Lydia Davis masters the art of translating without a dictionary

‘Read slowly, word by word, if you wish to understand what I am saying.’ Despite appearing in Essays Two, the latest non-fiction collection from Lydia Davis, this exhortation is by the Norwegian author Dag Solstad; yet the approach is apt for Davis’s work.

This is not because Davis, a feted translator and writer who won the Man Booker International Prize in 2013, is incomprehensible but because her work is often so short — a couple of lines or a couple of pages. It demands to be savoured slowly.

Even when she writes at length, as she does in this hefty volume spanning 19 essays, her thoughts on literature and language drill down to the minutiae of writing in ways that invite analysis of her every last comma — punctuation itself being a topic that earns its own entry in a 102-page piece on ‘Proust Translation Observations’, delivered in a handy A to Z (from Aurore to Zut).

Essays Two, drawn from talks, books and pieces that have appeared in publications as varied as the Yale Review, the Believer and Nest: A Quarterly of Interiors, reveals how Davis, a polyglot who was first exposed to another language aged seven when her family moved to Germany, tackles translations and learns foreign languages. Or, to put it another way, as she does in the preface, describes how her ‘professional and recreational activities tend to overlap’. The collection builds on 2019’s Essays One, which concentrated on writers, but also included tracts on the visual arts, memory and the Bible.

As a translator, Davis is best known for Swann’s Way, the first book of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. This project — a high point that she thought marked ‘the culmination of a career’ — won her a MacArthur ‘genius’ grant in 2003 and prompted six of the collection’s essays.