I am very much enjoying my slow reading of Kate Briggs’s This Little Art, organized by Kim and Rebecca. At the reflective pace of three or four pages a day, I pay attention to different things.
On the very first page, my attention snagged on a pair of delicate, gauzy sleeves–so easy to catch things on. These sleeves, and the arms they both reveal and conceal, come from Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain. Or from Helen Lowe-Porter’s translation of the novel. Or perhaps from Briggs’s paraphrase of that translation. It’s hard to tell exactly whose words these are.
The sleeves appear only indirectly, in the memory of Hans Castorp, who is comparing their effect on him to that of Frau Chauchat’s bare arms, which he’s observing in the novel’s present:
He had thought, on making their acquaintance for the first time — veiled, as they had been then, in diaphanous gauze — that their indescribable, unreasonable seductiveness was down to the gauze itself. To the ‘illusion,’ as he had called it. Folly! The utter, accentuated, blinding nudity of those arms was an experience now so intoxicating, compared with that earlier one, as to leave our man with no other recourse than, once again, with drooping head, to whisper, soundlessly: ‘O my God!’ (11)
What, I wondered, were these sleeves doing in Briggs’s book, an extended essay on literary translation. I understand the relevance of a later part of the scene, where Hans flirts with Frau Chauchat in his tentative French and she asks him, in the same language, to speak German. This negotiation among languages clearly raises questions of translation–and as Briggs goes on to explain, she is reading it in Lowe-Porter’s translation, which renders the German, but not the French, into English for her. So why not start there? Why a page about sleeves and arms before we get to the heart of the matter?
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