This Little Art - by Kate Briggs

About the Book

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.

Book Synopsis

This Little Art is published here as a limited edition casebound hardback as part of Fitzcarraldo Editions' First Decade Collection, featuring marbled endpapers and signed and numbered bookplates.

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.

Review Quotes

'Lucid and engaging, Briggs's book is essential, not just for translators, but anyone who has felt the magic of reading.'

-- Publishers Weekly, starred review

'This book is a gorgeous meditation on the practice of literary translation and the dynamic relationships translators develop toward their work. It is compulsively readable and it approaches the enchantments of language with irresistibly smart and intimate vignettes.'

-- Lit Hub

'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 of Can't and Won't

'I have been thinking, many weeks after having finished it, of Kate Briggs' truly lovely This Little Art, a book-length essay on translation that's as wry and thoughtful and probing as any book I've read in the past year. My favourite works are those in which one feels the writer wrestling with genre even as she is writing; Kate Briggs does this with her own kind of magic, never failing to write beguilingly and intelligently and passionately about the little art of translation, which in the end shows itself to be not so little, at all.'

-- Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies

'Not so much a demystification as a re-enchantment of the practice of literary translation, that maddening, intoxicating 'little' art which yokes humility and hubris, constraint and creativity - in Briggs's passionate telling, you can practically see the sparks fly.'

-- Deborah Smith, translator of the 2024 Nobel Prize Laureate Han Kang

'In This Little Art, a digressive, scholarly, absorbing 350-page essay, Kate Briggs roams across the vast terrain - practical, theoretical, historical, philosophical - of translation. Briggs's writing is erudite and assured, while maintaining a tone that is modest and speculative; this paradox encapsulates something of the essence of translation, which is always contingent (no translation is ever definitive) yet also - for its time at least - authoritative.... 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

About the Author

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. This Little Art, her genre-bending essay on the art of translation, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2017. In 2021, she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize. Her debut novel, The Long Form, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2023 and shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize the same year.