Letters to Kate

Kate Zambreno and Kate Briggs have more in common than a first name. Briggs is a translator of Roland Barthes, and the author of This Little Art (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2018), a book-length essay on translation. It’s a book not just about the act of shifting a text from one language to another, but is also a remarkable and intimate meditation on the way in which interpretation is an integral part of life: from your body translating the movements of an aerobics instructor, to your ears mishearing the lyrics of a Madonna song. Zambreno’s body of work, too, is marked by intimacy, and a thoughtful engagement with a long lineage of writers and artists: from Thomas Bernhard to Louise Bourgeois, from Roland Barthes to Barbara Loden. Her Appendix Project (MIT Press, 2019) is an addendum to the Book of Mutter (Semiotext(e), 2017), a work about “stitching back former selves, sentences,” that at its heart is a fractured, brilliant, and rhizomatic search to piece a life together after the death of her mother.

Given what the two Kates share in common—warm, meditative writing; a common love for Barthes—we asked them to correspond. They wrote emails to one another this winter, from February to March, Zambreno from her home in New York, and Briggs in Rotterdam. Because they’re both named Kate, we think it pertinent to say: the exchange begins with a letter from Briggs to Zambreno. 

Dear Kate,

I’ve just got home from walking the boys to school, and made a coffee, and the light is beautiful this morning—I feel like I can believe spring is coming now. Whereas last week it seemed impossible… The birds are singing too. And now I’ve written those lines I’m wondering whether the seasons might be a good place to start: continuity, ongoingness but always with variation? In Appendix Project you describe Barthes’s Mourning Diary as a “form of meditation that felt cyclical, seasonal.” I received Appendix Project—a book of new talks you wrote and delivered in response to requests to read from Book of Mutter—as a way of extending your time with these questions and experiences and materials of that earlier book, and holding them open. I want to ask you about this persistence: what it means, and perhaps also what it takes, to stay with a set of preoccupations over time. Even under pressure to write about something else, to talk about something else, to already be somewhere else? And yet I’m also interested to know whether, like the seasons, the questions and experiences and materials of Book of...