In Lydia Daviss Work, Writing and Translating Provocatively Commingle – The New York Times

There are any number of amazements in Essays Two. Some involve deep dives into a writer, others brief, bracing immersions. There are seven separate engagements with Proust, essays approaching the authors work from different directions but all centered on Daviss translating of Swanns Way. We learn, for example, that Davis first read Proust 25 years before she began her translation, and at the time she didnt, or wasnt able to, finish reading even that volume, the first of Prousts seven-volume novel. Rather, she read the final third only as she translated it an idea that for many of us might seem counterintuitive: Mustnt one have first read a book to translate it? Daviss experience flips the idea: How can one read a book if one isnt first translating it?

What is hard to determine, Davis writes, is what sort of influence reading Proust for the first time had had on me as a young writer. In Hammers and Hoofbeats, an essay that made my brains jaw drop as I read it, Prousts influence on Davis materializes as she thinks through, or imagines, the sounds Proust would have heard as a child:

The sounds in the city (either in his parents apartment or in his uncles house in Auteuil), outdoors: birds warbling and chirping in the garden, voices in the garden calling and shouting, laughing, occasionally singing, sung music and instrumental music; his own piano lessons and practice, and his brother Roberts; musical instruments being practiced in different apartments in the neighborhood; voices practicing scales and songs and arias (some of the same sounds that you hear now in a bourgeois neighborhood, and that you hear in Hitchcocks Rear Window); people calling their pets; dogs barking I dont know what the laws were then regulating pets or other animals roaming free in the streets, about 1885; cats meowing or caterwauling in the middle of the night; people whistling; footsteps on sidewalks; tradesmen calling their wares through the streets; horses hoofbeats, trotting and walking; carriage wheels rattling on cobblestone and grinding over dust and dirt over stone (i.e., the steady sound of wheels under the regular rhythm of the hoofbeats either pacing or trotting); in the carriage, the creaking of the wood and leather along with the hoofbeats and wheels.

This 187-word sentence is a list, grammatically a sentence fragment, one constituted of 14 dependent clauses that evoke the fragmentary nature of sensation, offering a sonic portrait of a provincial past. Not in 14 lifetimes would it have occurred to me to imagine what Proust (or any writer) would have heard in childhood, but Daviss attention to the idea puts the reader into different proximity to what translation does and what writing as a practice demands and too frequently overlooks: an osmotic awareness of the world, a quality of vision and audition that a writer transfigures into a sequence of not words sound. The yield of that attention is delivered in Daviss subsequent, grammatically ironclad, sentence:

Carillons from churches; church bells sounding the hours, tolling for deaths, clamoring for weddings: Think of Prousts description of the tears he continues to shed inside himself even now that he is an adult: They are, he says, like those convent bells covered so well by the clamor of the town during the day that one would think they had ceased altogether but which begin sounding again in the silence of the evening.

The alliterative cs that run through Daviss phrases and carry over into Prousts; the ow that rings five times, from Daviss sounding to Prousts: Daviss and Prousts sonics marry at the second colon, Daviss exquisite tolling for deaths, clamoring for weddings performing the loss and gain of life and memory bells so greedily alive they demand not death but joy. Here we find an answer to Daviss question of influence, Davis not sounding like Proust but thinking, unintimidated, collegially, with him.

Engagements like these populate Essays Two, making a reader want to return to reading, not to say living, with a different, Davislike (ugly word for beautiful idea) attention. The most surprising such acts of attention in the collection, and the most illuminating of the practice of translation to the monoglot, are conceptually the least promising. I do certain things backward, she tells us, a claim that certainly applies to her learning Spanish by reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in Spanish translation and then translating the Spanish into English and then comparing her translation of it with Twains original, not to see what is lost in translation but gained through its practice: in part, a more precise sense of Twains singularity.

There are also Daviss accounts of translating English books into English Laurence Sternes A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768); the childrens book Bob, Son of Battle (1898) older Englishes into contemporary English, an effectively foreign language into a domestic one, what all translation ultimately, inevitably, entails. Other essays have Davis learning Dutch and Norwegian, documents of ingenuity and curiosity that make the reader while reading them, at least think: I could, no, should, do that too. That one wont hardly matters. Mystically, the essays make one feel one has.

The final essay in the collection, The City of Arles, is the seeming outlier, about Daviss time in and research on the French city of Arles. Davis calls the piece notes the word comes from Latin, where it meant a mark and composes it as a series of discrete stories with names (A Single Sheep and a Doorway; The Mosquitoes of Arles). The essay is an attempt, through attention, to transmogrify a city into a substance, to seek the words that might as Daviss body of work, through time, continues to do translate the hidden marks in which the world is written.

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In Lydia Daviss Work, Writing and Translating Provocatively Commingle - The New York Times