Essays Two: On Proust, Translation, Foreign Languages, and the City of Arles

by Lydia Davis

Overview

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 profession: 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374148867
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	11/30/2021
Pages:	592
Product dimensions:	7.60(w) x 5.40(h) x 2.00(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Preface

ON TRANSLATION

Twenty-One Pleasures of Translating (and a Silver Lining)

PROUST

Reading Proust for the First Time: A Blog Post

Introduction to Swann’s Way

The Child as Writer: The “Steeples” Passage in Swann’s Way

Proust in His Bedroom: An Afterword to Proust’s Letters to His Neighbor

LEARNING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE: SPANISH

Reading Las aventuras de Tom Sawyer

TRANSLATING FROM ENGLISH INTO ENGLISH

An Experiment in Modernizing Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey

Translating Bob, Son of Battle: The Last Gray Dog of Kenmuir

From Memoir to Long Poem: Sidney Brooks’s Our Village

TRANSLATING PROUST

Loaf or Hot-Water Bottle: Closely Translating Proust (Proust Talk I)

Hammers and Hoofbeats: Rhythms and Syntactical Patterns in Proust’s Swann’s Way (Proust Talk II)

An Alphabet (in Progress) of Proust Translation Observations, from Aurore to Zut

LEARNING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE: DUTCH

Before My Morning Coffee: Translating the Very Short Stories of A. L. Snijders

TRANSLATING MICHEL LEIRIS

Over the Years: Notes on Translating Michel Leiris’s The Rules of the Game

AN EXCURSION INTO GASCON

Translating a Gascon Folktale: The Language of Armagnac

LEARNING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE: TWO KINDS OF NORWEGIAN

Learning Bokmål by Reading Dag Solstad’s Telemark Novel

Reading a Gunnhild Øyehaug Story in Nynorsk

ON TRANSLATION AND MADAME BOVARY

Buzzing, Humming, or Droning: Notes on Translation and Madame Bovary

ONE FRENCH CITY

The City of Arles

Editorial Reviews

2021-08-25
A vivid portrait of the translating life.

Davis is known for both her precise, uber-concise short fiction and her translations of Proust, Flaubert, and others. In this immersive collection, she offers a second (following Essays One) in-depth exploration of foreign languages and the art of translation. As a girl, learning German as a second language created a “hunger” in her to find out what words “mean.” The author begins by describing the 21 pleasures she gets from translating, including how it helps with her own writing; she enjoys subsuming herself in the writer and another culture and the pure joyous comfort that comes from it. She prefers beginning a translation without reading the book. Davis had already translated more than 30 French books before undertaking the daunting process, which she describes in luscious detail, of translating Proust’s Swann’s Way. In an essay on learning Spanish, she offers advice on how children should learn a foreign language, explaining how she learned by reading a Spanish translation of Tom Sawyer. Essays on translating “one kind of English to another”—e.g., converting Sidney Brooks’ memoir, Our Village, into a poem—and why she does these as experiments are fascinating. The experience of translating Michel Leiris’ The Rules of the Game“was heady because, for the first time in my translating life, I felt like a conduit through which the original French was effortlessly passing to become, instantly, an English equivalent, even a close English equivalent, in some way identical to the French, as though I had achieved some version of Borges’s Menardian ideal.” Other languages Davis discusses are Dutch, Gascon, and the “two kinds of Norwegian.” Taking on a new translation of the oft-translated Madame Bovary, Davis, the inveterate translator, writes, “the more the better.” Numerous examples of her and others’ translations are included throughout.

For those wondering what translators do and how they do it, this collection is a must.

Kirkus Reviews

As a translator, Davis is known for fidelity, clarity, and, in the case of Proust, decluttering . . . Yet the collection is not, mostly, about problems with other people’s translations but the process of working on her own—a kind of shop talk we’re allowed to listen in on . . . Davis once said in an interview that she would find it ‘almost morally or ethically wrong’ to deliberately impose her own style on a translation. Her scrupulousness is, perhaps, a counterbalance to the translator’s power, and to the peremptory instinct that prompts translation in the first place.” —Elaine Blair, The New York Review of Books

“Whatever the topic, Davis is always superb company: erudite, adventurous, surprising . . . Davis extracts endless thrills from the painstaking process [of translation]. Her essays do a beautiful job of transmitting that satisfaction to the reader . . . A book that contains an incredible amount of life-enhancing morsels.” —Molly Young, The New York Times Book Review

“When Davis breaks down the work of writing, she can be very funny, often at her own expense . . . The pieces in Essays Two brim with daring experiments . . . There is an element of knight-errantry, quest, romantic fatalism as she pursues the elusive foreign language, and often a distant century.” —Ange Mlinko, London Review of Books

"[Essays Two] offers overwhelming proof of the benefits to a writer of a practice of translation . . . [R]eaders with no interest in translation, little taste for essays and zero desire to become writers themselves will nonetheless find themselves burning through its 571 pages with equal parts confusion (What on earth is happening to me?) and relief (Thank God this is happening to me!), and, finally, recognition that the mind we're meeting on the page is awake to the world in ways that feel necessary and new." —Wyatt Mason, The New York Times

"We come away from Essays Two with renewed respect for a writer whose grasp of languages is profound, and whose capacity to shape-shift from one to another is quite exceptional." —Phillip Lopate, The Times Literary Supplement

"[Essays Two is] a guide . . . to new dimensions of thought. Davis makes translation seem like a sublime exercise of mind and self." —Adam Colman, The Boston Globe

"While writing about writing can sometimes wander into theoretical, navel-gazing territory, Davis’s approach here is thrillingly concrete. Several pieces describe, in vivid, granular detail, her process for translating the first volume of Proust. She pops the hood and lets us see how the literary gears turn." —Cornelia Channing, Vulture

“In this riveting and erudite collection, Davis [moves] with ease between the technical challenges posed by a complex text and her personal relationship with literature . . . Thorough, idiosyncratic, and inimitable, Davis is the kind of intelligent and attentive reader a book is lucky to find. Readers, in turn, are lucky to have this collection, a worthy addition to the Davis canon.” —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

“I think a good rule for living is always read Lydia Davis . . . Davis on writing is generous and specific in a way that reveals how much smarter she is than almost everyone without being the least bit alienating.” —Jessie Gaynor, Lit Hub

"A celebration of the beautiful and bewildering intermittences of language . . . Davis is a literary treasure." —Jonathan Russell Clark, Star Tribune

“A vivid portrait of the translating life. Davis is known for both her precise, uber-concise short fiction and her translations of Proust, Flaubert, and others. In this immersive collection, she offers a second (following Essays One) in-depth exploration of foreign languages and the art of translation. . . . For those wondering what translators do and how they do it, this collection is a must.” —Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher