Essays Two

June 1, 2021

A master particularly of short-form fiction who was a National Book Award finalist for Varieties of Disturbance: Stories and winner of the Man Booker International Prize for her oeuvre, Davis is also an accomplished translator. Here she collects all her essays on translating Proust, Flaubert, and Michel Leiris; learning a world language through reading; and staying for an extended time in the Van Gogh-brightened city of Arles. With a 25,000-copy first printing.

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Starred review from August 9, 2021
In this riveting and erudite collection (after Essays One), Davis documents the adventures and challenges of her work as a translator, moving with ease between the technical challenges posed by a complex text and her personal relationship with literature. Several pieces describe her process of translating Proust’s Swann’s Way into English: “The Child as Writer” provides critical and biographical insight as Davis diagrams the syntax of Proust’s “sophisticated and polished” sentences, while in “Proust in His Bedroom,” she reads his correspondence and pays a visit to his apartment in Paris. Sections are dedicated to her experience learning Spanish, Dutch, and Norwegian, often through context and logic: In “Learning Bokmal” (an older form of Norwegian), Davis explains how she is exhilarated by “the fact of doing it by myself.” In “Translating ‘Bob, Son of Battle: The Last Gray Dog of Kenmuir’,” Davis describes her desire to keep a book from her childhood from being forgotten, and her project of modernizing the book’s language, while “Buzzing, Humming, or Droning” considers the many Madame Bovary translations. 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. Agent: Denise Shannon, Denise Shannon Literary.

September 15, 2021
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.

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December 1, 2021
MacArthur Fellow, winner of the Man Booker International Prize, fiction writer, essayist, and translator Davis follows her Essays One: Reading and Writing (2019) with a collection of exacting, entertaining, and instructive reflections on her lifelong preoccupation with other languages. Her passion for words and syntax charges her candid and probing inquiries into the cascading challenges and revelations of translation. In "Twenty-One Pleasures of Translating (And a Silver Lining),"" the joys Davis cheekily elucidates include freedom from "the anxiety of invention" that shadows writing one's own work. Exultant in the geekiness of it all, she parses why exactly she delights in the puzzles of translation, the research, and the mission, declaring, "As I translate, I learn." As will the reader as Davis chronicles her intellectual adventures translating Proust and Flaubert; teaching herself Spanish, Dutch, and Norwegian through reading; and turning a nineteenth-century memoir by a Cape Cod ancestor of hers into a long narrative poem. With a closing essay about her fascination with the French city of Arles, Davis' articulation of her literary pursuits and processes will set kindred minds alight.

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