Kate Briggs at The Paris Review:
Marcottage could be a possible metaphor for translation. This work of provoking what plants, and perhaps also books, already know how to do, what in fact they most deeply want to do: actively creating the conditions for a new plant to root at some distance from the original, and there live separately: a “daughter-work” robust enough in its new context to throw out runners of its own, in unexpected directions, causing the network of interrelations to grow and complexify.
For me, marcottage is a way to make sense of my own translations of Barthes’s lecture courses. Officially, there have been two—two translations into English of two volumes of lecture notes published in French more than a decade ago: The Preparation of the Novel and How to Live Together. But to my mind, there have really been four: two further books, translations in a more expanded sense. This Little Art, my long essay that stays close to Barthes’s late work, frequently citing it, renarrating it, making an adjacent space to keep thinking with it.
more here.