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Essays Two: On Proust, Translation, Foreign Languages, and the City of Arles
A collection of essays on translation, foreign languages, Proust, and one French city, from the master short-fiction writer and acclaimed translator Lydia Davis In Essays One, Lydia Davis, who has been called “a magician of self-consciousness” by Jonathan Franzen and “the best prose stylist in America” by Rick Moody, gathered a generous selection of her essays about best writing practices, representations of Jesus, early tourist photographs, and much more. Essays Two collects Davis’s writings and talks on her second the art of translation. The award-winning translator from the French reflects on her experience translating Proust (“A work of creation in its own right.” —Claire Messud, Newsday), Madame Bovary (“[Flaubert’s] masterwork has been given the English translation it deserves.” —Kathryn Harrison, The New York Times Book Review), and Michel Leiris (“Magnificent.” —Tim Watson, Public Books). She also makes an extended visit to the French city of Arles, and writes about the varied adventures of learning Norwegian, Dutch, and Spanish through reading and translation. Davis, a 2003 MacArthur Fellow and the winner of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize for her fiction, here focuses her unique intelligence and idiosyncratic ways of understanding on the endlessly complex relations between languages. Together with Essays One, this provocative and delightful volume cements her status as one of our most original and beguiling writers.
594 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 2, 2021
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About the author
Lydia Davis
352 books1,466 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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January 16, 2022
I started this book with much enthusiasm.
Translations, learning new languages, language structures, evolution of language – these issues excite and frustrate me. Some time ago someone sent me an essay by Davis on translating Proust, which I found fascinating even though I had read Proust in the original and I would never dream of reading him in English. Then I lost the essay.
No wonder then that I jumped at this second volume of Davis’s Essays, since it contained that essay. . In this collection she writes of translating not just Proust, but also Flaubert (Mme Bovary) and Michel Leiris. Additionally she writes of learning Spanish, Dutch and Norwegian from the scratch, using not a language textbook but tackling a novel in each of those languages (although for Spanish she picks a translation of Tom Sawyer). She also discusses her projects of modernizing older works – such as Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, or Alfred Ollivant's Bob, Son of Battle: The Last Gray Dog of Kenmuir. She does this with French too, translating a Gascon Folktale. . At the end she has included an essay on the French city of Arles in Provence. Although I have visited this town, this essay will offer more interest to those who are planning an upcoming visit to Arles.
On Proust she has seven essays. Four are thematic and three are devoted to her translation of the first volume of La Recherche. Unsurprisingly, she devotes attention to Proust’s famous long sentences with subordinate clauses, and thus I learn the difference between Hypotaxis and Parataxis, Proust being a Hypotaxis practitioner. She tells us that his friend Paul Morand asserted that Proust spoke in this syntactically complex way. Davis also underlines Proust’s subtle attention to sounds, both those found in the text, for Proust played with alliteration and assonance (à la Racine), as well as those in Proust’s world and in this Davis shows her very inquisitive approach to translation. In her aim to dive deep into the original text, she used several dictionaries (French/French; English/English and a two volume French/English from 1885 that she found in a second-hand bookshop in the Catskills).
Translating Proust meant a different task from tackling Madame Bovary. There have been very few attempts at translating La Recherche, with Scott Moncrieff’s version still considered “the” English version, while Davis counted at least twenty of Bovary in English. She therefore addresses the question of “Why another one?” proving that translations are not monolithic, final and perennial.
Davis’s discussion of her translation methods, difficulties and challenges is very instructing. I was very surprised in that she does not read the book before translating it. This is the opposite from what I was once taught – to read the text first, find out what it is about, and then go back to the beginning and start translating only once one knew where one was going. Instead, she likes to stay close to the text and let the text take her where she has to go. This manner also provides her the element of surprise and curiosity that readers feel when first encountering a novel.
These essays can become very technical, both on general issues when translating – literal translations or finding equivalents? Can or should one “improve” on the original? What are the fundamental differences between languages (monosyllabic English versus polysyllabic French)—as well as with very specific instances: how some particular terms can be rendered. As Davis is very conscientious, she uses these opportunities to investigate her own language, to explore the full range of meanings and often finds that etymology offers the clarifying key.
As Davis is also a writer, she ponders on the differences between translating and writing one’s own text. In the latter the writer makes less deliberate choices being led by one’s personal train of thought, while translating per force entails confronting something more external and thereby becoming much more conscious when searching for the right terms. This attention to the other text is probably what drew me from Davis discussion, considering that I am not really interested in the translated Proust. But her observations enriched my appreciation of Proust’s writing, since, as she says, a reader is always more passive and can unconsciously skip over details.
Davis’s essay on Bovary is also masterful. She compares various of the other translations as well as examining what other great writers, such as James, Nabokov or Joyce, said of Flaubert. As she investigated Flaubert’s drafts of the novel, she noticed that if Proust revised by enlarging his original text, Flaubert did so by cutting.
As for Michel Leiris, as I have not read him, I could not feel the same engagement with her observations, but her essay awoke my interest. She notes that Leiris is more interested in the expression of an idea thereby becoming more self-conscious stylistically, while Proust concentrated more in the idea itself, even though he paid great attention to nuances in its expression.
Her essays on learning new languages were very inspiring and one can only her very brave efforts in the way she confronts a completely new language. She lists many of her tricks or tools when deciphering, such as identifying cognates or relying on the context of the novel. But some of these essays, those dealing with languages which for the moment at least I do not plan to learn such as Norwegian and Dutch, I skimmed through, though. Particularly since at times her essays are a collection of notes or a literary-deciphering diary. I had a kick out of her essay on Tom Sawyer in Spanish.
I plan to read her firs volume soon, and, of course, her own stories. Someone with such a command of language must produce captivating texts.
October 8, 2023
When I first moved to France, I was working for a news agency, making films for English-language broadcasters. A lot of it involved going out to interview people who had something to say about current affairs, and then dubbing or subtitling them into English.
It was a very practical form of translation. While I was interested in the nuances of different registers and dialects, I was more acutely interested in the fact that I had to get something on the wire by noon or my editor would fire me. I still vividly remember my first day, vox-popping people in an Arab market in the 12e about conflict in the Middle East, when one garrulous grocer ended an impromptu speech on the subject by saying,
I must have replayed the video a hundred times in the editing suite before I even understood the Ève et Adam bit, just because we're so used to hearing it the other way round. And as for et puis, voilà, quoi !, I had no idea how you could begin to translate it, it's just pure French expressiveness without any real meaning!
I don't remember how I solved that particular problem. But the point is, that job (which I loved) left me with a very pragmatic view of translation, and one that was not precious about specific qualities of the original. Or rather, what I learned was that the best way to translate was to understand the French, and then write something often quite divergent in its individual words, or even sentences, but which best expressed the same idea in English.
This is very different from Lydia Davis's idea of what literary translating should be, which I think is what lay behind the creeping sense that something in this book was rubbing me the wrong way, despite the fact that, on paper, she should be right up my street. Davis is fascinated by words, etymologies, languages, phonology, and she's insatiably curious about historical contexts. Some of the essays in here have such a strange ring of familiarity that it's almost like I'm reading one of my old notebooks: musings on individual word choices and correspondences, comparisons between different translations, random equivalences with other languages.
But Davis's ideal is ‘close translation’, a concept that I'm not totally comfortable with. Certainly not when it's as close as she wishes to get, which is practically a syllable-by-syllable correspondence. ‘I like to reproduce the word order, and the order of ideas, of the original wherever possible,’ she says; well enough, but the challenges she sets herself sometimes get more absurd:
This already made me a little dubious, because while obviously it's great if you can find matches to the sounds of the original, it's much more important to get an equivalent to meaning and register, and ‘otiose’ is a much more elevated register than French oiseuse. But things get weirder as she gets distracted (as I would see it) by etymology:
Let's hope not! That would be a terrible translation. The same kind of thinking leads her to conclude that ‘nearly’ is a better translation of presque than ‘almost’, because ‘nearly’ contains ‘near’ as presque contains près; or to caution us over jumping to the conclusion that toujours means ‘always’, as dictionaries might imply, because
…which is nonsense, because both words mean what they mean and have not the slightest echo of their etymology to most native speakers. This kind of mistake – that a word's history determines its meaning – is common enough that linguists call it the etymological fallacy, but to see a translator so caught up in it is a bit like seeing a town planner or architect who thinks that Celtic ley-lines are a good guide for where to build affordable housing. It's pleasant if things line up with your particular hobby-horse, but don't let it determine policy.
The quest for ‘accuracy’ can easily go astray when your eye is too close to the ground. Comma splices, which are natural in French, are carried over to Davis's English, where they are much less so. Where possible, a French word will be translated by its identical equivalent in English (for example, rose ‘pink’ will preferably, for Davis, be ‘rose’). All this because she is convinced that Proust ‘must have had a reason’ for every position, every sound: and maybe he did, but a word in one language is not the same as a word in another language, and, fundamentally, I'm afraid, English is not French.
You become aware that Davis's perfect translation would be one where each word in French becomes exactly the same word in English, like something from a Borges story. It reminded me of a snide comment someone made about Helen Lowe-Porter's translation of Mann's The Magic Mountain, in which, it was remarked, she accidentally succeeded in translating the novel back into German.
Here's a very telling anecdote:
And that's it, in a nutshell. Flair in French prose – and certainly there is plenty in Proust – cannot be conveyed by just reproducing the same words in the same order. It can only come from using the resources of the language in which you're actually writing, and those resources are very different in English than in French.
Proust's long sentences, for instance, are not half as confusing in French as they are in translation. (To break them up, Davis says, would ‘to falsify the experience of reading Proust’, but I think you could argue that it's just as much of a falsification to make him more complicated than he should be.) The reasons are purely grammatical. In French, words like ‘it’, ‘that’ or ‘which’ have a gender and a number which make it much easier to see what they're referring to, whereas in English there is no guide; it's no fluke or coincidence that English writers don't construct sentences that way, it's because it's hard to make them make sense.
This is very helpful on the many occasions when Proust even uses the pronoun before he's told us what the actual noun is. Take a sentence like this, which I noted down from Jeunes Filles:
…of which a more-or-less straight translation might be:
‘They surrounded us’: what exactly surrounded us? In English, it's easy to assume that ‘they’ refers to the intellectual joys, but in French it's clear from the grammar that it was the warm glazes and sparkling half-light. Here, as over and over again, French gives us handholds that English cannot.
While the resources of French are primarily formal and syntactical (I'll argue), those of English have more to do with verbal expansiveness and richness of vocabulary. This was brought home to me forcibly some years ago when I read Montaigne, and then John Florio's contemporaneous translation of it, one of the all-time great feats of translation. Where Montaigne is balanced and elegant, Florio is all verbal pyrotechnics. He doesn't attempt to put Montaigne's constructions into English, because in English they wouldn't convey his genius, only the form of it.
Lydia Davis notes down James Joyce making much the same point:
None of this, obviously, is to say that I think Davis is not an excellent translator: the examples she gives of her own translations in here all read really well and offer elegant solutions to the problems of the text. And they are clearly more ‘accurate’, on a word-by-word (and even comma-by-comma) basis, than most other translations. It's just I don't think this kind of accuracy gets you any closer to what makes Proust (or any writer) interesting in French.
It may be a fun game to match things up on as many levels as you can, but you're kidding yourself if you think it allows you to parse French style in English. Like Davis's fondness for alphabetising things, turning her information into lists, tables, enumerated divisions (the fastidiousness of which is itself rather Proustian), this kind of thing does suggest Emerson's comment about consistency being the hobgoblin of little minds.
I found this book super engaging and indeed fascinating all the way though, but it did leave me more convinced than ever of the exact opposite of Davis's viewpoint – convinced that translation is (pace this book) an interpretive thing, that one language is not another language, and that in the final analysis (as one grizzled hack back in my newsroom days once put it) ‘there's no such thing as a close translation’. Et puis, voilà, quoi.
It was a very practical form of translation. While I was interested in the nuances of different registers and dialects, I was more acutely interested in the fact that I had to get something on the wire by noon or my editor would fire me. I still vividly remember my first day, vox-popping people in an Arab market in the 12e about conflict in the Middle East, when one garrulous grocer ended an impromptu speech on the subject by saying,
Mais c'est comme ça depuis Ève et Adam, quoi, et puis, voilà, quoi !
I must have replayed the video a hundred times in the editing suite before I even understood the Ève et Adam bit, just because we're so used to hearing it the other way round. And as for et puis, voilà, quoi !, I had no idea how you could begin to translate it, it's just pure French expressiveness without any real meaning!
I don't remember how I solved that particular problem. But the point is, that job (which I loved) left me with a very pragmatic view of translation, and one that was not precious about specific qualities of the original. Or rather, what I learned was that the best way to translate was to understand the French, and then write something often quite divergent in its individual words, or even sentences, but which best expressed the same idea in English.
This is very different from Lydia Davis's idea of what literary translating should be, which I think is what lay behind the creeping sense that something in this book was rubbing me the wrong way, despite the fact that, on paper, she should be right up my street. Davis is fascinated by words, etymologies, languages, phonology, and she's insatiably curious about historical contexts. Some of the essays in here have such a strange ring of familiarity that it's almost like I'm reading one of my old notebooks: musings on individual word choices and correspondences, comparisons between different translations, random equivalences with other languages.
But Davis's ideal is ‘close translation’, a concept that I'm not totally comfortable with. Certainly not when it's as close as she wishes to get, which is practically a syllable-by-syllable correspondence. ‘I like to reproduce the word order, and the order of ideas, of the original wherever possible,’ she says; well enough, but the challenges she sets herself sometimes get more absurd:
See if, for oiseuse, you can find a word in English beginning with o and ending in the z sound that means the same thing and, if possible, has the same derivation. Handily, for this last problem, there was the perfect solution, otiose…
This already made me a little dubious, because while obviously it's great if you can find matches to the sounds of the original, it's much more important to get an equivalent to meaning and register, and ‘otiose’ is a much more elevated register than French oiseuse. But things get weirder as she gets distracted (as I would see it) by etymology:
alors, “then,” comes from the Latin illa hora, “at that hour.” So I felt I had the option of translating alors as “at that hour,” though I'm not sure I ever did.
Let's hope not! That would be a terrible translation. The same kind of thinking leads her to conclude that ‘nearly’ is a better translation of presque than ‘almost’, because ‘nearly’ contains ‘near’ as presque contains près; or to caution us over jumping to the conclusion that toujours means ‘always’, as dictionaries might imply, because
toujours is a shortened form of tous les jours, “all the days,” “every day,” whereas always is a shortened form of “all ways,” “in every manner,” or “by every route.” One word refers to time and the other to manner…
…which is nonsense, because both words mean what they mean and have not the slightest echo of their etymology to most native speakers. This kind of mistake – that a word's history determines its meaning – is common enough that linguists call it the etymological fallacy, but to see a translator so caught up in it is a bit like seeing a town planner or architect who thinks that Celtic ley-lines are a good guide for where to build affordable housing. It's pleasant if things line up with your particular hobby-horse, but don't let it determine policy.
The quest for ‘accuracy’ can easily go astray when your eye is too close to the ground. Comma splices, which are natural in French, are carried over to Davis's English, where they are much less so. Where possible, a French word will be translated by its identical equivalent in English (for example, rose ‘pink’ will preferably, for Davis, be ‘rose’). All this because she is convinced that Proust ‘must have had a reason’ for every position, every sound: and maybe he did, but a word in one language is not the same as a word in another language, and, fundamentally, I'm afraid, English is not French.
You become aware that Davis's perfect translation would be one where each word in French becomes exactly the same word in English, like something from a Borges story. It reminded me of a snide comment someone made about Helen Lowe-Porter's translation of Mann's The Magic Mountain, in which, it was remarked, she accidentally succeeded in translating the novel back into German.
Here's a very telling anecdote:
A fellow translator of mine in the seven-translator Penguin edition of the entire In Search of Lost Time was praised by a reviewer for one sentence in particular:
“I could tell [the weather] from the first street noises, whether they reached me muffled and distorted by dampness or twanging like arrows in the empty, resonant space of a wide-open morning, icy and pure.”
The reviewer picked out one phrase in particular, her “twanging like arrows,” as a good solution for the French original's more formal and neutral vibrant comme des flêches—he called it “a brilliant touch that taps an indigenous resource of English while honoring the French.” I was startled by but also rather admiring of the flair of that “twanging.” In my thoughts, I kept returning to the sentence and her solution. I was experiencing something of a struggle, because I knew that the use of “twanging” represented one approach to translation—to draw on the full Anglo-Saxon riches of English even if that gave a bit of an Anglo-Saxon flavor to the prose—but that I, despite loving that vocabulary, would almost certainly have opted for the more literal, and less colorful, “vibrating like arrows.” No flair in that, alas.
And that's it, in a nutshell. Flair in French prose – and certainly there is plenty in Proust – cannot be conveyed by just reproducing the same words in the same order. It can only come from using the resources of the language in which you're actually writing, and those resources are very different in English than in French.
Proust's long sentences, for instance, are not half as confusing in French as they are in translation. (To break them up, Davis says, would ‘to falsify the experience of reading Proust’, but I think you could argue that it's just as much of a falsification to make him more complicated than he should be.) The reasons are purely grammatical. In French, words like ‘it’, ‘that’ or ‘which’ have a gender and a number which make it much easier to see what they're referring to, whereas in English there is no guide; it's no fluke or coincidence that English writers don't construct sentences that way, it's because it's hard to make them make sense.
This is very helpful on the many occasions when Proust even uses the pronoun before he's told us what the actual noun is. Take a sentence like this, which I noted down from Jeunes Filles:
les joies intellectuelles que je goûtais dans cet atelier ne m’empêchaient nullement de sentir, quoiqu’ils nous entourassent comme malgré nous, les tièdes glacis, la pénombre étincelante de la pièce
…of which a more-or-less straight translation might be:
The intellectual joys that I tasted in that studio in no way stopped me from feeling, though they surrounded us as if in spite of ourselves, the warm glazes and sparkling half-light of the room.
‘They surrounded us’: what exactly surrounded us? In English, it's easy to assume that ‘they’ refers to the intellectual joys, but in French it's clear from the grammar that it was the warm glazes and sparkling half-light. Here, as over and over again, French gives us handholds that English cannot.
While the resources of French are primarily formal and syntactical (I'll argue), those of English have more to do with verbal expansiveness and richness of vocabulary. This was brought home to me forcibly some years ago when I read Montaigne, and then John Florio's contemporaneous translation of it, one of the all-time great feats of translation. Where Montaigne is balanced and elegant, Florio is all verbal pyrotechnics. He doesn't attempt to put Montaigne's constructions into English, because in English they wouldn't convey his genius, only the form of it.
Lydia Davis notes down James Joyce making much the same point:
In his opinion, the French compensated for their relatively barren language by inventing great style—by employing balance and precision to superlative effect. He said: “They have a rather poor instrument, but they play wonderfully well.”
None of this, obviously, is to say that I think Davis is not an excellent translator: the examples she gives of her own translations in here all read really well and offer elegant solutions to the problems of the text. And they are clearly more ‘accurate’, on a word-by-word (and even comma-by-comma) basis, than most other translations. It's just I don't think this kind of accuracy gets you any closer to what makes Proust (or any writer) interesting in French.
It may be a fun game to match things up on as many levels as you can, but you're kidding yourself if you think it allows you to parse French style in English. Like Davis's fondness for alphabetising things, turning her information into lists, tables, enumerated divisions (the fastidiousness of which is itself rather Proustian), this kind of thing does suggest Emerson's comment about consistency being the hobgoblin of little minds.
I found this book super engaging and indeed fascinating all the way though, but it did leave me more convinced than ever of the exact opposite of Davis's viewpoint – convinced that translation is (pace this book) an interpretive thing, that one language is not another language, and that in the final analysis (as one grizzled hack back in my newsroom days once put it) ‘there's no such thing as a close translation’. Et puis, voilà, quoi.
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February 4, 2022Video review on Leaf by Leaf: https://youtu.be/UljZf6ZXI6I
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December 15, 2021I focused on the chapters on Proust. The author is a world-renowned translator who translated "Swann's Way" for the Penguin Classics edition. I found that I trusted her judgments on Proust more than, say, those of Samuel Beckett or Nabokov. Nabokov, for example, considers Proust's characters entirely fictional, but it's a bit more complicated than that...
"The book is filled with events and characters closely resembling those of Proust’s own life. Yet this novel is not autobiography wearing a thin disguise of fiction but, rather, something more complex—fiction created out of real life, based on experiences and beliefs of its author, and presented in the guise of autobiography."
Meanwhile...
"Although plot has a role to play in a novel, it does not have to be primary, and in fact the novel is almost always more interesting when plot is not primary."
It does have a plot, but the catch is one has to read the whole thing to see all the threads pulled together in the final volume.
"One will find, too, that the better acquainted one becomes with this book, the more it yields. Given its richness and resilience, Proust’s work may be, and has been, enjoyed on every level and in every form—as quotation, as excerpt, as compendium, even as movie and comic book—but in the end it is best experienced, for most, in the way it was meant to be, in the full, slow reading and rereading of every word, in complete submission to Proust’s subtle psychological analyses, his precise portraits, his compassionate humor, his richly colored and lyrical landscapes, his extended digressions, his architectonic sentences, his symphonic structures, his perfect formal designs."
"In the very first pages of Swann’s Way, the notion of escape from time is alluded to, and the description of the magic lantern [The Arabian Nights were a favorite of Proust's] that follows soon after hints at how time will be transcended through art. The wistful closing passage in the Bois de Boulogne introduces the theme of the receding, in time, and the disappearance of beloved places and people and their resurrection in our imagination, our memory, and finally in our art. For only in recollection does an experience become fully significant, as we arrange it in a meaningful pattern, and thus the crucial role of our intellect, our imagination, in our perception of the world and re-creation of it to suit our desires; thus the importance of the role of the artist in transforming reality according to a particular inner vision: the artist escapes the tyranny of time through art."
"In December 1912, Gallimard and Fasquelle both returned their copies of the manuscript. Fasquelle, and other publishers, too, Proust wrote in a letter to a friend, would not undertake to publish a work “so different from what the public is accustomed to reading.” Author and Publisher, Andre Gide later admitted to Proust: “The rejection of this book will remain the most serious mistake ever made by the NRF—and (since to my shame I was largely responsible for it) one of the sorrows, one of the most bitter regrets of my life.”
"The book is filled with events and characters closely resembling those of Proust’s own life. Yet this novel is not autobiography wearing a thin disguise of fiction but, rather, something more complex—fiction created out of real life, based on experiences and beliefs of its author, and presented in the guise of autobiography."
Meanwhile...
"Although plot has a role to play in a novel, it does not have to be primary, and in fact the novel is almost always more interesting when plot is not primary."
It does have a plot, but the catch is one has to read the whole thing to see all the threads pulled together in the final volume.
"One will find, too, that the better acquainted one becomes with this book, the more it yields. Given its richness and resilience, Proust’s work may be, and has been, enjoyed on every level and in every form—as quotation, as excerpt, as compendium, even as movie and comic book—but in the end it is best experienced, for most, in the way it was meant to be, in the full, slow reading and rereading of every word, in complete submission to Proust’s subtle psychological analyses, his precise portraits, his compassionate humor, his richly colored and lyrical landscapes, his extended digressions, his architectonic sentences, his symphonic structures, his perfect formal designs."
"In the very first pages of Swann’s Way, the notion of escape from time is alluded to, and the description of the magic lantern [The Arabian Nights were a favorite of Proust's] that follows soon after hints at how time will be transcended through art. The wistful closing passage in the Bois de Boulogne introduces the theme of the receding, in time, and the disappearance of beloved places and people and their resurrection in our imagination, our memory, and finally in our art. For only in recollection does an experience become fully significant, as we arrange it in a meaningful pattern, and thus the crucial role of our intellect, our imagination, in our perception of the world and re-creation of it to suit our desires; thus the importance of the role of the artist in transforming reality according to a particular inner vision: the artist escapes the tyranny of time through art."
"In December 1912, Gallimard and Fasquelle both returned their copies of the manuscript. Fasquelle, and other publishers, too, Proust wrote in a letter to a friend, would not undertake to publish a work “so different from what the public is accustomed to reading.” Author and Publisher, Andre Gide later admitted to Proust: “The rejection of this book will remain the most serious mistake ever made by the NRF—and (since to my shame I was largely responsible for it) one of the sorrows, one of the most bitter regrets of my life.”
February 5, 2022
Ow, my head hurts.
This is a good thing. You see I first heard about Lydia Davis a short while ago listening to a podcast while out for a walk. It had snowed here and she was talking about an essay that she wrote on Arles.
This was a perfect distraction from the cold. You see I had visited the city in September 2019. It was a warm fall in the south of France. The light was perfect and made for exploring so much more fun.
Pardon my distraction. You see my head hurts in a good way because this massive tome of essays is about language, and specifically the art of translation. It is 570 pages and weighs a lot! And that is a minor complaint.
Warning: this book was very deep and deals with many languages. This makes sense as any of us wanting to read something other than our own language, needs a translation. Davis, herself a translator, digs deep.
Remember the story of Babel? One day everyone started speaking in tongues (yeah I skipped the religious part) but when it comes down to it, all languages started from one place and developed into all these fascinating voices. But in the end, we all tell a common story: love, birth, death, hope, loss; tragedy, comedy, poetry, prose. All are means to an end. Humans just love to tell stories in whatever language. That’s what keeps us going.
Lydia Davis, who started learning German as a child, followed by French, Spanish and Dutch, decided out of the blue to learn Norwegian. She had a hunch a Dag Solstad’s Telemark novel would never be translated and decided to translate as a challenge (this is the main reason I learned Spanish, lack of translation or the time it took for a translation to come out). It was no easy feat; no dictionary either. Don’t worry, she explains how she did it. Fascinating. Enlightening. Brilliant.
The essays prove one thing, a translation is a rendering of one language into another at that time and place. And sometimes, it’s updating stories from old English. It’s a way of staying true to the source and making it readable. The translator has their work cut out for them, and for many, the rewards are few and with hardly recognition. In Davis’s case, it’s the challenge to unravel the mystery of language.
Did I mention Proust? Now, that man could write. I read him last year. The deep dive into words, cognitives, relationships, connections. Davis translated the first tome, Du Côté de chez Swann. In her essays, I learned even more about his inversion, patterns, alliteration and word play that just reinforced his brilliance. They were more than long sentences. Zut zut zut zut. And no commas too!
Or Flaubert. C’est magnifique! I just read Madame Bovary this year. Lydia Davis has translated this book, and since there are some twenty English translations, we run through many comparisons. The good, the bad, the ugly.
For me this was a very rewarding read. If you have any interest in the art of translation, read this collection of essays.
Oh yeah, the essay on Arles is here too. Ironically, it’s the last essay but getting there was half the fun.
A special thanks to Kalliope for her recent review on this book. I had only known about the essay of Arles, not knowing it was part of this book.
Full five stars.
This is a good thing. You see I first heard about Lydia Davis a short while ago listening to a podcast while out for a walk. It had snowed here and she was talking about an essay that she wrote on Arles.
This was a perfect distraction from the cold. You see I had visited the city in September 2019. It was a warm fall in the south of France. The light was perfect and made for exploring so much more fun.
Pardon my distraction. You see my head hurts in a good way because this massive tome of essays is about language, and specifically the art of translation. It is 570 pages and weighs a lot! And that is a minor complaint.
Warning: this book was very deep and deals with many languages. This makes sense as any of us wanting to read something other than our own language, needs a translation. Davis, herself a translator, digs deep.
Remember the story of Babel? One day everyone started speaking in tongues (yeah I skipped the religious part) but when it comes down to it, all languages started from one place and developed into all these fascinating voices. But in the end, we all tell a common story: love, birth, death, hope, loss; tragedy, comedy, poetry, prose. All are means to an end. Humans just love to tell stories in whatever language. That’s what keeps us going.
Lydia Davis, who started learning German as a child, followed by French, Spanish and Dutch, decided out of the blue to learn Norwegian. She had a hunch a Dag Solstad’s Telemark novel would never be translated and decided to translate as a challenge (this is the main reason I learned Spanish, lack of translation or the time it took for a translation to come out). It was no easy feat; no dictionary either. Don’t worry, she explains how she did it. Fascinating. Enlightening. Brilliant.
The essays prove one thing, a translation is a rendering of one language into another at that time and place. And sometimes, it’s updating stories from old English. It’s a way of staying true to the source and making it readable. The translator has their work cut out for them, and for many, the rewards are few and with hardly recognition. In Davis’s case, it’s the challenge to unravel the mystery of language.
Did I mention Proust? Now, that man could write. I read him last year. The deep dive into words, cognitives, relationships, connections. Davis translated the first tome, Du Côté de chez Swann. In her essays, I learned even more about his inversion, patterns, alliteration and word play that just reinforced his brilliance. They were more than long sentences. Zut zut zut zut. And no commas too!
Or Flaubert. C’est magnifique! I just read Madame Bovary this year. Lydia Davis has translated this book, and since there are some twenty English translations, we run through many comparisons. The good, the bad, the ugly.
For me this was a very rewarding read. If you have any interest in the art of translation, read this collection of essays.
Oh yeah, the essay on Arles is here too. Ironically, it’s the last essay but getting there was half the fun.
A special thanks to Kalliope for her recent review on this book. I had only known about the essay of Arles, not knowing it was part of this book.
Full five stars.
June 23, 2023
'A translation, one worth taking trouble over, is always a work in progress: It can always be improved. The translator can always learn more that will make it better, or can always think of a better way to write a sentence.'
Easily, and surely a 5*. So much to rave about this. Maybe I will later when/if I organise my notes and thoughts. RTC later. Reading Davis' essays on literary translation convinced me that I have to read Proust and Flaubert. Not like I was never curious, but now I'm fully, fully convinced. She almost makes me feel like my French is more awful than I think it is, but in a very self-aware and actually 'good' way? All that fucking 'nuances', am I right. Like you may understand something literally, but sometimes that isn't quite enough. You kind of need a certain form of 'intimacy' that comes with consistency, and a lot of experience; and it helps to be a bit obsessive about it. Thank you for obsessive translators. I love them, and the work and art of translation. Davis gives the readers such a generous glimpse(s) into the process of it all. And I devoured it all so happily.
'The rhythm and sounds and syntax of the language are large elements of a work, even when they are not the most important elements, and a translator who for the most part chooses to ignore these is omitting one aspect of the work. But since compromise is an inherent part of any work of translation—the multiple small compromises involved in so many of the millions of decisions that are made in the course of a project—one can when necessary justify sacrificing rhythm, sound, syntax in the interests of something else, like characterization, dramatic tension, narrative coherence, clarity, and so on. And it is interesting to see how, given one’s engagement with the unfolding narrative of Swann’s Way, with Proust’s complex thoughts, his multifaceted characters, his detailed descriptions, and all the many other elements of the novel, which are all present in a translation even when significant rhythmical and syntactical elements are missing, the work in translation, imperfect as it must be, is still so powerful.'
March 2, 2022
The ultimate and, I would say, the best book about translating literature. Lydia Davis is a master, and to get her views or insights on how translations take place, the procedure is genuinely excellent. Most of the book is devoted to her translation of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way. Her thinking process is both practical, but also to dwell in her brain of sorts is informative and exciting.
December 15, 2021
This was a wonderful follow-up to 2019’s Essays One. I knew that Davis was translator — it was her beautiful story “The Walk” that inspired me to read Proust — but I didn’t grasp just how much of her life she has dedicated to translation. While Essays One had some pieces sharing her process in writing fiction, it was also very outward-focused, with much of the content being critical essays about visual artists and writers. Essays Two, in contrast, is extremely process-focused and highly technical; if Stephen King’s On Writing is a “memoir of the craft,” then Essays Two is a memoir of the science of the written word. Davis emphasizes repeatedly that translation isn’t exact, that there is no such thing as a perfect translation, but she also demonstrates that arriving at a satisfactory solution, of which there may be several, is extremely difficult.
In some cases, translating just a single word requires knowledge of the word’s plain meaning and potential synonyms, of its etymology, and of life in 19th century France. The most striking case of this is the translation of the word boule, the title problem from the essay “Loaf or Hot-Water Bottle.” One would imagine that from context it would be simple to tell which meaning the author intended, but Davis outlines in great detail just how tricky a problem this is, before revealing and justifying her choice of hot-water bottle.
There are glimpses of Davis’s gentle humor throughout. In one instance, after considering that an alternative translation may be better than the on she settled on, she remarks:
“Then again, maybe not. (If I were to write a memoir about being a translator, I might title it: Then Again, Maybe Not. Or, then again, maybe not…)”
However, given the subject matter, Essays Two is bit dry, although this is certainly deliberate and I don’t think the collection suffers from it. If one were looking to read for entertainment, I’d steer them towards The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, as Essays Two is indisputably on the informative end of the spectrum.
On the whole, I really loved this book. Davis is perhaps my favorite author, and I’m very grateful that she has shared so much about her methods for translation and language acquisition.
Thank you to FSG and NetGalley for the advanced copy!
In some cases, translating just a single word requires knowledge of the word’s plain meaning and potential synonyms, of its etymology, and of life in 19th century France. The most striking case of this is the translation of the word boule, the title problem from the essay “Loaf or Hot-Water Bottle.” One would imagine that from context it would be simple to tell which meaning the author intended, but Davis outlines in great detail just how tricky a problem this is, before revealing and justifying her choice of hot-water bottle.
There are glimpses of Davis’s gentle humor throughout. In one instance, after considering that an alternative translation may be better than the on she settled on, she remarks:
“Then again, maybe not. (If I were to write a memoir about being a translator, I might title it: Then Again, Maybe Not. Or, then again, maybe not…)”
However, given the subject matter, Essays Two is bit dry, although this is certainly deliberate and I don’t think the collection suffers from it. If one were looking to read for entertainment, I’d steer them towards The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, as Essays Two is indisputably on the informative end of the spectrum.
On the whole, I really loved this book. Davis is perhaps my favorite author, and I’m very grateful that she has shared so much about her methods for translation and language acquisition.
Thank you to FSG and NetGalley for the advanced copy!
March 31, 2022
such a pleasure to read Lydia Davis who relishes language, essays one was better if only for its breadth of subject matter which showed her full range of linguistic and artistic ability (although I froth the translation philosophising)
December 18, 2021
Can I grow up to be Lydia Davis? (When my idea of translation is keeping my Duolingo streak alive, signs point to no.) Reading Davis is a profoundly inspiring experience - to take a peek behind the brilliant and conscientious mind that thinks with infinite shades of nuance in multiple languages makes me want to read with greater attention. Her essays gave me a renewed awe for the work that translators do.
The intellectual curiosity that Davis brings to every topic she chooses to write about is infectious. I didn’t realize I was interested in half the things her essays cover and yet I found myself engrossed in her writing whether it be about Proustian word choice, the intricacies of “translating” from older English to modern English, or a trip through the city of Arles past and present. I was fascinated.
Davis ponders every single word in the translations she does and her absolute love of language leaps off the page as she allows herself to meander into questions of etymology and history and changing uses of words. This book made me urgently feel like pulling out my copy of Proust and pore over each word with the same level of care Davis put in transforming the soul of it into English.
The intellectual curiosity that Davis brings to every topic she chooses to write about is infectious. I didn’t realize I was interested in half the things her essays cover and yet I found myself engrossed in her writing whether it be about Proustian word choice, the intricacies of “translating” from older English to modern English, or a trip through the city of Arles past and present. I was fascinated.
Davis ponders every single word in the translations she does and her absolute love of language leaps off the page as she allows herself to meander into questions of etymology and history and changing uses of words. This book made me urgently feel like pulling out my copy of Proust and pore over each word with the same level of care Davis put in transforming the soul of it into English.
Read
October 30, 2022aggressively took my time with this one - compared to her previous essay collection which covers a fairly wide breadth of topics, this one is pretty narrowly focused on her translation projects and problems, so it helped me to space em out. i am utterly in awe of her ability to make me care deeply about things i have never once been interested in before namely a) the french language and b) proust. my favorite bits in this dealt with the sounds of language - in one essay she gets into the sounds proust was probably hearing as he wrote, more rhythmic beats compared to today's steady, ambient noises, and speculates how it might have affected his sentence structure. and the way she describes words and sentences and sounds themselves is soo yummy to me— "russian dolls of nesting clauses;" the french l is "liquid, pleasant to the ear;" in english th in "the" "softens and muffles each noun," the word "contiguous" is "a little chilly or prickly: it contains crisp sounds—the hard c, t, and g" mmmmmm
February 12, 2022
Very interesting and inspirational. And there’s so much to learn from these essays!
July 29, 2024
Davis’s clear, actively explanatory mind is wonderful to spend a lot of time with, at least from reading this volume of essays It does help, however, to be interested in literary translation, because that is what most of these essays are about.
I’ve never seen so much material on the nitty gritty aspects of translation, nor have I seen it so well presented: in short sections that allow the reader not to feel bogged down as well as feel able to skim the material that interests him less. Skimmability is a highly underrated gift writers can give to readers, especially in so long a book.
I’ve never seen so much material on the nitty gritty aspects of translation, nor have I seen it so well presented: in short sections that allow the reader not to feel bogged down as well as feel able to skim the material that interests him less. Skimmability is a highly underrated gift writers can give to readers, especially in so long a book.
November 29, 2022
lydia davis is a more disciplined person than i will ever be and these essays made me feel ashamed of living in france and the netherlands yet having a negligible grasp of either language
November 25, 2024
After finishing Essays One, I was excited to pick this volume up. This collection primarily focuses on language learning and translation. However, most of the essays get so into the nitty gritty to the point where most of it flew over the head of a layman like me. On top of that, I don't know any of the languages she's translating from. I have no frame of reference to draw from. As a result, I struggled through these essays and didn't find them enjoyable at all. This is not Lydia Davis's fault; I'm just not the target audience.
October 16, 2022
I have always loved Lydia Davis and believed her to be a peerless writer and translator. This volume really demonstrates her tirelessness and brilliance in the work of translation and further cemented my abiding affection and admiration for her. I found the essays on Proust and Flaubert most interesting; I’ll admit I skimmed some of them (on Dag Solstad, for example), but in every piece, she sparkles. She is wit and light and brevity.
February 20, 2022
Most of this was great, but my god, the essay about trying to "translate" the early 20th century children's (?) book Bob, Son of Battle thoroughly overstayed its welcome.
...It is disappointing that Davis doesn't ever acknowledge (that I recall at any rate) that her work as a translator is entirely confined to western European languages, and that a lot of the ideas and practices she is interested in very likely cannot sustain themselves, or need to be extensively overhauled, in order to address translation between English and structurally more distant languages like Arabic, Hindi, or Mandarin (to name only the largest and most hegemonic non-European languages). While I enjoyed hearing what she has to say about the languages she works in, I now find myself much more interested in hearing from a translator who works across a greater divide, where the options for "close" translation of the kind Davis prefers are much more limited, since standard readable English simply won't have the equipment to produce all the elements and dynamics present in the source language (e.g., East-Asian topic-comment syntax, formality levels, etc.). That said, I for one would be very intrigued by any English translation of such a language that did proceed as closely as Davis's do, even if the result did not approximate an ordinary idea of writing in English.
...It is disappointing that Davis doesn't ever acknowledge (that I recall at any rate) that her work as a translator is entirely confined to western European languages, and that a lot of the ideas and practices she is interested in very likely cannot sustain themselves, or need to be extensively overhauled, in order to address translation between English and structurally more distant languages like Arabic, Hindi, or Mandarin (to name only the largest and most hegemonic non-European languages). While I enjoyed hearing what she has to say about the languages she works in, I now find myself much more interested in hearing from a translator who works across a greater divide, where the options for "close" translation of the kind Davis prefers are much more limited, since standard readable English simply won't have the equipment to produce all the elements and dynamics present in the source language (e.g., East-Asian topic-comment syntax, formality levels, etc.). That said, I for one would be very intrigued by any English translation of such a language that did proceed as closely as Davis's do, even if the result did not approximate an ordinary idea of writing in English.
October 1, 2023
Lydia Davis stays true to her reputation of precise and sparse prose to describe her process of translation, learning new languages, and loving, reading, and recreating Proust's Swann's Way. Davis's passion for language and the art of constructing words onto a page shines and almost convinced me to continue on my own Proust journey (mildly enjoyed #1, suffered through #2) and settled on someday reading Davis's translation. Also enjoyed were Davis's essays about translating Madame Bovary and learning Norwegian.
So much as I may love many, many sentences of Proust's or Flaubert's, I am out to annihilate them, for the moment
Some of my criteria for a good approach to translating were the same years ago, and some were different:
"Three essentials: thorough knowledge of original; skill in writing; courage to make your own piece.
"Then: enjoyment of the original, enjoyment of the act of translating; enjoyment of writing
"Then: patience; readiness to work a problem."
So much as I may love many, many sentences of Proust's or Flaubert's, I am out to annihilate them, for the moment
Some of my criteria for a good approach to translating were the same years ago, and some were different:
"Three essentials: thorough knowledge of original; skill in writing; courage to make your own piece.
"Then: enjoyment of the original, enjoyment of the act of translating; enjoyment of writing
"Then: patience; readiness to work a problem."
Read
December 28, 2024did not fully complete! read the essays that were most interesting to me, mostly the Proust ones, skipped about 3-4 of the others concerning extremely niche content I was not particularly interested in. This book as a whole is incredibly niche, and deeply meticulous in terms of the translation of literature, so to be at times so hair-splitting that it felt like something only a dedicated translator would find entertainment in. If I had not purchased this book, I doubt I would’ve persevered through it as much as I did, as I found it to be a bit too detail oriented for me as someone who is not a translator herself.
May 20, 2022
Really loved this collection, more so than the first volume. I only know one language, and have always felt impoverished and ashamed of that. But I do love to read about other languages, and language in general, and Lydia Davis is a great writer and translator. I loved learning about how she translates, the problems she faced, and the funny projects she chose for herself.
In the midst of reading this book I saw a really distressing bit of news about Davis’s son. A terrible story, I feel very sad for her and her family.
In the midst of reading this book I saw a really distressing bit of news about Davis’s son. A terrible story, I feel very sad for her and her family.
January 4, 2024
i’ve been reading lydia davis in the morning for the better part of a year. what the hell am i supposed to do now
April 8, 2022
lydia is the best, and helps focus on what matters
February 6, 2022
For logophiles, linguaphiles, and francophiles. As someone who has tackled sections of The Plague and Les Miserables in the original, and dabbled in translating a couple of obscure French novels that have never been rendered (which is an apt verb for what I was probably doing, blood and tears and all) into English, I was utterly captivated by Davis's essay in the New York Review of Books on the "Twenty One Pleasures of Translating." So I pounced on this new collection (which opens with that essay), with trepidation, though, when I saw how THICK it was. But for the most part, I found it absorbing and fascinating. She addresses in detail many of the questions that occurred to me in my own dilettantish efforts: a philosophy of translation? Just how close are you trying to come to the original (her answer: very. Up to and including finding English synonyms for the French that begin and end with the same letter, or have the same number of syllables, or the same consonant / vowel sounds.) Is it okay to leave out words or phrases from the original - or add some? (Generally: no. Except when you really, really have to.) How to deal with idioms or slang from a different century or culture. Beyond the trenchwork of changing one word into another, she astutely demonstrates issues of sentence structure, alliteration, rhythms, voice, and tone that apply to writing across tongues.
Davis has translated from French, German, Dutch, Norwegian. She does not read the book before beginning to translate: she wants to come to the text fresh, and find out what happens as she goes, as a new reader would. She uses multiple dictionaries, from eras contemporaneous with the text; straight one-language dictionaries of the original text's language for subtleties of usage; online dictionaries, even Google. When she wants to learn a new language, she finds a book and just starts to read it cold (it helps when you already know three or four other languages to compare word roots to) - which seems excessively laborious to me. But it's kind of inspiring to know she learned Dutch by reading Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo's classic Beck detective series, or Spanish by reading Tom Sawyer. She also discusses the complexities of reading versus understanding and speaking: she may be fluent and expert in the first, but is thrilled when she can parse out a friend asking for the bathroom in an Amsterdam restaurant.
This is a dense, long, deep dive into the world of translating, and as separately published essays or lectures, there is considerable repetition. I confess that the 100 pages of a Proust alphabet in progress was too much for me (though I thoroughly enjoyed the other Proust chapters, not just on his writing, but his life, and his cork-lined bedroom politely preserved as a conference room in a modern Parisian bank). Likewise, the Norwegian essays palled, as did the close analysis of Gascon "patois," both of which I skimmed or skipped. The final Flaubert essay was dazzling, with a sharp-eyed look at some of the numerous previous translations and their presumed intentions, conventions, choices, and failings (would a fly crawl, walk, or climb up a glass? Davis, Nabokov and I disagree.). Not quite sure why the rambling, fragmented travelogue of the city of Arles was stuck on the end of an already 500+-page tome, but hey, if it mentions Van Gogh and throws in a lion who ate a man's hand, I'll read it.
The first time I read Camus's Plague in the Gilbert Stuart translation, I was so overwhelmed by it, I wondered aloud how I could have reached middle age before discovering it. Then, inspired to try it in French, I was outraged at what Stuart had done to the initial appearance of Dr. Rieux on his staircase that first terrible day - how DARE he ADD a phrase Camus had NOT written?! I threw away the Stuart copy and got Robin Buss's instead (much better!). I now feel far better educated on the marvelous and intricate challenge of the art of translation (especially in a language I love), thanks to Ms. Davis.
Davis has translated from French, German, Dutch, Norwegian. She does not read the book before beginning to translate: she wants to come to the text fresh, and find out what happens as she goes, as a new reader would. She uses multiple dictionaries, from eras contemporaneous with the text; straight one-language dictionaries of the original text's language for subtleties of usage; online dictionaries, even Google. When she wants to learn a new language, she finds a book and just starts to read it cold (it helps when you already know three or four other languages to compare word roots to) - which seems excessively laborious to me. But it's kind of inspiring to know she learned Dutch by reading Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo's classic Beck detective series, or Spanish by reading Tom Sawyer. She also discusses the complexities of reading versus understanding and speaking: she may be fluent and expert in the first, but is thrilled when she can parse out a friend asking for the bathroom in an Amsterdam restaurant.
This is a dense, long, deep dive into the world of translating, and as separately published essays or lectures, there is considerable repetition. I confess that the 100 pages of a Proust alphabet in progress was too much for me (though I thoroughly enjoyed the other Proust chapters, not just on his writing, but his life, and his cork-lined bedroom politely preserved as a conference room in a modern Parisian bank). Likewise, the Norwegian essays palled, as did the close analysis of Gascon "patois," both of which I skimmed or skipped. The final Flaubert essay was dazzling, with a sharp-eyed look at some of the numerous previous translations and their presumed intentions, conventions, choices, and failings (would a fly crawl, walk, or climb up a glass? Davis, Nabokov and I disagree.). Not quite sure why the rambling, fragmented travelogue of the city of Arles was stuck on the end of an already 500+-page tome, but hey, if it mentions Van Gogh and throws in a lion who ate a man's hand, I'll read it.
The first time I read Camus's Plague in the Gilbert Stuart translation, I was so overwhelmed by it, I wondered aloud how I could have reached middle age before discovering it. Then, inspired to try it in French, I was outraged at what Stuart had done to the initial appearance of Dr. Rieux on his staircase that first terrible day - how DARE he ADD a phrase Camus had NOT written?! I threw away the Stuart copy and got Robin Buss's instead (much better!). I now feel far better educated on the marvelous and intricate challenge of the art of translation (especially in a language I love), thanks to Ms. Davis.
March 20, 2025
I have been very much interested in the art of translation of Portuguese literature, not that Margaret Jull Costa and Richard Zenith aren’t doing a bang up job. I am a quarter the way through Eça de Queirós’s Os Mandarins and have been working on a volume of poems by José Saramago. Again, I do not see my making a big splash in the world lit world. In fact, my poor attempts will not be seen past my journals. I’m more interested in it as a puzzle to solve. Aside from this I have been reading In Search of Lost Time; the first volume Swann’s Way was translated by Davis for Penguin. Again, I have lately read her sparkling translation of Madame Bovary, a book I had previously found unbearable. To wit, I found many sections of the book very relevant to my current interests.
Davis’s essay style is engaging, humble, in manner, often funny. Despite being a translator of some of France’s greatest literature, she is always broadening her linguistic pursuits. Learning Dutch and Norwegian to translate, mainly to engage with yet another language. One section of great interest to me was her learning to read Spanish by translating a Spanish edition of Tom Sawyer. Her practical insights gathered from this endeavor along with those concerning her translation of Proust were especially thought provoking as well as giving me sound guidance in my translation effort. Also interesting is her translating English into English, specifically Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey from 18th century English to 20th century. A dubious effort to begin with, but a valuable exercise in linguistics, especially in assessing the divide between what makes English works that predate J. Austen so rarely ventured into, except for by a handful of scholars. Is it the archaic language or the wrapping our brains around mores so different from ours that are too challenging? Okay, my guess for Sterne, and Sterne only, is the disconnection is as much about his very quirky style as Davis notes. He was modern before modern. His style is eccentric, downright nutty by any standard. Which is why I love him. Do we need a modern translation, Davis ultimately asks.
Davis’s essay style is engaging, humble, in manner, often funny. Despite being a translator of some of France’s greatest literature, she is always broadening her linguistic pursuits. Learning Dutch and Norwegian to translate, mainly to engage with yet another language. One section of great interest to me was her learning to read Spanish by translating a Spanish edition of Tom Sawyer. Her practical insights gathered from this endeavor along with those concerning her translation of Proust were especially thought provoking as well as giving me sound guidance in my translation effort. Also interesting is her translating English into English, specifically Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey from 18th century English to 20th century. A dubious effort to begin with, but a valuable exercise in linguistics, especially in assessing the divide between what makes English works that predate J. Austen so rarely ventured into, except for by a handful of scholars. Is it the archaic language or the wrapping our brains around mores so different from ours that are too challenging? Okay, my guess for Sterne, and Sterne only, is the disconnection is as much about his very quirky style as Davis notes. He was modern before modern. His style is eccentric, downright nutty by any standard. Which is why I love him. Do we need a modern translation, Davis ultimately asks.
July 24, 2025
I juggle books. Not literally, but I generally read several books at the same time, though not simultaneously, because that would be absurd. I could belabour the point. Could but won't. Suffice to say, I have been reading this book over the course of eight months, but this is far from the only book I have read in those eight months. I dip in and out of books, read a few paragraphs/pages/chapters, even just a few lines, then put down the book, either in favour of another book, or in favour of another activity, that other activity most often being sleeping. How much I read in a given reading often depends on how sleepy I am. Perhaps you are the same. Perhaps lines from books, or whole plot lines, snag in the matrix of your neurons and reappear, or at least influence, the course of your dreams.
Lydia Davis is a writer I have long admired. I have read almost everything she has written that I have been able to get my hands on. Some of her work I have read more than twice, which is unusual for me, as I rarely pick up a book again once I have finished it. But Davis's writing keeps me coming back. Is she my favourite writer? Perhaps. In any case she would make the top ten, the top five, probably the top three, should I decide some day that it be necessary or useful to contrive such a list.
Let's say her writing appeals to me: in her concision, in her meanderings, in her thoughtfulness.
For a long time this book was inaccessible to me, firstly by geography, then by cost. I'm not so poor that I can't pay my rent or eat to my hunger, but when it first came out, buying the hardback would have been a choice between food or this book. So I was patient and finally got my hands on it and when I did I savoured it slowly, knowing that it might very well be her last book, or certainly one of her last books, at best.
There is a real mix of reading in this book, but a lot of it deals with the work of translation, which in itself is a form of extremely deep reading. Having done some translation work myself, en plus, like Davis, primarily in French, I got a lot out of this book. If I live long enough, one day I may reread it.
Lydia Davis is a writer I have long admired. I have read almost everything she has written that I have been able to get my hands on. Some of her work I have read more than twice, which is unusual for me, as I rarely pick up a book again once I have finished it. But Davis's writing keeps me coming back. Is she my favourite writer? Perhaps. In any case she would make the top ten, the top five, probably the top three, should I decide some day that it be necessary or useful to contrive such a list.
Let's say her writing appeals to me: in her concision, in her meanderings, in her thoughtfulness.
For a long time this book was inaccessible to me, firstly by geography, then by cost. I'm not so poor that I can't pay my rent or eat to my hunger, but when it first came out, buying the hardback would have been a choice between food or this book. So I was patient and finally got my hands on it and when I did I savoured it slowly, knowing that it might very well be her last book, or certainly one of her last books, at best.
There is a real mix of reading in this book, but a lot of it deals with the work of translation, which in itself is a form of extremely deep reading. Having done some translation work myself, en plus, like Davis, primarily in French, I got a lot out of this book. If I live long enough, one day I may reread it.
December 23, 2023
This is a slightly bemusing collection of essays. Some of the material on the art of translating is valuable and interesting. I enjoyed reading “Twenty-one pleasures of translating”, and felt I gained a good understanding of Davis’s thinking and, indeed, of her love of being a translator. My own language skills are weak so this was an introduction to a world which I shall never inhabit, nor even visit.
I was badly thrown though by some wording in pleasure # 15 : “for someone like me who am not really a scholar…” I cannot accept that the use of the first person pronoun, “am”, is correct there. The verb should agree with “someone”, not with “me”. I can, sort of, see why this odd usage was employed: “me” is the first person pronoun and the first person present conjugation of “to be” is “am”. However, the remainder of the sentence dictates that the verb be “is”. Apart from anything else, “am” sounds terribly jarring and that jarring sound should encourage the writer (or the editor) to rephrase it so as to avoid a usage which causes the reader to stumble and stop. I am surprised that a renowned translator would compose something so ugly. I should have thought that the role of literary translation requires tidy-sounding composition. (Although I should note that, amongst her rules for translating, David includes “do not normalize something that sounds odd”. And perhaps she feels that dictum also applies to essay-writing.”
It seems to me that Essays Two has a pretty limited readership. First and foremost there are other translators who will be interested in what Davis, as a well-regarded practitioner, has to say, or will simply be interested in another practitioner’s perspective. I think such people would gain the most from reading the book. Davis has written extensively in this volume on her project of translating Marcel Proust, so it is likely that Proust devotees, and especially those who have read Davis’s translation of Swann’s way will be interested in her comments about the process involved in translating À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. , or about particularised comments about his language-usage and style. Finally, I can see philologists with a special interest in the micro-view – or perhaps the nano-view – of language use also joining her audience. Outside those fairly small groups I cannot see many more general readers enjoying the book. And I see that Goodreads cites only 37 reviews and 154 ratings as of the end of 2023. That is, indeed, a small readership. I was attracted to it by a very enthusiastic review in London Review of Books before I realized that its and my tastes differ.
Davis writes her essays in a highly personal, anecdotal style which is probably suited to readers who follow her avidly from essay to essay. However, this is likely to be idiosyncratic, and not necessarily attractive to other readers. For example, at the start of the final section of Essays Two , she writes “What follows is part of an ongoing piece of writing that I could best describe as being the elaborated notes of what I have been discovering in my exploration of the history of the French city of Arles… This essay began as notes taken during a visit to Arles in November 2018”. Or, in another section we are told, “When I turned to a dictionary to help, the one I used, at first, was very small (a little over 2“x4” ), yellow, faux-leather-covered, a Hugo pocket version for travellers that my mother may have bought on a trip to Amsterdam in 1964. The cover is torn a little at top and bottom, although the book is sturdy and won’t fall apart. Some pages are stained and a few are missing, evidently ripped out.” At another point, “– I read steadily on in a grammar book: at present, it is the slim paperback I bought secondhand in Portland, Oregon, at Powell’s bookstore, in the company of my fourth cousin once removed, Ruth.” For some readers, these details might be described as quaintly quirky; for me they are tedious and intrusive.
Despite my lack of regard for Proust, I found Davis’s comments on translating Proust the best parts of the book although, again, they were far more detailed than could hold my attention. She writes that “In translating you become very aware of synonyms, because you are always looking at every possible way of saying something. But how far apart most so-called synonyms really are; eventually, what leap out are the differences. Anyway is different from in any case, because a way is different from a case . For instance is different from for example because an instance is different from an example . No choice is simple, even one that seems obvious.
“Then there are the differences between the French and English so-called equivalents. The commonest equivalent of toujours is ‘always’ – though you can sometimes use ‘ever’ or ‘forever’. But the differences emerge when you look more closely: toujours is a shortened form of tous les jours , ‘all the days’, ‘every day,’ whereas always is a shortened form of ‘all ways,’ ‘in every manner,’ or ‘by every route.’ One word refers to time and the other to manner; they came to their meanings by different routes. Toujours also has the constant presence in it of jours , ‘days’ and since jour can also mean ‘daylight’ and ‘light’, toujours also has the constant presence of ‘light.’ Toujours also has the advantage of its built-in rhyme – it has a pleasing sound.” As I was reading this, it struck me that it does not only have application to translating; we are all often guilty, I suspect, of choosing words in our own language far too capriciously.
There were a couple of instances which troubled me about Davis’s writing. First was a significant cultural error; Davis mistakenly believes that English usage is like American in referring to the ground floor of a building as being the first floor. In fact, English usage is the same as French, naming the floor above the ground floor as the first floor. For all her meticulous examination of cultural and linguistic detail, this seemed an unfortunate error (and one which, again, a good editor would have rectified).
My final quibble is with Davis’s statement: “I don’t often read very long books. In fact, I don’t often finish even a much shorter book, even in English. I usually put it aside, however good it may be, after, sometimes, 80 or 100 pages, or less, having in some sense not only absorbed its nature but saturated myself with it.” Perhaps it is noble to be so honest but, given that she is in the business of books and readers, this seems like a very odd thing to write.
I was badly thrown though by some wording in pleasure # 15 : “for someone like me who am not really a scholar…” I cannot accept that the use of the first person pronoun, “am”, is correct there. The verb should agree with “someone”, not with “me”. I can, sort of, see why this odd usage was employed: “me” is the first person pronoun and the first person present conjugation of “to be” is “am”. However, the remainder of the sentence dictates that the verb be “is”. Apart from anything else, “am” sounds terribly jarring and that jarring sound should encourage the writer (or the editor) to rephrase it so as to avoid a usage which causes the reader to stumble and stop. I am surprised that a renowned translator would compose something so ugly. I should have thought that the role of literary translation requires tidy-sounding composition. (Although I should note that, amongst her rules for translating, David includes “do not normalize something that sounds odd”. And perhaps she feels that dictum also applies to essay-writing.”
It seems to me that Essays Two has a pretty limited readership. First and foremost there are other translators who will be interested in what Davis, as a well-regarded practitioner, has to say, or will simply be interested in another practitioner’s perspective. I think such people would gain the most from reading the book. Davis has written extensively in this volume on her project of translating Marcel Proust, so it is likely that Proust devotees, and especially those who have read Davis’s translation of Swann’s way will be interested in her comments about the process involved in translating À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. , or about particularised comments about his language-usage and style. Finally, I can see philologists with a special interest in the micro-view – or perhaps the nano-view – of language use also joining her audience. Outside those fairly small groups I cannot see many more general readers enjoying the book. And I see that Goodreads cites only 37 reviews and 154 ratings as of the end of 2023. That is, indeed, a small readership. I was attracted to it by a very enthusiastic review in London Review of Books before I realized that its and my tastes differ.
Davis writes her essays in a highly personal, anecdotal style which is probably suited to readers who follow her avidly from essay to essay. However, this is likely to be idiosyncratic, and not necessarily attractive to other readers. For example, at the start of the final section of Essays Two , she writes “What follows is part of an ongoing piece of writing that I could best describe as being the elaborated notes of what I have been discovering in my exploration of the history of the French city of Arles… This essay began as notes taken during a visit to Arles in November 2018”. Or, in another section we are told, “When I turned to a dictionary to help, the one I used, at first, was very small (a little over 2“x4” ), yellow, faux-leather-covered, a Hugo pocket version for travellers that my mother may have bought on a trip to Amsterdam in 1964. The cover is torn a little at top and bottom, although the book is sturdy and won’t fall apart. Some pages are stained and a few are missing, evidently ripped out.” At another point, “– I read steadily on in a grammar book: at present, it is the slim paperback I bought secondhand in Portland, Oregon, at Powell’s bookstore, in the company of my fourth cousin once removed, Ruth.” For some readers, these details might be described as quaintly quirky; for me they are tedious and intrusive.
Despite my lack of regard for Proust, I found Davis’s comments on translating Proust the best parts of the book although, again, they were far more detailed than could hold my attention. She writes that “In translating you become very aware of synonyms, because you are always looking at every possible way of saying something. But how far apart most so-called synonyms really are; eventually, what leap out are the differences. Anyway is different from in any case, because a way is different from a case . For instance is different from for example because an instance is different from an example . No choice is simple, even one that seems obvious.
“Then there are the differences between the French and English so-called equivalents. The commonest equivalent of toujours is ‘always’ – though you can sometimes use ‘ever’ or ‘forever’. But the differences emerge when you look more closely: toujours is a shortened form of tous les jours , ‘all the days’, ‘every day,’ whereas always is a shortened form of ‘all ways,’ ‘in every manner,’ or ‘by every route.’ One word refers to time and the other to manner; they came to their meanings by different routes. Toujours also has the constant presence in it of jours , ‘days’ and since jour can also mean ‘daylight’ and ‘light’, toujours also has the constant presence of ‘light.’ Toujours also has the advantage of its built-in rhyme – it has a pleasing sound.” As I was reading this, it struck me that it does not only have application to translating; we are all often guilty, I suspect, of choosing words in our own language far too capriciously.
There were a couple of instances which troubled me about Davis’s writing. First was a significant cultural error; Davis mistakenly believes that English usage is like American in referring to the ground floor of a building as being the first floor. In fact, English usage is the same as French, naming the floor above the ground floor as the first floor. For all her meticulous examination of cultural and linguistic detail, this seemed an unfortunate error (and one which, again, a good editor would have rectified).
My final quibble is with Davis’s statement: “I don’t often read very long books. In fact, I don’t often finish even a much shorter book, even in English. I usually put it aside, however good it may be, after, sometimes, 80 or 100 pages, or less, having in some sense not only absorbed its nature but saturated myself with it.” Perhaps it is noble to be so honest but, given that she is in the business of books and readers, this seems like a very odd thing to write.
February 6, 2023
On Translation
Twenty-One Pleasures of Translating (and a Silver Lining) – 5/5
Proust
Reading Proust for the First Time: A Blog Post – 5/5
Introduction to Swann’s Way – 5/5
The Child as Writer: The “Steeples” Passage in Swann’s Way – 5/5
Proust in His Bedroom: An Afterword to Proust’s Letters to His Neighbour – 5/5
Learning a Foreign Language: Spanish
Reading Les Aventuras de Tome Sawyer – 4/5
Translating From English Into English
An Experiment in Modernizing Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey – 5/5
Translating Bob, Son of Battle: The Last Gray Dog of Kenmuir – 5/5
From Memoir to Long Poem: Sidney Brook’s Our Village – 4.5/5
Translating Proust
Loaf or Hot-Water Bottle: Closely Translatint Proust (Proust Talk I) – 5/5
Hammers and Hoofbeats: Rhythms and Syntactical Patterns in Proust’s Swann’s Way (Proust Talk II) – 5/5
An Alphabet (In Progress) of Proust Translation Observations, From Aurora to Zut – 5/5
Learning a Foreign Language: Dutch
Before My Morning Coffee: Translating the Very Short Stories of A.L. Snijders – 4/5
Translating Michel Leiris
Over the Years: Notes on Translating Michel Leiris’s The Rules of the Game – 5/5
An Excursion Into Gascon
Translating a Gascon Folktale: The Language of Armagnac – 4/5
Learning a Foreign Language: Two Kinds of Norwegian
Learning Bokmål by Reading Dag Solstad’s Telemark Novel – 4/5
Reading a Gunnhild Øyehaug Story in Nynorsk – 4/5
On Translation and Madame Bovary
Buzzing, Humming, or Droning: Notes on Translation and Madame Bovary – 5/5
One French City
The City of Arles – 5/5
Twenty-One Pleasures of Translating (and a Silver Lining) – 5/5
Proust
Reading Proust for the First Time: A Blog Post – 5/5
Introduction to Swann’s Way – 5/5
The Child as Writer: The “Steeples” Passage in Swann’s Way – 5/5
Proust in His Bedroom: An Afterword to Proust’s Letters to His Neighbour – 5/5
Learning a Foreign Language: Spanish
Reading Les Aventuras de Tome Sawyer – 4/5
Translating From English Into English
An Experiment in Modernizing Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey – 5/5
Translating Bob, Son of Battle: The Last Gray Dog of Kenmuir – 5/5
From Memoir to Long Poem: Sidney Brook’s Our Village – 4.5/5
Translating Proust
Loaf or Hot-Water Bottle: Closely Translatint Proust (Proust Talk I) – 5/5
Hammers and Hoofbeats: Rhythms and Syntactical Patterns in Proust’s Swann’s Way (Proust Talk II) – 5/5
An Alphabet (In Progress) of Proust Translation Observations, From Aurora to Zut – 5/5
Learning a Foreign Language: Dutch
Before My Morning Coffee: Translating the Very Short Stories of A.L. Snijders – 4/5
Translating Michel Leiris
Over the Years: Notes on Translating Michel Leiris’s The Rules of the Game – 5/5
An Excursion Into Gascon
Translating a Gascon Folktale: The Language of Armagnac – 4/5
Learning a Foreign Language: Two Kinds of Norwegian
Learning Bokmål by Reading Dag Solstad’s Telemark Novel – 4/5
Reading a Gunnhild Øyehaug Story in Nynorsk – 4/5
On Translation and Madame Bovary
Buzzing, Humming, or Droning: Notes on Translation and Madame Bovary – 5/5
One French City
The City of Arles – 5/5
Displaying 1 - 30 of 51 reviews