ESSAYS TWO

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.