Essays Two

We come away from Essays Two with renewed respect for a writer whose grasp of languages is profound, and whose capacity to shape-shift from one to another is quite exceptional * Times Literary Supplement *Whatever the topic, Davis is always superb company: erudite, adventurous, surprising … Davis extracts endless thrills from the painstaking process [of translation]. Her essays do a beautiful job of transmitting that satisfaction to the reader … A book that contains an incredible amount of life-enhancing morsels – Molly Young * New York Times *[Essays Two is] a guide to new dimensions of thought. Davis makes translation seem like a sublime exercise of mind and self * The Boston Globe *When Davis breaks down the work of writing, she can be very funny, often at her own expense … The pieces in Essays Two brim with daring experiments … There is an element of knight-errantry, quest, romantic fatalism as she pursues the elusive foreign language, and often a distant century – Ange Mlinko * London Review of Books *As a translator, Davis is known for fidelity, clarity, and, in the case of Proust, decluttering … Yet the collection is not, mostly, about problems with other people’s translations but the process of working on her own – a kind of shop talk we’re allowed to listen in on … Davis once said in an interview that she would find it ‘almost morally or ethically wrong’ to deliberately impose her own style on a translation. Her scrupulousness is, perhaps, a counterbalance to the translator’s power, and to the peremptory instinct that prompts translation in the first place – Elaine Blair * New York Review of Books *

Lydia Davis is the author of Collected Stories, one novel and six short story collections, the most recent of which was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of modern writers, including Gustave Flaubert and Marcel Proust. She won the Man Booker International Prize in 2013.