge could only be received in the key of aggression, or intimidation. We come back to that wall of style, again. That intimidating tone. I strongly, strongly disagree with this. I would say that I try to write philosophically and aesthetically serious books in the key of permission. I see them as practice books. In the sense of working books, books of ideas and practices and invitations that could be set to work. I hope The Long Form is a bit like that. It's a novel, but it is also a How do you write a novel? What is it, even? How does narrative work? sort of book. And I aim to write books that have that kind of multi-functionality, that are useful in the sense that they can be activated, they are activatable by others, not in that sense of awed reading but what else could this lead to?
Kate McNamara
As you were talking, that is exactly what I was thinking. That your books are almost like a seminar that you're holding with the reader: here's a piece of text, let's open it up and think through what it’s actually doing, let’s think through how we are engaging with it, and then we can go back to the narrative and work through these ideas in practice.
Kate Briggs
Absolutely! Yes. I hadn't thought about it like that, but yes. Come in. Be with me. Let's think, let’s work together here. I can't do all the work by myself. I'm not interested in doing it by myself. I am interested and invested in the collective production, the co-production, which of course a translation is in a very real and literal sense. But I'm interested in finding that quality in a work of fiction, too. Perhaps that invitation is already implicit in every work of fiction: Come in and imagine. Lend me your imagination. But what is it to ask someone to do that? What does that actually involve? Those sorts of questions fascinate me. These are not things I take for granted…
Kate McNamara
But then you bring in all of these other voices as well. So you’re able to think through them and with them.
Claudia Marzollo
That’s also something you talk about in This Little Art, especially in the section when you talk about Ferrante, and her idea of the hubris of wanting to rewrite sentences that you didn’t write, how she was driven by a desire to rewrite a sentence from Madame Bovary. But Bessette also works in a similar way to what you are describing here. She involves the reader a lot, she directs the reader and tells the reader what to do. So there’s a parallel with your work there.
Kate Briggs
It's amazing to hear you point to this. I feel like you're switching lights on for me, actually. Because you’re absolutely right: Bessette is working in the space of the novel, but she's also actively asking, What is this form? What are its conventions? What am I proposing to do with it? What are you doing here with me as a reader? So there is also this layer, this level of commentary and questioning built into her books, while also transporting us, making us see things and feel things. There are moments in Lili is Crying, especially around Lili's husband, where I, at least, am deeply moved. Bessette is not sacrificing any of the affective charge of fiction but she also managing to open up these questions: What actually is this object? What is this form of engagement? There is also, throughout, an attentiveness to the book as an object. To the energies of the page space. And these are certainly things that I am drawn to. But you're absolutely right, there is a participatory role, a space that she makes for the reader, across all of her work, I would say. Certainly in Twenty Minutes of Silence, certainly in maternA which has this extraordinary opening sequence doing exactly that. She is unafraid of saying Here I am, a writer, writing, and here you are a reader, reading. What kind of pact or promise does that make? What kind of non-immersive thinking space does that open up between us? And now, here’s a scene. I love that.
Kate McNamara
I’d like to come back to ask about your idea of non-intimidation, which I love. You have said that you have been deeply influenced by Barthes’ idea of actively seeking a discourse of non-intimidation, and that you have made it your life’s project to open yourself and others up to questions and ideas that matter to you in ways that are the opposite of intimidating or shaming or excluding. This is inspiring and it is clearly represented in your writing and its generosity, as we were just talking about. I think this concept of non-intimidation is especially shown in your work through hesitation and the way that you allow for uncertainty, for backtracking and questioning. I think of the final line of This Little Art: ‘Let’s say I am actively parrying against the all-purpose explanation.’ This feels so different to much writing that engages deeply with intellectual ideas, particularly in the academic tradition where there can often be a very critical edge, where writing is often focused on demonstrating your knowledge and expertise with certainty, and where there is a frequent critiquing of others and pulling their ideas apart. Your way of writing, your engagement with deep thought, felt very new to me with its openness to hesitation, and how you assert that to be knowledgeable, to be serious, you don’t have to be certain. Your writing opens up a space for the working through of intense, knotty questions in a way that feels accessible.
So I would really like to hear you talk more about that, but then I also would like to know how much you think about the life of your texts beyond the writing of them. I’m thinking of how your work is situated within the sparkling catalogue of Fitzcarraldo Press with their stark covers and intellectual reputation; of the events and conversations and articles that accompany your work, of where they are and who they are with. Perhaps you could speak about how you want to balance a deep engagement with intellectual ideas with a desire to be non-intimidating. To what extent do you think about, and try to shape, the way that your work as a text is positioned beyond your role in writing it? What conversations do you hope your work will begin, and where these will take place?
Kate Briggs
Yes, I love that question. Yes. I hear what you're asking. It's something I think a lot about.
One of the reasons why I really enjoy experimenting with other forms, other ways of generating printed matter, including with this micro-publishing project Short Pieces That Move, is how it has allowed me to explore how different readerships can be reached and produced at different scales. Twice a year, we publish 4 pamphlets by writers or artists in a run of 200, 50 of which go to the author. We print very cheaply, but covering the costs has been made possible by the Windham-Campbell prize, a great sum of money I was given in support of my practice, and I do see Short Pieces That Move as a vital part of my practice. I learn so much from it. The pamphlets then circulate in different ways, usually by hand. It’s a project about friendship and community and beginnings. Almost everyone who is part of the project has passed through Rotterdam in some way or another. Everyone is a beginner. That's the idea. We're all beginners in our own way. We're beginner editors. If there's a kind of ecology of literary and artistic spaces, then it’s important to me that not all my energies are directed towards the most visible or prestigious, the ones with the broadest readerships. That said, receiving recognition and a form of visibility for my own work has been transformative – and is also what is enabling me to move between these different scales. For instance, having an established working relationship with Fitzcarraldo is what made it possible to ask: What about Hélène Bessette? Hopefully that leads to more the visibility for and recognition of Bessette’s work, which is super meaningful…
Kate McNamara
Yes, and a renewed interest in her work in France, as is happening at the moment. I asked that question in part because these are things that we think about for our work with In Other Words, for instance with our seminars. We often discuss how to take these ideas from academia and make them accessible and open, how to take the complex conversations and deep thought that are happening within the boundaries of academic life and bring them into everyday public life, without the sessions being intimidating.
Kate Briggs
Short Pieces That Move is a project that I started within the art school here in Rotterdam, But during the first lockdown I took it out of the MFA so that it could be a free structure run on my own energy, outside of those spaces of assessment and into, as you say, everyday public life. I now run it in collaboration with four former students who have become close friends. I am really interested in building relationships between alternative structures which are serious and rigorous, but which are bypassing the institution in different ways. To create networks of solidarity across these initiatives. In January this year we ran the first Short Pieces That Move winter school – it was just two days, but it was amazing.
Kate McNamara
These are things that feel so valuable and important, and matter hugely to us and our work too.
We will move on now to our final questions. One of these questions is around soundtracks, which is not something I've often thought about in relation to your work. Apart from the beautiful exercise-dancing scene in This Little Art. I would be so interested to know if there is music that you relate to each book: whether you think about or create soundtracks to the works that you translate, or listen to music either from the language/culture that the book is steeped in, or with music suggested by the writing itself? Or do you perhaps have certain music playing on repeat whilst working on a text? Is there an unheard sonic background to the translated work we read?
Kate Briggs
Oh wow! What a question. I don't ever listen to music when I write. I know some people do, and I just don't. I can’t. But I do if I need to get up and have a break. I might do the washing up or something and I'll put music on and there are sometimes specific songs…I didn't have anything specific with Bessette. But there were certain songs with The Long Form. There’s one: Whitney Houston’s ‘My Love is Your Love’. I talked about this when the novel was shortlisted for The Goldsmiths Prize. The song has this lovely bounce and rhythm. This swapping back and forth that I was trying to get at in the novel, however unlikely that sounds! You're here, I'm here. My love is your love. Your love is my love. And also, there was another song by The Neville Brothers, called ‘Yellow Moon’, which has these extraordinary lines: Yellow moon, yellow moon… With your eye so bright and shiny, you can see the whole damn land. The song is basically this appeal to the moon: Tell me, you can see everything. Can you see her? Can you see the woman I love? Does she still love me? Is she coming back? All of this—it connects for to me to narration, imagining it as this big, bright, shiny eye that can see everything, almost. Or can it?
So when I’m working on a book quite specific tracks do become quite talismanic.
Also, my friend Pau Ardid, who is the editor and publisher of La forma extensa, Carlota’s translation of The Long Form. As he was typesetting the book, Pau made a playlist of specifically Catalan or Spanish tracks which all relate to The Long Form in a different way. It's amazing. It's a gift, a total gift, which I received in March on my birthday. I don't know if you remember in The Long Form that there is a moment where it rains? It happens around three quarters of the way through in the novel. And three quarters of the way through the playlist, there’s a song about rain...
Claudia Marzollo
That’s wonderful! How perfect.
We are building an online bookshelf of books recommended by translators, and perhaps one day it will become a Translator’s Library in some physical form. To do this, we ask our translators whether there is a piece of writing that has guided you during your translation work, or a text or an idea that you keep returning to?
Kate Briggs
There was recently, very specifically in relation to Bessette, there was a conversation with Rosemarie Waldrop — the partner of Keith Waldrop, so there is a Bessette connection— a poet, translator, novelist, who was on Between the Covers, this beautiful podcast with David Naimon, who's an extraordinary interviewer. And the ways that Rosemarie Waldrop talks about what she's doing with the prose poem, and her desire for interruption, active interruption, to the line in such a way that it moves both forwards and backwards... Well, she just talks so precisely and insightfully about what she's doing, particularly in her later collections of poetry, for instance The Nick of Time. Reading her work, and then reading her talk about her work, has been really helping to give me a vocabulary for thinking about what Bessette might be doing in her own way. So that transcript, I have it printed out and I am keeping near me on my desk…
Claudia Marzollo
Thank you. And finally, do you have a book that has been translated into English that you would recommend, and/or is there a book that hasn't been translated into English that you think should be?
Kate Briggs
Yes! The Hunger of Women by Mariosa Castaldi, translated by Jamie Richards and published by And Other Stories. Well, I recommend it because I have just bought it for myself, following a reading this past weekend. On Saturday we launched four new SPTM pamphlets, including poems by Tim Coster, titled Time gently stopped, which he built from lines from the book reviews he wrote for a monthly newsletter between 2022 and 2024 – the newsletter published by a small press called No More Poetry. Tim couldn’t come to Rotterdam for the launch, so in his stead my co-editor Ash read one of his reviews aloud in full. The review was of The Hunger of Women and Tim made it sound so compelling and singular that I can’t imagine I am not going to love it…
Kate McNamara
Thank you so much. I was going to say that’s all of our questions, but in truth we have so much more we’d like to talk with you about! This interview is particularly special for Claudia and I as we bonded over our love of ‘This Little Art’, and we have since spoken about that book so often in various different settings.
Thank you for answering our questions, and for being so generous with your time and with your responses.
Kate Briggs
They were incredible questions to receive, really. They’re also vast. I think so many of these we could talk about for a lot, lot longer, especially the things that clearly matter to all of us, the things that we share. Thank you.
