On "Essays Two": An Interview with Lydia Davis
Lydia Davis | Essays Two | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 2021 | 592 Pages
It is easy to take translation for granted. It is easy to appreciate a text only in its current context, to visualize a listed translator as a talented mathematician with some innate knowledge or intuition for what an original author or source text imagined, performing equations to convert languages for our understanding and pleasure. The mark of a good translator, supposedly, is that they somehow become invisible to the reader and allow language to, quite literally, speak for itself. Of course, this is an oversimplification not only of the process of translation, which requires fluency (and confidence) in multiple languages, but also of the outcome. Lydia Davis—who has gained popularity across literary circles for her pointed, precise, and honest short stories, novels, essays, and translations—at points, agrees.
Davis’ most recent book, Essays Two, elaborates on her translation work in Essays One, and carefully walks readers through her experiences translating esteemed texts such as Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. She discloses her attempts to learn Spanish and Norwegian through reading, and to “translate” Old English into a contemporary style in an effort to widen readership and bring beloved stories of her youth to children today. These essays are thrilling to read not only because of Davis’ mastery, but because of the intimate detail she shares about her process. She sequentially maps out each experience, telling the story of a translation process or her own learning. Reading Essays Two, we sit parallel to Davis as she reads Dag Solstad’s Det uoppløselige episke element i Telemark i perioden 1592–1896; follow along as she works through her frustrations modernizing Laurence Stern’s A Sentimental Journey; learn how she works through each problem, considering each word, consulting friends, and thinking back to past experiences to inform decisions in the present. We watch as each piece falls into place.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Interviewer: In reading both Essays One and now Essays Two, I’ve appreciated the clarity in your explanation of your editing, writing, and translation processes. It’s helpful—and pleasurable—to read explanations of why you chose a particular phrasing over another, or how the passing of time and gaining new experiences with language has an effect on the completion of the finished work. I couldn’t help but wonder if this kind of metacognitive writing-on-writing you do undergoes the same process. Does the same wonderful clearness in a work like Essays Two come from the same process of revision?
Lydia Davis: Oh, yes, of course. I can hardly write a shopping list without correcting it for clarity. I'm not entirely exaggerating. For me, if the expression of an idea is not as clear as it can be, then the idea itself is subtly altered. There is a best and exact expression, I feel. The trouble starts—as has happened occasionally—when a story goes off in two directions, each equally valid.
Interviewer: Much of this book elaborated on where you see the ethical and stylistic limitations for a contemporary translator. How do you, if at all, see yourself as an actor within these boundaries? What other translation theorists and practices are on your mind as you work?
Lydia Davis: In the beginning of my work translating Proust, I struggled a little with the question of which procedure I would follow—how closely I would follow the text, how much I would rewrite the English to be expressive in its own right. But as I settled into the work, my procedure in effect chose itself, there seemed to be only one way to go—to stay close to the text and at the same time write natural English (not always an easy balance). I thought I might stray from the original a little in the last draft, but in the end I didn't choose to do that. After the start of the work, I didn't have other theories and practices on my mind but simply focused on the text.
Interviewer: You mention transferring dialogue/character/action to a different, usually more contemporary time, as the sixth sin of translation. In the book, you say that you haven't decided what the first five are, but what are some other sins of translation you've witnessed, egregious or subtle? Does your experience of these sins come from your own translation practice, or from reading other translators’ works?
Lydia Davis: Oh, it might be hard for me to call them to mind. I do mention some of the other sins in some of my essays on translation, especially in the recent Essays Two. I can remember one, and that is to follow the lead of a previous translator—when there is an earlier translator—simply because you can't solve a difficult translation problem. But that is such an understandable sin, really, I almost forgive it. Maybe another sin would be to include, in the translation, what a translator friend of mine called a "stealth gloss"—i.e. slipping an explanation into the text where it didn't exist in the original. Say the Statue of Liberty was mentioned in an English language text and was translated into another language (with a stealth gloss) as "that famous island monument the Statue of Liberty." I'd rather have an endnote at the back of the book if there was any need for more explanation.
Interviewer: You also mention moments of self-reflection and the deepening of your understanding of English in your translation practice, especially in your efforts to widen the reader base for works in English different than what you or I might be used to. For example, coming to understand that the word "crack" in "crack of dawn" means moment, not sudden appearance. What are some other surprising moments you've encountered in your translation practice that have deepened your understanding of English or affected the way you think about language more broadly?
Lydia Davis: Well, it was across the board, really. Any word I really thought about, considered using, etc. I would research and try out and come to have a deeper understanding of. But one realization I had as I worked, something I hadn't fully understood before, was that there simply weren't any true synonyms in the English language. Words could be close to each other in meaning, but no two words meant exactly the same thing. Their origins and development were different, and their associations and usual contexts were different, too.
Interviewer: In this book, you cover a multitude of experiences with language, approaching the process of translation from all angles: as an experienced translator, as a student of language, as a writer, as a reader. What were the overlapping experiences you had interacting with these different contexts? How similar (or different) were your experiences and approaches to learning Norwegian and Spanish through reading, as compared to approaching a major translation of Proust, for example?
Lydia Davis: One major difference was that learning Norwegian (from scratch) and improving my Spanish (from a basic acquaintance with the language) were more or less just recreational adventures—completely voluntary and with no onus of responsibility on them. I was fascinated to observe how a person learns or figures out a foreign language. (One particular person, only, though—everyone is different.) The Proust translation was an altogether different matter. It was a sort of culmination of decades of translating from French, so I had a pretty thorough acquaintance with the language, though of course it could have been much, much deeper, even so. And I felt the responsibility, since this was the first completely new translation of the book to be offered to a wide public (a previous new translation was generally unavailable), to do my utmost to stay close to the original while still producing a living text in English.
Interviewer: Of all the translation projects you talk about in Essays Two, which were the most challenging? Which were the most fulfilling, and which did you learn the most from?
Lydia Davis: I suppose I'd have to say the Proust translation was the most challenging, simply because of its length and the challenge it posed as one of the most important novels of literary history. But I'd have to add that it was not as difficult for me to translate one sentence of Proust as to put into contemporary English one sentence of Laurence Sterne or to put into "easier" English one sentence of the 1898 Ollivant novel. And this was because there were no real rules for what I was trying to do, or if there were, they weren't familiar to me since I had not tried this before. I learned from all the projects and found them all, in different ways, fulfilling.
Interviewer: What are some particularly stellar examples of other translators’ work you see as important to the field? How has the world of translation changed since you first started publishing translations? How has it changed since you began working on Essays Two?
Lydia Davis: One lovely example of an inventive, ambitious translation is Barbara Wright's translation into English from French of Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style. She reproduces the same limited story by Queneau—an encounter on a bus—in ninety-nine (or more?) different styles, including slang from around England. She must have had enormous fun with it, since she had such complete freedom to mine different kinds of language. Since I started translating (which wasn't longer before the first pieces collected in Essays Two were written), respect for translators has grown and grown, although they sometimes still go unmentioned in reviews of translated books, or disposed of with an adverb ("fluently" translated by). After all, there was a time when translators weren't even named on the title page! There has also been a growing awareness of the importance of cross-cultural exchanges. But the U.S. still lags way behind other countries in publishing translated works—we're losing by that.
Lydia Davis is the author of Essays One, a collection of essays on writing, reading, art, memory, and the Bible. She is also the author of The End of the Story: A Novel and many story collections, including Varieties of Disturbance, a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award for Fiction; Can’t and Won’t (2014); and The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, described by James Wood in The New Yorker as “a grand cumulative achievement.” Davis is also the acclaimed translator of Swann’s Way and Madame Bovary, both awarded the French-American Foundation Translation Prize, and of many other works of literature. She has been named both a Chevalier and an Officier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government, and in 2020 she received the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story.