This Little Art

Author: Kate Briggs

Stock information

General Fields

  • : $32.99 AUD
  • : 9781910695456
  • : Fitzcarraldo Editions
  • : Fitzcarraldo Editions
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  • : 0.37
  • : August 2017
  • : 197mm X 125mm
  • : United Kingdom
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  • : books

Special Fields

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  • :
  • : Kate Briggs
  • : Paperback
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  • :
  • : English
  • : 824/.92
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  • :
  • : 392
  • : DNF
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Barcode 9781910695456
9781910695456

Description

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 Andr 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.

Reviews

'Kate Briggs's THIS LITTLE ART shares some wonderful qualities with Barthes'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 and translator

Author description

Kate Briggs is the translator of two volumes of Roland Barthes's lecture and seminar notes at the College de France: THE PREPARATION OF THE NOVEL and HOW TO LIVE TOGETHER, both published by Columbia University Press. She teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam.