Lydia Davis on Language and Literature

Conversations with Tyler

Society & Culture, Education

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 23 March 2022

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A prolific translator, author, and former professor of creative writing, Lydia Davis’s motivation for her life’s work is jarringly simple: she just loves language. She loves short, sparkling sentences. She loves that in English we have Anglo-Saxon words like “underground” or Latinate alternatives like “subterranean.” She loves reading books in foreign languages, discovering not only their content but a different culture and a different history at the same time. Despite describing her creative process as “chaotic” and herself as “not ambitious,” she is among America’s best-known short story writers and a celebrated essayist.

Lydia joined Tyler to discuss how the form of short stories shapes their content, how to persuade an ant to leave your house, the difference between poetry and very short stories, Proust’s underrated sense of humor, why she likes Proust despite being averse to long books, the appeal of Josep Pla’s The Gray Notebook, why Proust is funnier in French or German than in English, the hidden wit of Franz Kafka, the economics of poorly translated film subtitles, her love of Velázquez and early Flemish landscape paintings, how Bach and Schubert captured her early imagination, why she doesn’t like the Harry Potter novels—but appreciates their effects on young readers, whether she’ll ever publish her diaries, how her work has evolved over time, how to spot talent in a young writer, her method (or lack thereof) for teaching writing, what she learned about words that begin with “wr,” how her translations of Proust and Flaubert differ from others, what she’s most interested in translating now, what we can expect from her next, and more.

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Recorded February 3rd, 2022

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi everyone, this is Tyler Rev. Conversations with Tyler. The Mercada Center is producing
0:09.9	a new podcast called Ideas of India, where my colleague Shruti Rajikopalan invites guests
0:16.9	to examine the ideas propelling India forward. Whether listening from India, the European
0:23.2	Union, or here in North America, Shruti's discussions are relevant and engaging and covering
0:29.1	some of the most important issues in our world today. You can listen and subscribe to the
0:34.2	show on your favorite podcast app.
1:04.2	Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm here with the very special
1:09.3	guest Lydia Davis. Lydia is unique. She is one of America's best and best known short story
1:16.0	writers and her short stories are indeed very short. She is a leading translator, best known
1:22.1	for translating parts of Proust and also Flobar. She is a wonderful essayist. Her latest
1:28.2	book which I loved is Essay's 2. Lydia Davis just out. Of course there is also Essay's
1:33.9	one which is excellent as well and she has in fact done much more than that. Lydia, welcome.
1:40.3	Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. I have a question about writing very short stories
1:46.1	and that is what's the kind of content by us that's introduced by making them very short.
1:51.4	So if I think about Thomas Barronhart who also wrote very short stories, he tends to use
1:56.8	either a very bad event or some kind of miss and throppy to hook the reader and that's not
2:02.2	what you do but what is the content bias in writing very short stories. I suppose it's limited
2:09.5	by something that is short in duration and necessarily either an action that's very short
2:16.2	in duration or a perception that's very brief and glancing. It might be a perception that
2:23.4	could lead to a great many more perceptions or could be developed but for the moment it's
2:29.1	very brief. That is the constraint. The stories are born very spontaneously from these immediate
2:36.0	perceptions or immediate actions that are there and over in a blink of an eye.
	...

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