Writing and the Space It Makes
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Kate briggs and renee gladman are writers who might be said to defy categorization. Briggs, who built her career as an English translator of French theorists, is also the author of the novel-essay—or the translator's memoir-treatise—This Little Art. Gladman has published numerous books, of poetry, fiction, essays, and ink drawings, which seem, together, to build some master architecture.
These writers seem to defy categories defiantly—as true genre radicals, with no regard for the confines of convention. Yet one also feels, reading their work, and reading this conversation, that their genrelessness may be a necessity: of their uncontainable curiosities, [End Page 18] of their conception of writing itself as a process of innovation, sentence making as language testing.
Their willingness to question leads them here to some bold propositions: Is there a fictional element to translation? Are Gladman's slim novels, in fact, long? Is all writing actually fiction? Briggs and Gladman conducted their conversation over simultaneous sessions in a cloud document, writing from the Netherlands and New England, respectively. One can sense this conversation constructing its own physical space, as they urge each other around the corners they are writing toward to discover something new, something further.
—the editors
I have been thinking about when we met for the first time in Rotterdam, three summers ago now (can that be right?). You asked me a question: Why had I been so sure that you were also a translator? In my first book, This Little Art, I name you, and describe you, as, among other things, a translator. You didn't mind my mistake. In fact, I think it made you happy. But you were curious to know why I had made it. I remember gabbling out some reply, then afterward feeling frustrated with myself, like I hadn't answered you at all. Now, with more time, more reflection, I can tell you that there are at least two reasons why I made this assumption.
The first is that your Ravicka novels—novels in sequence, each opening a different door on to this city-state you have imagined, with its architecture, its people, their habits, their language—seem to know so much about translation. They know about its strangenesses, its tiltings. They know especially about its weird proximities and distances, foldings and collapsings, about how much and how little meaning words in sequence can hold, and how an effort of translation can show us this. It's like the novels are their own spatialization of how this can feel. It didn't seem possible to me that you could know so much about all this without having written [End Page 19] translations yourself. (And in fact, The Ravickians does announce itself as a translation from the first page, asking the reader to hold that thought while reading…)
Then, the second reason: the language your novels are written in. I remember on first reading feeling as though some pressure was being put on English, as if the English of the novels had been through some powerful specific process, such as the process of translation.
I wonder, Do you remember asking me about this when we met? And do you in some way think of yourself as a translator?
I have so many things to say, it's hard to know where to start! I think your memory of our conversation, your reading of the Ravicka series, your questions to me about the pressures you experienced in the novels' language—and then your asking me if I remember the conversation—somehow all encompass the architecture of writing for me. To be clear, though, I'm not sure I would ever say to an actual translator that I thought of myself as such. I don't know any other language well enough to translate from it. But I would be holding something back if I didn't say that so much of what I do and think has to do with translation.
Translation, like architecture, works as this wondrous analogue to the experience of writing, that strangeness of being a...
