Lydia Davis on Language and Literature | Conversations with Tyler

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm here with a very special guest, Lydia Davis. Lydia is unique. She is one of America's best and best-known short story writers, and her short stories are indeed very short. She is a leading translator, best known for translating parts of Proust and also Flaubert. She is a wonderful essayist, Her latest book, which I loved, is Essays II: Lydia Davis, just out. Of course, there is also Essays I, which is excellent as well, and she has in fact done much more than that. Lydia, welcome.

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

Now, I have a question about writing very short stories, and that is, what's the kind of content bias that's introduced by making them very short? So if I think about Thomas Bernhardt, who also wrote very short stories. He tends to use either a very bad event or some kind of misanthropy to hook the reader. And that's not what you do, but what is the content bias in writing very short stories?

I suppose it's limited by something that is short in duration, necessarily either an action that's very short in duration or a perception that's very brief and glancing. It might be a perception that could lead to a great many more perceptions or could be developed, but for the moment it's very brief. And that is the constraint. The stories are born very spontaneously from these immediate perceptions or immediate actions. That are there and over in the blink of an eye.

Do you think the writer has to use something that is incongruent to hook the reader in the very short story? So it seems to me a lot of your stories, there's an element of the paradoxical or the ironic or the quizzical instead of Bernhardt's misanthropy, but you share this interest in the incongruent.

I suppose. I mean, the examples— it's always easier for me to work from examples, because I forget that there's so many of these stories by now, many volumes, and so hundreds. But I tend to remember the stories about ants just because I still have dealings with ants and interactions with ants and try—

You mean A-N-T-S ants?

Yes, yes. Well, I have interactions with A-U-N-T-S, I guess, in the past. But But yes, I mean, the little insects that come to the cat bowl, cat bowls, if we're not careful. So the incongruous would be probably perceiving myself as a person who actually respects ants and tries to deal with them in a respectful way. In other words, not squashing them, but persuading them to leave. That would be the incongruity, perhaps.

How do you persuade an ant to leave?

If you really want to know, I usually don't brush them away because that might harm their little tiny bodies, so I blow them away and then remove the reason for their interest. So if they're interested, it's always food, so I blow them away and clean up the food very thoroughly, and I do usually persuade them not to come back.

In very short stories, does the difference between poetry and prose blur? Because every word counts so much in a very short story.

I think it only blurs in that sense. I think of a poem as more lyrical, and I think that's a test that I can depend on to some extent. There are poems that aren't very lyrical, but they're clearly poems for other reasons. So I don't see mine— yeah, I go back to the idea of song with poems, and I don't see my very short stories as songs. I see them sort of pedestrian. In other words, thump, thump, thump, you know, they're not rhythmical or imagistically beautiful most of the time. And I'm talking about the very, very short ones. There are longer short ones that are a paragraph or a page, and some of those are lyrical, so.

Are there any great writers who don't have a great sense of humor?

Oh, yes. Absolutely. Well, I don't know. Did Conrad have a great sense of humor? I mean, it depends who you think is great in the first place. So maybe we are leaving Conrad for certain other reasons, but he was one I was reading recently, and I don't detect much of a sense of humor there. But I do in Beckett and Proust. People usually don't think of Proust as very funny, but he's quite funny.

If one reads Conrad, for instance, there's a thickness to the language, right? You have to cut through it with a machete. Proust, there's an elaborate nature to the language. The Irish writers, whether older or contemporary, there's something quite mellifluous about it. Do you think it's hard for a contemporary American writer to develop a truly appealing language?

No, but it would be very different. It might— I mean, we do tend towards shorter sentences now anyway. I mean, not all— you know, every writer's very different. But in general, we have less tolerance for long elaborately constructed sentences. But I think with very short sentences, you can also be very sparkling and lyrical, magical.

Do you think the late Thomas Pynchon became unreadable? That somehow it was just a pile of complexity and it lost all relation to the reader? Or are those in fact masterworks that we're just not up to appreciating?

Well, since I hesitated to even open the books, I can't answer you because I guess I do find not all long books, but very long, very fat books a little hard to approach, and some of them I try over and over, and if I sense that it's really a load of verbiage, you know, I really don't— you know, I fault myself for not having the patience to get through at least one, say, late Pynchon, but I haven't, so.

So if for you long books are hard to approach, and you've translated the first section of Proust. How is it you approach Proust in a way that helped it make sense for you?

Ah, well, maybe it helps that he conceived of the, the individual books or the parts that make up the whole book— he conceived of them one at a time or published them one at a time, wrestled them with them one at a time. He was he was not— he didn't set out to write as much, you know, as he ended up writing in that one novel, which I can really understand. There are a lot of projects, if you realized how long they were going to be and how long they were going to take, you might not start them. So he thought it was going to be a matter of, say, 3 small volumes or even 2. In the beginning, two small volumes or reasonable volumes. And it grew and grew, which I can also sympathize with. But so I didn't have a problem with that. I had a problem a long time ago trying to read Ulysses by Joyce and started it twice and finally read it when I lived in Ireland, which made it much easier. Because I had his context. And that too, I suppose, because it had different chapters, each of which approached the ongoing story in a very different way, I found that possible too. But it's tricky. There's a book by a Catalan writer called Josep Pla that's called The Gray Notebook, I think, or the— yeah, The Gray Notebooks or The Gray Notebook. And that's very fat, but I keep going back to it and delighting in it. But I'm not reading it all at once. I'm going back to it and just sort of nibbling away at it. It was an amazing project. He took an early, very brief diary of his— he was 21, I think, and it was only— covered a year and a half. And he kept going back to it. Rather than publishing it, he kept going back to it and expanding it with more memories and more material. And I love that idea. So maybe that's why I can read it.

And what language are you reading it in?

Well, I'm reading it in English. I can actually read Catalan if I put my mind to it, but I see no reason to in this case.

A number of readers have written me and complained that when it comes to reading Proust, the secondary language— secondary literature is of no use to them, or very little use. Do you think that's a fair characterization, or if one wants to read something on Proust that's useful, where does one start?

Well, the fact is that I did not, as a matter of principle, did not read any secondary material before I started translating Proust, and even now would not want to read a great deal of it. I like the one-on-one confrontation with the text. And I really think that's where a reader should begin and maybe end. I don't like the idea— I mean, I'll modify this in a minute, but I don't initially like the idea of some so-called expert coming in between me and my perception of the book. And that was particularly true translating it. I didn't want someone else to tell me what was important or what I should look out for. And then I suppose once, you know, if you've read all of the Proust novel and read it again or whatever, and then you just want to read more about it. And share the experience in a way with another person who's written about it. There, again, I can't really— you know, there are people like Roger Shattuck who've written a great deal about Proust. And there's Beckett's essay on Proust, which I do— I think I probably did read that. It's short, by the way. You know, just— but in that case, I would be curious what another favorite writer of mine thought about Proust, although he was quite young at the time. So that would be sort of my answer, sort of, I guess, the easiest answer really, or the most sensible, is to dip in and out of the different writings on Proust and see which, writer you feel comfortable with. Some you'll hate and some you'll love. Oh, yes, I want to hear what he has to say.

Now, your first foreign language was German. What do you think of the German translation of Proust by Eva Reichel-Mertens?

I haven't read it.

It's very good.

It's very good. You're saying it's very good?

It's much funnier than Proust in English.

Aha, that's interesting. Has anyone done— speaking of studies— has anyone done a study of the difference in the humorous passages between the German and the English? That would be fun to read.

I don't think so. I think what works well in German and French is the difference between a very long Proustian sentence and a very short observation. Fits those two languages well. But doesn't really work in English. You just end up a little bit confused. Mm-hmm.

I love the fact that Proust does have very, very short sentences. People kind of forget that.

Why isn't Franz Kafka funny in English?

Well, I think he is. I think he is. I think some of these writers are burdened by their reputations, and that would be true of Kafka. Proust, you know, that we hear so much more about how important they are that we sort of tune out the moments that are really funny. Kafka, I'm thinking of his diaries, have very funny entries, not because he was trying to be funny, but just He described people walking in the street as, I think, trying to unstick their feet from where they are to stick them down in another place. You know, he's just— he's observing, and what he observes ends up seeming funny to us and probably to him.

If one as a writer sets out to create an intentionally fragmentary or intentionally incomplete literary work. Can that succeed, or does it have to, in a sense, be accidentally fragmentary?

I think it can succeed. In fact, I— not to bring it back to myself necessarily, but obviously I'm so well acquainted with my own work, pretty well acquainted anyway— but I think of the novel I wrote, the one novel, The End of the Story, was meant to be— give the impression of fragmentation because the narrator is trying to remember, remember incidents, and so the memories come back in fragments. But I was thinking even first of a book that influenced me a lot in my writing of that, and that was Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights, which I haven't revisited in a while, but that too gave the impression of being fragmented, but was written that way deliberately. And I think also A Sorrow Beyond Dreams by Hanke, which I'm about to revisit, by Peter Hanke, also gives that impression of fragmentation. In his case, I think it may be a combination of actually trying to retrieve memories that he had trouble retrieving and allowing the book to work that way and be that way.

Do you worry as a translator that some languages are word poor? This charge is sometimes leveled against French and Spanish relative to English and German. Or do you think that's not correct?

Well, I would be very cautious about accusing another language of having deficiencies, but I do think English has a wonderful advantage in having the doubled vocabulary, the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary and the Latin vocabulary. Examples being, you know, "underground" would be the Anglo-Saxon version and subterranean would be the Latin, of the same idea. And not all languages, or most, don't have that advantage. So we can play with the different vocabularies and, you know, speak more plainly or speak more abstractly and intellectually. We have that great facility because of our vocabulary.

As a translator, why do you think that film subtitles are so often so bad? There's certainly enough money in cinema compared to literary translation.

Well, that's kind of fun. I mean, are they pressed for time? I'd have to guess because often people press translators to get things done overnight. And more and more so. I think, I mean, the constraints are obviously you have to translate, you can't translate faithfully what you're hearing. You have to translate it in such a way, briefly, more briefly, so that someone can read it quickly. So it's very hard to retain all of the flavor of the original. I usually don't see any that are really bad, but I think I've learned something from some of them. You know, when I was stuck on a vocabulary word or something, I actually might have learned something. But I'd hesitate there to blame the translator, because I think usually it is a time constraint or I used to discover that I could not earn much of a living if I translated very, very carefully. And that was simply, you know, I could not take so much time. I did take time when it mattered and got paid very poorly, like a dollar an hour on some books. But so time and money and film industry, I bet it doesn't work too well.

How would you best describe your own motives for being a translator?

My motives?

Your motives. What do you get from it?

I really just love foreign languages, which may sound a little dumb because it's such a blanket statement, but even here at home, I find myself wanting to just break into German or French just for a second. I get— I don't know what it is. I don't— obviously not tired of English really, because that's my language. I write in it. I love it. But I love the sound of other languages and also that as soon as you speak another language or read it, you enter a completely different culture and a completely different history. And I really love that. So, you know, I do think sometimes that my first experience of another language made me want to translate the rest of my life, and that was— Being in that Austrian classroom and not understanding anything anyone said, and yet feeling that the surroundings were hospitable and friendly, so it wasn't an alienating experience, and then learning gradually what they were saying. So I think I've wanted to repeat that maybe over and over.

Do you think that reading fiction can be a better experience simply because you don't understand the language as well as your own language?

Reading fiction in another language?

That you understand less well than English. Can it be better because you understand it less well?

No, I don't think I experience the fiction itself or the content in a more enjoyable way. I'm sort of experiencing both at the same time, the content probably less well, and then the language is a pleasure in itself. And that doesn't mean I would enjoy reading a washing machine how-to manual in French or German and get the same enjoyment. But it's, you know, I read two different Peter Hanke books in German just because I wanted to. One was The Left-Handed Woman. And that he wrote in such a straightforward style and the material repeated so much that I was able to read it without a problem. So then I tried reading whatever it is, The Day in the— Afternoon of a Writer, I think it's called, Afternoon of a Writer. And that was terribly complicated with difficult constructions and huge vocabulary. And I had terrible trouble with it. I already knew it in English, so it was more the challenge of the language I was after.

Which languages do you dream in?

It's really— I don't actually think there's much language in my dreams, actually, come to think of it. But I think it would be mostly English. But sometimes in waking life, another word in another language will just pop up into my head spontaneously, and I don't ever quite know why.

Could you translate from the Norwegian if you were asked to?

Well, I actually have. I never translated that long book, which I learned Norwegian by reading, but I did translate— some short stories by Gunnhild Øyehaug. It's hard to say her last name. They were actually in the other Norwegian language, nynorsk, which is— Norwegian has two languages, bokmål and nynorsk. So it was in that language. I found her short stories so delightful that I did translate at least one of them and also some other works by a friend, by my Norwegian translator actually. But these were all very short.

Putting aside your husband's own work, but what in the visual arts excites you the most?

Well, it's hard to put aside his work since that's the— we live with it and think about it the most. Oh dear, that's very hard. Not because there aren't painters that I love. It was Velázquez that I paid a lot of attention to for a while. And that was partly because I was in Europe on many different trips. I would often go to a museum, and I found museums overwhelming. So I just thought, I can't do this. I feel sort of ill after an hour. So what I'm going to do is just look at two areas of painting. One is Velázquez. I almost made a game of it. How many Velázquez paintings can I find in the different museums? You know, make a sort of running list. And then the other area was early Flemish paintings, very, very different, but I love them and I'm partly interested in them sometimes. I mean, some of them are— a lot of them are interiors, but I'm interested in the landscapes. I like to just look at what was going on in their landscapes at that time. So part of my interest was sort of documentary. They were there and they were painting what they saw. So they're not trying to imagine what life was like back then.

Does your own work ever remind you of Joseph Cornell?

Well, no. I like Joseph Cornell and I like what he was doing and why, but I don't do collages and I never have. And I don't know if I ever would, but you never know. But my pieces are always composed sort of very much in a very unified way from beginning to end. I mean, in the first place, then I go back to them and work on them. But so the collage idea doesn't appeal to me, although Just once, a neighbor and friend here in New York State, he was writing haikus, and he said, "Would you like to collaborate on a poem?" And I usually don't want to, but I said, "Well, okay, if we can do it this way, I'll give you a poem and then you can—" intersperse your— what inspires you to— what inspires you by what you read, you can compose something and intersperse it with mine. And that worked out quite well. But that wasn't me responding to him, which is not quite fair.

What is it in the classical music repertoire that most captured your imagination when you were young?

Well, I was very, very much into classical music and, you know, from a pretty early age. I tried to branch out into moments of, you know, pop music, folk music, rock and roll. And I always managed to like some of it for a little while, but I always went back to classical music. And I guess it was Bach and the Schubert songs were very important to me, maybe because there was a little narrative element in them. But I keep coming back to Bach. And in high school, there was a very good program in which I played the orchestra, played in the orchestra, and sang in the choral groups and so on. Studied music theory, and that was very, very heavily oriented towards Bach. But, you know, it's again, it's like with writers. I mean, how could I do without Fauré, and how could I do without, you know, Verdi's Requiem, so on and so forth.

How would you articulate why you don't like the Harry Potter novels?

Well, that's fairly easy, although I should have a page in front of me. It's always better if you have the page and you can say, "Look at this sentence, look at that sentence." But at a certain point, my son was reading Harry Potter, as kids do and did, and I think he was probably 11 or 10 or 11, 12, 9, I don't know. But also the Philip Pullman trilogy, whose name I always forget. And I thought it would be a lot of fun to read the Harry Potter books because I knew a lot of grown-ups were reading them and enjoying them, and I thought, this is great, there are a lot of them. But when I tried to read them, I didn't like the style of writing, and I didn't like the characters, and I didn't like anything about them, whereas I opened the first Philip Pullman book and read the first page and said, this is wonderful. This— the writing here is wonderful. And I really think there's an ocean of difference. I won't— you know, I wouldn't put down the Harry Potter books because, as we know, they got a lot of kids reading and being enraptured with books. And I think that matters more. Than anything really, getting kids hooked on reading, so.

On page 418 of your new book, Essays Two, you imply that you don't finish most of the books you read. Is that correct? Yeah. And how do you think about that? You get to try more books? Because I'm very much the same way. I'm not sure that I finish 1 in 10 that I pick up, but that's for me mostly nonfiction.

For me, it's both. I'm always annoyed by it, so I won't say that it's— I pride myself on it or it's a wonderful thing. I'm always annoyed by it, and now I'm trying to develop the ability to skim. I know how to skim, but it doesn't usually occur to me to skim a book that I should take seriously. But now I'm thinking, well, I either skim it or I don't read it at all, or don't finish it. I think the reason over the years usually was that I kind of got what the writer was doing in the first 30 pages or whatever I read carefully, and I seldom felt that I really had to read every word to get it. And I did feel that way, say, as I mentioned with Ulysses, I felt I really wanted to read every word. But, for example, we mentioned Conrad. I started The Heart of Darkness. I had read it years ago, but I started it, you know, a few months ago and really liked the writing and wanted to go on. But I think the other problem is that there's always a new book coming into the house, another and another and another. And the temptation just to open a brand new book and start reading it is just too difficult for me to resist. But sometimes I think, well, I'm gonna go back to this bookcase and I'm gonna finish every single book that I started, but so far I haven't done it.

What do you think is your most unusual productivity habit? Unusual. And successful, that is.

Well, it's hard to say because I imagine that a lot of writers share some of the things I do, or a lot of them, so unusual. But I know that I have a more chaotic approach than some writers would want to have, and that's always been true. It's in a way very wasteful. I mean, like like the reading, the books I don't finish reading, there are also a number of very interesting projects, or very interesting to me, that I've done a lot of work on and, you know, then gone on to another project. So I have at least 3 or 4 or 5 big projects. These are not small stories. These are, you know, biographical projects or grammar projects or, you know, history projects, you know, crossing genres that I've done a lot of work on and then gotten distracted from. But that— when you say productive or successful, it does work very well with shorter things that you can actually finish. So the way I work on stories is to get busy immediately and write down what occurs to me. And write it until I've sort of exhausted that vein for the moment. And then I usually have enough to come back to later. So I'll have 10, 15, 20, 30 unfinished stories. And every now and then I'll pick one up again. Sometimes I don't even remember what it is. I'll see a title and think, "I don't know what that story was." I'll pick it up again and try to discern what it was that moved me and what it was that made me want to write it and get back into that and see if I could finish it. So that's a sort of chaotic method that works pretty well.

How ambitious are you?

I'm not ambitious in the worldly sense. You know, I've never been someone who was driven by, you know, "Oh, the public's gonna forget me, so I've got to get another book out within the next 2 years," which I know does motivate some writers or at least if they wouldn't— if they'd prefer not to think that way, they sometimes have an agent or a publisher who says, you know, you've got to give us another book in 2 years. But that's never been the case for me. And that's why some books are 7 years later, you know, and I'm doing other things. Often I'm working on, say, another project that won't bear fruit. I think George Steiner has a book which I have not read. I haven't even opened it, but a book detailing all the books he didn't write.

Yes, that's quite interesting. Yeah, yeah.

Have you read the whole of that one?

I think so, yes.

Well, that seemed lovely, and I thought, well, someday that'll have to be my last project. Maybe I'll have to write a book like that, modeled on that, about all the projects I didn't finish. But, um, so my ambition, if you call it that, is really just in terms of what I'm interested in doing and doing next and so on.

Will you ever publish your diaries?

I'm, I'm already doing that actually, um, in, in magazines, uh, so I'm And I will do it in book form. I'm reading— I have lots and lots of notebooks and journals, depending how you count, 90 to 100 to more. Some of them don't have much in them, so I wouldn't even count them, but some are very full. So I've been going through them and picking out the parts, the entries that are of general interest. They're not the autobiographical ones as much as just observations again, or interesting things from my reading, and putting them together and publishing them. Some have been in the magazine Noon that Diane Williams edits and founded. So because she asks for something each year, I give her something, and if I don't have stories, I give her journal excerpts. So sooner or later I'll publish an excerpt, a volume of excerpts of journals, and then much, much later when I don't have to know about it, maybe more complete books will come out of journal entries.

Dana Goodyear wrote in The New Yorker, and I quote, "When Davis was younger, the obsessions of her narrators tended to be amorous." 'Now they are philosophical.' Do you agree or disagree?

Oh, I suppose. I mean, one friend, writer friend, when I— I forget which book it was, Almost No Memory maybe, or one earlier one— she said, because of the sort of subject matter of those stories, she said, 'Oh, now Lydia discovers marriage,' or something like that. Though it's true that my stories, you know, maybe they were more about— I don't think they were really about love in the beginning. They're not only about love, because I think in the first collection, there was a story called "What an Old Woman Will Wear." That may have been in the second collection. So I was thinking about other things, not just love. But— and then the latest ones will have much more about ants in them, because I wasn't thinking about ants quite so much when I was 30, in my 30s. So yes, the stories will reflect whatever I'm— what's going on in my mind.

To put it more generally, you have taught and you still read other people's work. If you're looking for talent in a young writer, just from the page, not from the person, what is it you look for? What gets you excited? I don't mean finished product, but In what do you see potential?

Oh, just a certain spark, a certain way of being able to look with his or her own eyes at the world and see it the way he or she sees it without sort of— I mean, what discourages me completely, of course, is the clichéd observations, you know, one after another. A student just picking and using what everyone else picks up and uses. But— so, I've had some students who were exciting. I mean, it's partly the use of language, but the use of language implies that they are really thinking about language and paying attention to what language can do. So it'll be use of language and then use of their own honest vision. Usually if the grammar and syntax are just too bad, you know, I mean, you can have sort of a spark, but if it's too bad, I've learned from experience it's really hard to change that at that point, you know, if the student's in college or after. So you know, I have to sadly kind of— I mean, it's not that I didn't try my best, but there has to be a minimum recognition of how language is used. I don't know, there's so many things you look for in teaching writing. It gets very complicated.

Do you feel that meeting them or interviewing them gives you a better sense of how good a writer they can become, or that's worthless and don't get distracted, just look at the printed page?

Well, in my experience, I have not had to or really wanted to interview students in person before accepting them into a class. So it's, it's been either that they were already signed up and enrolled and I did what I could, or with some of the classes at the Writers Institute in, in SUNY Albany Those are for continuing education, you know, general public and graduate students. And you're handed, you know, a pile of samples, 30 pages. I mean, 30 samples, anonymous. So I really think that's the best way if you're selecting students for a class. I always wanted to balance the genders, and that was a bit of a game with me to say, well, this seems like a guy, this seems like a woman. You know, nowadays, who cares? But I thought it was good to have the balance. But I was often wrong, and that was fine too.

How do you teach differently? Differently? Yes. What is it you do that other teachers of writing don't do when you do master classes or when you taught at Albany?

Well, I know I gave many— well, again, we get back to the lack of being systematic. For one thing, I didn't like to give out a curriculum at the beginning. This is what we're going to do every week till the end of the term, because I never knew. I liked to see what they needed or see what I was reading or see what occurred to me and give the next assignment based on that rather than something I had already decided. So that was one difference. And that led to some very fun things. Like, I myself was trying to think of all the words that began with "w-r." This was just something I happened to be doing walking around the house, realizing there weren't very many of them. So I thought, "Okay, I'll give that as an assignment next week." The students will have to think of all the words they can that begin with W-R. And they can— they're allowed to ask other people, but obviously they're not allowed to look online or in the dictionary to find them. And that was a lot of fun, because we also realized that all the words beginning with W-R, except for one in the Cornish language or something, had to do with twisting. So wrench or wrist or wrangle.

Wrong, right? Sure. Yeah. Why is that?

Well, that's the kind of thing I love. And I have— I don't— I can't really tell you why, except that I'm sure if you go back to the Indo-European or the Gothic or, you know, go way back, you'll find it there. The answer is there somewhere that— I mean, I sometimes think that the sounds are related to the meaning in the sense of You know, "ma ma ma ma ma." The M is good for "ma ma ma." But W-R, I'm not sure. "Rrrr." You know, is it something to do with that? That's a bit of a mystery. I don't think I ever went and really tried to answer that. But I like having these discoveries. I liked— I should say in the past tense— having these discoveries with the students and having that freshness, like I didn't plan it, I haven't done that with the students every year from time immemorial.

Have you read Don Quixote yet?

Well, I actually, I belong to a kind of pretty high-minded book club, a Zoom, a remote book club, and I say high-minded because I have another one that's much more casual. And we read detective novels or we read, you know, I don't know. It's much— we don't— we're not ambitious, very ambitious. But this one, we're willing to tackle difficult things. So I thought, well, my choices will all be books that I've been meaning to read, and I'll make them read them with me, and that way I'll actually read them. So we did read 100 pages of Don Quixote. We all agreed we couldn't— try to read the whole thing. This is the Edith Grossman translation.

It was.

I had various— you know, I asked someone once, you know, which one do you think is the best? He was someone who was in a position to know, and he did have to think of it, but he decided that all in all that was the best one. But so we read like the first 4 books or whatever it books, meaning not books but long sections, about 100 pages. I was very glad, and so was everyone else. We also read Beowulf because that was another one I had never read and thought that I should read.

That was the Heaney translation or which?

I think it was several. I read the Heaney but also referred to— was it Nabokov? What am I thinking of that was much more literal? Did he attempt a very literal one, or am I mixing him up with someone else?

I think of his as quite poetic.

Haney. Well, Haney's was farther from the original, because I also tried to— you know, I read it alongside the original, because it's not impossible. And his was— his departed much more from the original than whichever one it was that I was comparing it to. But that was very interesting. We all enjoyed that too.

There's something about the cumulative effect of Don Quixote that I quite enjoy. So Book 2 to me is much better than Book 1. Oh yeah. So if your 100 pages were from Book 1, Book 1 makes Book 2 better, but on trying to reread it, I found I was experiencing a certain impatience that I kept on wanting to skip ahead to the better Book 2. But that's also a mistake.

And have you read the whole of Don Quixote?

Yes, but I have not reread the whole recently, and I think when I read it, it was maybe the Walter Starkey translation, which I suspect isn't that good, but it's a good book to read. Like some of the early Dostoevsky translations? Mm-hmm. Like maybe Constance Garnett is not very good as a translator, but she might be quite good to read, especially if you're young.

Well, that was true of Stiegmüller's translation of Flaubert, I think, is also a good book to read, but it goes quite far away from Flaubert.

How would you put what you did with Flaubert in contrast to that translation?

Well, staying much more, much closer to the French. I mean, that was something I tried to do with Proust and Flaubert, was really, really not stray too far, you know, no farther than absolutely necessary. Whereas he, Stiegmüller, would put in a phrase that isn't even in the Flaubert, like 'Poor thing' is the one I remember after Charles's first wife dies, the wife that precedes Emma Bovary. The narrator says 'poor thing.' I don't remember if Charles says it or it's just in the narration, but 'poor thing' is not in the Flaubert. So Stiegmüller was making a readable, very vibrant novel out of it. And that's okay as far as that goes. I mean, I think that's what you mean by a good book or a good book to read that isn't necessarily, you know, a scholar would not necessarily approve of the approach.

And at current margins, what is your dream translation job?

Well, I actually don't want to translate anymore. What I decided at a certain point Well, this is just partly because I have a lot of other things I want to do urgently. But at a certain point, I thought, I do want to go on translating, but they will all have to be very, very short stories. So I, at that point, switched over to translating— there's a Swiss writer I like a lot called Peter Bichsel. Who isn't— some of his early books were translated here, but these are sort of newspaper columns, autobiographical, that I really like a lot. So I translated a few of those, and they're only a page and a half long. So that's— if you wanted to— if I wanted to answer your question properly, I'd say that's my dream translation job, is Texts like that, that are autobiographical and short.

And last question, as readers, in terms of publication, what can we expect next from you?

Well, I actually have a pile of stories that have been sitting here and accumulating, and they're in a folder called "New Book," and it's very fat. There are a lot of them, but I keep, you know, I keep having to put it aside because of all the other things I'm doing and that get in the way. But that, that should be the next book because it's all there. I just need to organize it, maybe complete one or two of the longer ones, and there it'll be, another book of stories.

Lydia Davis, thank you very much. It's been a real honor.

Thank you very much. It's been enjoyable.