The Long Form is the debut novel by the award-winning writer and translator Kate Briggs. Published in 2023, it narrates a day in the life of a mother caring for her baby girl and trying to find time to read Tom Jones, and considers the relationship between what she and her child are doing, their experiences of time, and what it means to write fiction. Briggs’s book-length essay This Little Art, which explores literary translation, was published earlier, in 2017, though I actually read the The Long Form first. As a result, when I read This Little Art, I couldn’t help but see a myriad of connections between how Briggs writes about translation and the language often used to describe motherhood, or caregiving more broadly, and was eager to discuss them with her.

This interview was originally scheduled for September 2023, and though life got in our way then and another couple of times, we finally managed to speak for an hour over Zoom in early February of this year. In a wide-ranging conversation that has been edited and condensed for publication, we spoke about Briggs’s work as a translator and a novelist, the relationship between that work and being a parent, and making invisible work visible. 

Lauren Goldenberg (LG): I’ve had This Little Art on my shelf since it came out, but I only actually read it after I read your more recent book, The Long Form, and after I became a parent. So much of what you say about translation also applies, in my opinion, to motherhood. Because you talk a lot about the mother-child relationship in discussing The Long Form, I’m curious: what do you think of taking that lens of motherhood and bringing it back to This Little Art and questions of translation?

Kate Briggs (KB): Interesting question. I mean, very interesting that your experience was of reading my books out of sequence in that way. I guess the first way into answering is that translating the lecture courses by Roland Barthes—which were the kind of base material for This Little Art—coincided with my having children. I got the contract for what in English is titled The Preparation of the Novel around the time I discovered I was pregnant with my eldest; I delivered the first draft just before he was born, and then I was revising the translation while caring for him kind of full-time—in my naivete, thinking that would be wholly possible. I mean, it was possible, but it was very intense, these very tiny bursts of work time.

Strangely, the same thing, timing-wise, happened with my second child and Barthes’s How to Live Together. So my most invested, formative times of translating were meshed with this intensive formation in caring, both of which I’d done only in ad hoc ways before. I’d done smaller-scale translation projects, I’d done lots of babysitting, but I’d done neither in such durational ways. So, as you say, these two practices are somehow speaking to each other, were kind of living together with me. And so, when it came to writing This Little Art, my children feature in that book as voices, and there are scenes from childcare, especially ones that describe the asymmetry of the care: what it is to be responsible for something or someone that isn’t responsible for you and can’t be. There’s something not quite, not ever, entirely symmetrical about that distribution of responsibility. So when I was writing the book, I was reaching for ways of understanding and deepening the questions I had, or the thoughts and feelings I had about what it was to do this work, and I was reaching for what was closest to hand. To things like the books on my desk. And that’s why The Magic Mountain and Robinson Crusoe are in there, because those were books that were part of the translation project. But I was also reaching to Legos, because there were Legos in the room.

LG: There’s a phrase in This Little Art where you talk about translation as a hidden—I’m going to get the quote wrong—a hidden but necessary labor, and I was thinking, you often describe the labor of translation with language that is used to apply to the labor of parenting, or mothering in particular.

KB: It felt to me like these two endeavors, these two forms of work, which are going on all the time and are massively consequential in terms of the circulation of ideas—the ways in which writing by others gets represented in new languages, especially dominant languages, and, likewise, looking after humans—they are both immensely high-stakes. I think if you’re doing this work, you’re conscious that it’s high-stakes but at the same time have the sense that its importance is being regularly underrecognized, culturally minimized. Mothering and translating get described in similar ways; they are often devalued in similar ways. Yet both involve these vital questions: what it is to take responsibility for others, what it is to reckon with otherness.

LG: One way of framing this is that obviously not all translators are parents, but the work of translation and of parenting share a continuity of endeavor.

KB: Absolutely. I’m interested in durational practices, these things in life that can’t be done quickly. Novels take time, they ask for time to be engaged with, to be written, but also to be experienced. And they also accommodate forms of interruption.

That relationship between continuity and discontinuity was hugely important to The Long Form. You find it when spending a day with a baby. Like, here we are doing the same thing, repeating the same gestures within the context of the day, everything seems to kind of smudge, smudge together. And yet, within the same time frame, there are also these moments of radical interruption and breakage and reset.

LG: As I read The Long Form, I thought, this is also a translation. This is a translation of the experience of being a parent.

KB: That’s so interesting. A translation into fictional space? This Little Art was a long time in gestation. When I finished it, I thought, now I’m moving from that essayistic mode into the novel. There will be this break. For a couple of years, I wrote under the illusion that I was doing something wholly other from the first book. But then I slowly came to understand that they’re actually deeply connected and there is no break, and hence the first line of The Long Form, which I don’t have to hand, is something like “The origin of each new project is always a continuation…”

LG: I’ll read it to you: “The beginning of each new project was always a continuation.”

KB: Thank you! So to answer your question about whether The Long Form is participating in or expanding on a kind of translation activity, I think yes, absolutely.

LG: Following this idea of continuation, I’m curious if at some point you thought, “I’m going to try to write in a totally different way for the novel,” and then you unconsciously, or consciously, realized that in some ways your previous work, or the craft of translation itself, was shaping how you were writing this longer, novelistic form.

KB: Well, some readers of the novel have pointed to the fact that I am also a translator, and felt that this had influenced my prose. Certainly, it’s true that I was keen to explore the work of redescription—the major difference it can make when you put new words to a familiar scene. I was keen to test this: to see what happens when a writing question gets redescribed, or translated, into the language of childcare, and vice versa.  

But I was more fundamentally interested in how you achieve a longer piece of writing, how you get there, and reading a lot about this, a lot of novels, and also novel theory, some of which appears in The Long Form, particularly around the structure of the chapter. I’m just completely fascinated by this kind of unit. There is no long form that’s not built from smaller parts. It’s just a question of how you manage the transition. In both books, I was interested in activating these forms of transition work, and the sort of energy and charge that can come from those line breaks and chapter breaks. You leave something somewhere, and then pick it up somewhere else, but what’s happening in that space in between?

LG: Well, I think you can see that interest in This Little Art, when you are talking about Barthes talking about The Magic Mountain and the question of what to do with the French section in the book.

Something that also really struck me in your writing about Barthes is when you say that for him, haiku was a means of recording the incidences of daily life, its particularities: “attending to the detail of domestic life in no way implies a narrowing or circumscribing of the field of interest.” And I was wondering if in some way The Long Form is a haiku in the Barthesian sense?

KB: What a great proposition. I mean, on the one hand, no, but on the other hand, Barthes’s thinking on haiku set something in motion in me in terms of the territory of the writable, or the describable.

LG: The Long Form captures the movement of the domestic space so well, what it’s like to try to get your baby to sleep so you can read. It’s funny the way you talk about the protagonist’s selection of a long novel, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, because when I was pregnant, for some reason I had this idea that, before the baby came, I had to read one of the classic novels I’ve been meaning to read forever, and I chose Bleak House. I did not finish it, and speaking of interruption, it’s been interrupted for a year and a half now, but I liked that the main character, Helen, also wanted to read something long and classic—it’s a way of passing the time, but it feels like an accomplishment, too.

KB: I think for Helen to feel accompanied was the thing. In Henry Fielding’s narrative voice, there’s an atmosphere of companionship and friendship that’s being produced on the page and activated by the reader. Fielding compares the novel to a pub, and there is this sense of “Come in, sit down, you can just order a half, you can stay for as long as you like.” Clearly, not all pubs are welcoming like this! But there’s something about that offer of hospitality that I think Helen was seeking.

When I was working on the book, I worried, briefly, that reading Tom Jones might be construed as some kind of highbrow endeavor, or incongruous in relation to the activity that she’s engaged in, with the baby, Rose. Formally, there are lots of reasons why she’s reading Tom Jones in particular, but one of the reasons that novel comes into her space is because it is what books do—they turn up in people’s homes, and people read them, you know, and think about them.

LG: Those early months are so exhausting, but at the same time you think, I am also a person with an intellectual mind.

KB: And that’s it. In the introduction to an edition of The Bell by Iris Murdoch, A. S. Byatt says that what’s wonderful about Iris Murdoch’s novels, which I think is deeply true, is that all of her characters, whatever kind of social bracket they occupy, have profound, intellectual, affective lives, and they all engage with the world. And part of being engaged with the world is being engaged with each other and with work and so on, but also with art-making and with politics. So often, when you have a kind of intellectual life being described in fiction, you get all of these elaborate justifications as to why you’re bringing these ideas in. I think there is something weird and wrong about our requiring that of art, of fiction and of ourselves; this trope of the researcher at her desk, we need to justify why she’s a person thinking about ideas now. It’s like, no, people are thinking all the time.

LG: It ties back to what you talk about in This Little Art, which is who has the right to translate, and the gendering of criticism and judgment around translation. Also, the way people have talked about women translators, historically, and how their work has been viewed and judged. Why do we believe only a certain kind of person can be a translator? It’s also a question of access: why do you have to be a certain way to access literature, and why do you have to be a certain way to access language?

KB: The reason I’m so committed to making art in book form is because it’s accessible. Of all the art forms, this is something you can actually buy and have in your home. I mean, you can do this with film, and music, of course, but there’s something about the book. The fact that it’s relatively cheap, and that it’s multiple, and that it circulates, that libraries still exist—thankfully—and that it doesn’t have opening hours, that you can own it forever. The principle of a book is to be durable and accessible.

LG: I’m looking at the line I was thinking of in This Little Art, when you say, “Do translation? Yes, yes. And absolutely. But who are we saying can?” You mentioned this idea of otherness, this idea that so much of the work of translation is accessing an other, like another language, another culture. If you’re a person who only reads English, The Magic Mountain would remain just a foreign object if it didn’t exist in English, because what would you do with a German book?

I wanted to jump back to a really specific question I have, and maybe I’m the only person who noted this. My father is Romanian, and most of my family’s Romanian, and so when I was reading The Long Form, I was surprised to come across an exchange in Romanian in the book. I was curious if this has to do with questions of Romanians in England or your work as a translator. When you were writing The Long Form, did you know at some point that you were going to use another language in some way in the text? And why is Romanian, of all languages, the one you chose?

KB: You know, you are the first person to ask me this—not even my editors have asked. So, thank you, I really appreciate the question. I’ve lived outside of England for twenty years, but this book is clearly set in England. There is this engagement with the English-language novel, and I was conscious also of Helen and Rose being very English-sounding names. And I guess there’s a kind of reckoning with Englishness from my position of having not lived there for so long. What is Englishness? For me, as for many others, it doesn’t mean monoculturalism or monolingualism—certainly contemporary England is traversed by many languages, operating and existing alongside each other. And so, Helen’s best friend, Rebba, is Swedish. She speaks in English, but there’s a sense of her relation to English being different from Helen’s, and different again from Rose’s, who is nonverbal, as she’s a sort of prelinguistic being.

And then there was this thought of hospitals, and birthing and being in hospital; there is a narration of birthing in the book. I wanted to show how this can happen: how is it that Helen can have a reasonable birth, that Rose can come into the world in a way that, thankfully, is not traumatic for either of them. And who is involved in that? Well, there are other characters involved. It’s not just the two of them, there are these other workers. And they too have lives. They have lives and concerns and languages that might not be wholly accessible, certainly not accessible to Helen and Rose in that moment. So I liked the idea of this sort of privacy of another language that wouldn’t be readily interpretable to the reader, unless you either had the competence to read Romanian or were so deeply motivated that you would find out what that small exchange means. And why Romanian? Well, there are Romanian nurses working in the UK. Also, I have two friends here in Rotterdam, both artists, and one of them, Clara, is Swedish, and Raluca is Romanian. They’re both thanked in the back of the book. With Raluca, we went through a long exchange about how the two women who speak Romanian would actually phrase the question to each other, given that it’s a workplace setting, it could be like this or like that. So I went with her expertise, and it was a way of drawing on my friendships and bringing them in.

It’s very interesting with fiction writing, how you come to a decision that can seem somewhat random. I remember sitting on a bench and finding Rebba’s name and knowing that she needed to be Swedish. And it wasn’t because she’s a version of Clara, not at all, but rather the sense of wanting her not to be English. So it was somewhat random, she could have been German or whatever. But then that decision solidifies and starts to become this indisputable truth. It’s very odd. It hadn’t happened to me before. Somehow, a decision just starts to exist within the context of the novel, and then it becomes the truth within the logic of the novel.

LG: For our last question, I’d like to step back a bit. You’ve talked a lot about failure in translation, and how often translation is viewed through the lens of failure, rather than through a lens of possibility. Do you think that view has shifted at all in recent years, or do you think, for better or for worse, that this language of failure is a permanent fixture of translation discussion and criticism?

KB: I think within an anglophone context there’s been a radical shift, really, in the past ten years. It’s incredibly different in terms of the celebration of the practice, the interest in the practice, the visibility of translators themselves, the kind of authority and the right to speak that they’re now accorded in ways that, at least in my experience, just wasn’t the case a decade ago. So I think that’s enormously positive and down to the activism and the work of many, including Words Without Borders. It’s extraordinary how seldom translation was asked about back then. People are more attentive to it now: aware they are reading this in translation, aware of who translated it, and keenly interested in this. So I do sense a lot of positive change.

Kate Briggs is a writer and French-to-English translator based in Rotterdam, Netherlands, where she teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute and co-runs the publishing project Short Pieces That Move! Her books include This Little Art (Fitzcarraldo Editions) and The Long Form (published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in the UK and Dorothy, a publishing project in the US). In 2021 she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for nonfiction. Between March 2022 and May 2023 she was practitioner-in-residence at Glasgow School of Art. Co-edited with Laura Haynes, A Social Process of Unknowing Yourself in Real Time: Work on Conversation is a forthcoming record of that year.