Thirwell on Wright/Queneau

Adam Thirwell's homage to the amazing translator Barbara Wright is worth reading. Here's a bit:

It begins with a digression in Paris. In 1929, Samuel Beckett published an essay on James Joyce's "Work in Progress", which would eventually become Finnegans Wake, in which he praised Joyce for having "desophisticated language". "And it is worth while remarking," Beckett added, "that no language is so sophisticated as English. It is abstracted to death."

It seems important that this passage was written by an exile in Paris about another exile in Paris. Often, I think, it takes that kind of displacement in a foreign language to force the poor reader or writer to realise just how abstracted languages are. And a certain kind of writing represents this contrary attempt to desophisticate language – to make the form and meaning of a style coincide. While, to continue the foreign theme, the challenge of translation is then to recreate this refusal of abstraction.

I thought about all this, in my airport, because I was thinking about Wright, and her miraculous translations of the French novelist Raymond Queneau.

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