Writing and the Space It Makes

• Published in: The Yale review 2021-12, Vol.109 (4), p.18-35
• Main Authors: Briggs, Kate, Gladman, Renee
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Essays; Fiction; Language; Literary translation; Novels; Translations; Translators; Writers; Writing
• ISSN: 0044-0124; 1467-9736; 1467-9736
• DOI: 10.1353/tyr.2021.0073

Yet one also feels, reading their work, and reading this conversation, that their genrelessness may be a necessity: of their uncontainable curiosities, of their conception of writing itself as a process of innovation, sentence making as language testing. 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. [...]do you in some way think of yourself as a translator? RENEE GLADMAN 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. [...]reading your thoughts here, especially on this sensing of what is not visible, not yet brought into meaning, I am reminded of a passage that I love in Calamities, which I think of as your book of mornings, each essay narrating how you began the day, each one tracking its own wild line of flight from that contingent beginning. Part of what I love about this scene is how you make teaching into a drama of live thinking-together: a setting to risk working out something important in the moment, without knowing in advance where you might end up.