This Little Art

'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 '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 '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