Guest of the ilb 2001
Lydia Davis was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, in
1947, and grew up there and in New York City, attending second grade,
however, at the Ursulinenklosterschule in Graz, Austria. After
graduating from Barnard College, she spent nearly three years abroad,
in Ireland and in France. While living in Paris she began to work
as a translator for the film industry and for art galleries, before
deciding to concentrate fully on the translation of literary
texts. Since then Davis has made a name for herself as the
translator of works by Marcel Proust, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Butor,
Pierre Jean Jouve and Michel Leiris, among others. In 1992 she
received the French-American Foundation Translation Award for her
translation of 'Scratches' by the surrealist Leiris. She is
currently completing a translation of the first volume of Gustave
Flauberts 'Madame Bovary' for Viking Penguin.
It was while living in the south of France that Davis wrote most of the
short stories which appeared in her first collection, 'The Thirteenth
Woman and Other Stories', in 1976. In 1986 her first substantial
collection of stories, 'Break It Down' was published by Farrar, Straus
& Giroux and was subsequently a finalist for the PEN/Hemmingway
Foundation Award for Fiction. Her only novel to date, 'The End of
the Story'(1995), was followed in 1997 by 'Almost No Memory', another
collection of short stories. The author is represented in many
renowned literature journals and anthologies. Although her novel
has already been translated into French and Polish, only one of her
short stories is available in German at the moment. Among other
awards, Davis has received a Guggenheim Scholarship and the Lannan
Literary Award. She is married to the painter Alan Cote, lives
with him and their son Theo in Port Ewen, New York, and is
currently writer in residence at the University of Chicago.
The critic Edith Jarolim has remarked that Davis' translating
background is apparent in her prose. Her characters are not only
out of sync with the contemporary world, Jarolim claims, they are also
estranged from their own language. "They sound at times like
intelligent foreigners who have learned to speak correctly but have not
entirely mastered colloquialism." Davis herself characterizes her
writing as a philosophical investigation of the relationship between
imagination and reality, as well as an exploration of one’s perceptions
of one’s identity and the subjective nature of the truth. The
question of communication is a constant topic; communication between
characters, and communication between the author and the reader.
The narrator in her novel not only discusses various interpretations of
words and actions relating to her lover, but also constantly reflects
on her own work as a writer. The author has stated that she is
particularly interested in the diversity of forms of literary
expression, that is, all the various possibilities for creating
realities through language.
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