reading in the margins: Lydia Davis

, a short essay more than a year in the works,

Our lives might be almost over. This required an immediate reconciliation with the idea of death, and it required an immediate decision as to the best way to leave this world. What should be my last thoughts on this earth, in this life? It was not a matter of looking for solace but for acceptance, believing that it was all right to die now.
“The Landing,” can’t and won’t

I was introduced to the work of American writer and translator Lydia Davis through a 2008 interview conducted by Sarah Manguso in The Believer, having been made aware of Manguso through her debut collection of very short stories, the accumulative self-contained paragraphs of Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape (2007). The gift of that particular small book may have triggered the directions I explored through The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (2014), but it was the broader example of Davis’ work that really provided the scaffolding for the kinds of fiction I might already have been reaching for; a broadening of scope for what might be possible throughout the realm of prose, into the borderlands of the prose poem, and into the condensed narratives of my short story collection, On Beauty (2024). There is a clarity I appreciate in Davis’ prose, almost a shorthand, with not a wasted word or image, while still adhering to narrative possibility, from the straightforward passage to the sudden left turn. How she can alter narrative direction and purpose through but a single phrase or word. And my reading of Davies connected further to the lyric narratives and delicate precisions of other prose writers I’d already encountered up to that point, such as Elizabeth Smart [see my Geist essay on her here; my literary mothers piece on her here] and Sheila Watson, Kristjana Gunnars [see my essay on her here] and Diane Schoemperlen, Nicole Brossard and Jean McKay [see my essay on her here].

I studied The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (2009), and the chapbook-length short story, The Cows (2011), marveling at her wayward and sharp stretches. I caught her collection of new stories, Can’t and Won’t (2014), and the incredible heft of the omnibus collections Essays One (2019) and Essays Two (2021). And more recently, Our Strangers (2023). There’s a lot packed into those pages. With some stories as short as a single paragraph or sentence, Davis leans more lyric than the prose poems of the father of the American prose poem, Russell Edson (1928-2014), but hers are very much short stories, each with their own narrative trajectories. However lyric she bends, she is telling you a story. “Although she is late,” the story “The Afternoon of a Translator” from Our Strangers, begins, “she has stopped, before coming up out of the subway, to look at herself in the mirror of the subway toilet. She had thought she was well dressed when she left home, but decides that she is not. She is carrying a folder of work and two books.”

As Essays One focuses on her essays on writing and writers, Essays Two collects her various essays, lectures and talks on the process of translation, such as her years of unfurling the sentences of Marcel Proust into contemporary English. Beyond her extensive work articulating the nuances amid and between languages—translating the complexities of works originally composed in French by Gustave Flaubert, André Jardin, Pierre Jean Jouve and Marcel Proust—it is absolutely fascinating to hear her experiences attempting to explore languages she has either only a passing knowledge, or no knowledge whatsoever. She specifically speaks of navigating an endless sequence of paths attempting to read, understand and translate from a language such as Norwegian, deliberately without utilizing a language dictionary. She probably doesn’t know of Montreal poet and mathematician Hugh Thomas’ ongoing project of translating poems into English from languages he also doesn’t know, such as Swedish, Norwegian and Albanian. A further essay in this assemblage writes on attempting to translate a relative’s two hundred year old English prose memoir into a contemporary narrative poem, and of her exploring elements of the line break. The details of this particular piece offered echoes of Winnipeg poet Dennis Cooley’s classic essay on the line break, articulating poetry’s notational form, shape, sound and purpose, collected in The Vernacular Muse (1987). It is interesting to hear such a deliberate and experienced craftsperson as Davis speak of her uncertainty with language and form, working to trust her own research and judgement, attempting to feel her way through a puzzle or mystery, without any sense of what the final translated work might look like. As she offers as part of her explorations of the line break:

Or I could take Ashbery’s answer as, really, the best and only answer, and here is how it might work: you would simply have to keep attempting your own line breaks, trusting your instincts and then listening again to what you had done, examining your line breaks, reexamining them. You would also, when you were not writing your own poems, study the line breaks of other poets, especially poets you unquestionably admired. You would then return to examine your own, and in that way inculcate in yourself a feel for line breaks, until you could confidently, without worrying, break the line “wherever it felt right.”

Across those early months of the Covid-era emerged an essay by Davis, also in The Believer, “On Translating Bob, Son of Battle,” a first-person piece subtitled “The unexpected difficulties of modernizing a beloved nineteenth-century children’s book.” Davis explains her process of navigating elements of attempting to translate a work, more than a century old, from a particular dialect into a more contemporary English, both through language and cultural markers, without losing the purpose and structure of the original story. The agony over details she went through is fascinating, breaking the entire project down to the sentence, the word.

During this project, I kept putting myself in the place of a less experienced reader. At a certain point, however, I became confused: As I progressed through the book, I saw more and more difficulties in the vocabulary and sentence structures and found myself changing more and more of the language. Then I had to step back and reevaluate what I was doing. I was heading down an impossible path: by the standards I was establishing, I would have to recast every sentence, every phrase. So I tried to return to a middle path, changing only the most difficult things, allowing some of the less difficult to remain.

I take a lot of notes when reading Lydia Davis, from my own thoughts on prose, scratchings toward a potential essay or two, direct quotations, and even the opening threads of what could become a short story. Despite Davis remaining one of my most cherished prose writers, I still have difficulty bringing myself to shape up any of these notes into a review, as though simply wishing to retain the experience of reading and absorbing the material. Perhaps there’s a selfishness at play, wishing to retain the experience of reading to prompt my own writing and thinking, and not be distracted. There are always certain books I find that render themselves slippery when it comes to commentary, prompting me, instead, to prefer to lose myself in the reading and thinking. I had a similar experience while struggling through writing a review of Gail Scott’s Permanent Revolution: Essays (2021) [I did manage a more recent essay, here]. It is entirely for this reason, as well, that I never did do proper write-ups for Joshua Beckman’s paired 2018 Wave Books essay titles, despite the wealth of notes I made during my extensive reading and rereading of both collections. Even this short sketch, which took more than a year.

Through Lydia Davis: the form of the short story, the container that can hold anything and everything one might think to include. As she responded via an interview in the online journal splonk: “I wanted an approach that would free me up and let me dive quickly into unfamiliar imaginative and emotional territory.” I perpetually marvel at her fearlessness. It is, thus, the unknowing through which one best begins.