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New Directions Poetry Pamphlet #2
Two American Scenes
Part of our revived "Poetry Pamphlet" series, Two American Scenes features two masters of the essay discussing "found material."
Excerpts:
It was given to me, in the nineteenth century,
to spend a lifetime on this earth. Along with a few of the sorrows
that are appointed unto men, I have had innumerable enjoyments;
and the world has been to me, even from childhood,a great museum.
— Lydia Davis
Bad rapids. Bradley is knocked over the side; his foot catches
under the seat and he is dragged, head under water. Camped on
a sand beach, the wind blows a hurricane. Sand piles over us like
a snow-drift.
— Eliot Weinberge
Excerpts:
It was given to me, in the nineteenth century,
to spend a lifetime on this earth. Along with a few of the sorrows
that are appointed unto men, I have had innumerable enjoyments;
and the world has been to me, even from childhood,a great museum.
— Lydia Davis
Bad rapids. Bradley is knocked over the side; his foot catches
under the seat and he is dragged, head under water. Camped on
a sand beach, the wind blows a hurricane. Sand piles over us like
a snow-drift.
— Eliot Weinberge
56 pages, Paperback
First published January 17, 2013
2 people are currently reading
123 people want to read
About the author
Lydia Davis
354 books1,479 followersLydia Davis, acclaimed fiction writer and translator, is famous in literary circles for her extremely brief and brilliantly inventive short stories. In fall 2003 she received one of 25 MacArthur Foundation “Genius” awards. In granting the award the MacArthur Foundation praised Davis’s work for showing “how language itself can entertain, how all that what one word says, and leaves unsaid, can hold a reader’s interest. . . . Davis grants readers a glimpse of life’s previously invisible details, revealing new sources of philosophical insights and beauty.” In 2013 She was the winner of the Man Booker International prize.
Davis’s recent collection, “Varieties of Disturbance” (May 2007), was featured on the front cover of the “Los Angeles Times Book Review” and garnered a starred review from “Publishers Weekly.” Her “Samuel Johnson Is Indignant” (2001) was praised by “Elle” magazine for its “Highly intelligent, wildly entertaining stories, bound by visionary, philosophical, comic prose—part Gertrude Stein, part Simone Weil, and pure Lydia Davis.”
Davis is also a celebrated translator of French literature into English. The French government named her a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters for her fiction and her distinguished translations of works by Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Jean Jouve, Michel Butor and others.
Davis recently published a new translation (the first in more than 80 years) of Marcel Proust’s masterpiece, “Swann’s Way” (2003), the first volume of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.” A story of childhood and sexual jealousy set in fin de siecle France, “Swann’s Way” is widely regarded as one of the most important literary works of the 20th century.
The “Sunday Telegraph” (London) called the new translation “A triumph [that] will bring this inexhaustible artwork to new audiences throughout the English-speaking world.” Writing for the “Irish Times,” Frank Wynne said, “What soars in this new version is the simplicity of language and fidelity to the cambers of Proust’s prose… Davis’ translation is magnificent, precise.”
Davis’s previous works include “Almost No Memory” (stories, 1997), “The End of the Story” (novel, 1995), “Break It Down” (stories, 1986), “Story and Other Stories” (1983), and “The Thirteenth Woman” (stories, 1976).
Grace Paley wrote of “Almost No Memory” that Lydia Davis is the kind of writer who “makes you say, ‘Oh, at last!’—brains, language, energy, a playfulness with form, and what appears to be a generous nature.” The collection was chosen as one of the “25 Favorite Books of 1997” by the “Voice Literary Supplement” and one of the “100 Best Books of 1997” by the “Los Angeles Times.”
Davis first received serious critical attention for her collection of stories, “Break It Down,” which was selected as a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. The book’s positive critical reception helped Davis win a prestigious Whiting Writer’s Award in 1988.
She is the daughter of Robert Gorham Davis and Hope Hale Davis. From 1974 to 1978 Davis was married to Paul Auster, with whom she has a son, Daniel Auster. Davis is currently married to painter Alan Cote, with whom she has a son, Theo Cote. She is a professor of creative writing at University at Albany, SUNY.
Davis is considered hugely influential by a generation of writers including Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers, who once wrote that she "blows the roof off of so many of our assumptions about what constitutes short fiction."
Davis’s recent collection, “Varieties of Disturbance” (May 2007), was featured on the front cover of the “Los Angeles Times Book Review” and garnered a starred review from “Publishers Weekly.” Her “Samuel Johnson Is Indignant” (2001) was praised by “Elle” magazine for its “Highly intelligent, wildly entertaining stories, bound by visionary, philosophical, comic prose—part Gertrude Stein, part Simone Weil, and pure Lydia Davis.”
Davis is also a celebrated translator of French literature into English. The French government named her a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters for her fiction and her distinguished translations of works by Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Jean Jouve, Michel Butor and others.
Davis recently published a new translation (the first in more than 80 years) of Marcel Proust’s masterpiece, “Swann’s Way” (2003), the first volume of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.” A story of childhood and sexual jealousy set in fin de siecle France, “Swann’s Way” is widely regarded as one of the most important literary works of the 20th century.
The “Sunday Telegraph” (London) called the new translation “A triumph [that] will bring this inexhaustible artwork to new audiences throughout the English-speaking world.” Writing for the “Irish Times,” Frank Wynne said, “What soars in this new version is the simplicity of language and fidelity to the cambers of Proust’s prose… Davis’ translation is magnificent, precise.”
Davis’s previous works include “Almost No Memory” (stories, 1997), “The End of the Story” (novel, 1995), “Break It Down” (stories, 1986), “Story and Other Stories” (1983), and “The Thirteenth Woman” (stories, 1976).
Grace Paley wrote of “Almost No Memory” that Lydia Davis is the kind of writer who “makes you say, ‘Oh, at last!’—brains, language, energy, a playfulness with form, and what appears to be a generous nature.” The collection was chosen as one of the “25 Favorite Books of 1997” by the “Voice Literary Supplement” and one of the “100 Best Books of 1997” by the “Los Angeles Times.”
Davis first received serious critical attention for her collection of stories, “Break It Down,” which was selected as a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. The book’s positive critical reception helped Davis win a prestigious Whiting Writer’s Award in 1988.
She is the daughter of Robert Gorham Davis and Hope Hale Davis. From 1974 to 1978 Davis was married to Paul Auster, with whom she has a son, Daniel Auster. Davis is currently married to painter Alan Cote, with whom she has a son, Theo Cote. She is a professor of creative writing at University at Albany, SUNY.
Davis is considered hugely influential by a generation of writers including Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers, who once wrote that she "blows the roof off of so many of our assumptions about what constitutes short fiction."
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 17, 2022
There's just the one life -- among all the other little lives with whom one lives. So separated from each other as contemporaries of a single geography and so distinguishable biospheres of a separate continent, Lydia Davis, inheriting papers from pere Robert Gorham Davis (1908-1998), literary professor, communist, McCarthy Hearings witness, and thus caretaker of the family museum papers of the Harwich Historical Society (somehow missed by In the American Grain) comes together with Eliot Weinberger, translator and critic, to let their found poems-of-Cagean-writing through reflect upon each other. There's no meta-commentary. No scholarly emendation. I can't even disclose much about the origins of Weinberger's text. It's as if the publisher would simply make the text, in pamphlet form, available to students.
November 30, 2017
Eliot Weinberger's part is just wonderful.
May 1, 2013
As the New Directions website says, "Break out your butter churner and hold onto your hats!" Two narrative poems set in 19th-century America by two of America's most interesting writers (to me). Inspired by real events.
from "A Journey on the Colorado River"
by Eliot Weinberger
It seems a long way up to the world of sunshine.
Camped in a grove of cedars, box-elder, and dead willows. A sudden whirlwind scatters our fire and sets the site ablaze. We rush for the boats, ears scorched, hair and clothes singed, carrying what we can. The cook stumbles and falls, and away goes the mess-kit down the river. Plates are gone; spoons gone; our knives and forks are gone.
The unceasing roar of rushing water.
* * *
from "Our Village"
by Lydia Davis
The sea appeared perfectly smooth, a mile and a half away,
and the vessels inshore were long in passing
while those in the offing, which I thought very near
and so small that I could take them in my hands,
seemed to hang all day as white specks
between the sky and the water.
The voices, so kind,
of those who led me from place to place,
their mild words, were in exact harmony
with the picture of the slow-moving vessels
from those windows
and the vessel on the wall clock
that kept time with the pendulum,
rising and falling on a billowy sea.
from "A Journey on the Colorado River"
by Eliot Weinberger
It seems a long way up to the world of sunshine.
Camped in a grove of cedars, box-elder, and dead willows. A sudden whirlwind scatters our fire and sets the site ablaze. We rush for the boats, ears scorched, hair and clothes singed, carrying what we can. The cook stumbles and falls, and away goes the mess-kit down the river. Plates are gone; spoons gone; our knives and forks are gone.
The unceasing roar of rushing water.
* * *
from "Our Village"
by Lydia Davis
The sea appeared perfectly smooth, a mile and a half away,
and the vessels inshore were long in passing
while those in the offing, which I thought very near
and so small that I could take them in my hands,
seemed to hang all day as white specks
between the sky and the water.
The voices, so kind,
of those who led me from place to place,
their mild words, were in exact harmony
with the picture of the slow-moving vessels
from those windows
and the vessel on the wall clock
that kept time with the pendulum,
rising and falling on a billowy sea.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews