2013.05.21 2013年曼布克国际奖得主

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在翻译中获得的
2013年曼布克国际奖得主。莉迪亚-戴维斯是一位作家的作家，拥有一些杰出的粉丝。2009年，她与艾米莉-博布罗谈论了语言、精确度和普鲁斯特。

2013年5月21日


作者：Emily Bobrow

摘自《智慧生活》杂志，2009年秋

莉迪亚-戴维斯要么被推崇，要么被忽视。她赢得了许多奖项，但她的书却很少传给不熟悉的人。她更像是一次秘密的握手，被那些知情者--主要是作家们--所珍视。里克-穆迪称她是 "美国最好的散文家"；弗朗辛-普罗斯承认，"当我觉得自己变得过于狭隘、过于僵化、过于局限时"，我就会去读戴维斯。戴夫-埃格斯（Dave Eggers）在几年前的一次阅读会上介绍戴维斯时说，许多作家都忍不住想模仿她。

然而，最近在纽约的斯特兰德书店（"18英里的书"，新书和二手书）访问时，没有发现戴维斯的作品。服务台的一位女士解释说。"她的作品很少再版，拥有她的书的人倾向于保留它们"。


戴维斯现在应该得到更多的关注，因为Farrar, Straus and Giroux出版了《莉迪亚-戴维斯的故事集》。虽然她只有62岁，仍在写作，但这本书有一种职业终结的正式性。故事集》有近800页，取材于《打破它》（1986年）、《几乎没有记忆》（1997年）、《塞缪尔-约翰逊是愤怒的》（2001年）和《干扰的多样性》（2007年）中的故事，是那种将一个作者推入正轨的逆袭者。

戴维斯以完善和重新定义短篇小说而闻名。她的文字凿凿有声，精确无误；她的人物往往没有名字，非常自觉。她以一种近乎临床的方式来处理过度活跃的思维的结点和磨损的边缘，这使得阅读她的作品时有一点宣泄的感觉。考虑到 "打破它 "的标题故事中的叙述者。"他坐在那里盯着一张纸，"故事开始。"他想把它分解开来"。这个故事起初很克制，一个人在计算一个假期的费用。但很快就可以看出，他正试图逐项计算一段爱情，使已经消失的东西变得合理。句子越来越长，记忆越来越强烈。


... 我不敢说，但我必须说，因为我想让她知道，那是最后一晚，我必须在那时告诉她，否则我就再也没有机会了，我就说，在你睡觉之前，我必须在你睡觉之前告诉你，我爱你，然后马上，紧接着，她说，我也爱你，在我听来，她好像不是真心的，有点平淡，但通常当有人说，我爱你时，听起来有点平淡。我也爱你，因为他们只是回话，即使他们是真心的，问题是我永远不知道她是不是真心的，也许有一天她会告诉我她是不是真心的，但现在没有办法知道，我很抱歉我这么做了，这是个陷阱，我不是故意要把她放进去的，我可以看到这是个陷阱，因为如果她什么都不说，我知道那也会很痛苦...

他继续分解，而这件事继续不加思索。戴维斯的语言以一种死板的整齐划一捕捉到了这种无序，几乎是滑稽的。

她的许多故事都非常短：一个段落或一个打趣，悬浮在一个乳白色的页面中。就像核桃一样，它们只有巴掌大，很复杂，但却很完整。"几乎结束了。分开的卧室》是《塞缪尔-约翰逊愤慨》中的一个故事，全文是这样的。"他们现在已经搬到了单独的卧室。那天晚上，她梦见自己正抱着他。他梦见自己在与本-琼森共进晚餐"。

这是个一闪而过的故事，但凄美而有趣。她的句子有一种朴实无华的清晰度，在精心的选择下显得很有活力。出自同一文集的《双重否定》。"在她生命中的某个时刻，她意识到与其说她想有一个孩子，不如说她不想没有孩子，或者说不想有一个孩子。" 戴维斯将母性的矛盾心理提炼在两行简洁的文字中，就像一个逻辑问题或文字游戏。这种紧缩性很容易被低估，但很难被复制。

去看戴维斯，就是进入她的故事的深思熟虑的雷区。起初，她不确定自己是否愿意接受采访。她的出版商同意了，但后来又反悔了（"莉迪亚需要多一点时间考虑"）。她的编辑试图安抚她（"莉迪亚是一个非常慎重的人......你可能已经猜到了"）。在她同意见我之后，她在思考我应该坐哪趟火车--"每趟火车都有它的优点和缺点，"她写道。她的许多叙述者的声音传来：脑筋急转弯，兢兢业业，略显笨拙。

我们最终在纽约州北部的哈德逊见面，离她和她丈夫艾伦-科特居住的地方不远，他是一位抽象画家。车站在正午的阳光下发出红色的光芒，仿佛是霍普的作品。戴维斯来接我，开车到附近一家古朴的茶室。她说："应该不会太吵，"她说，听起来忐忑不安，而不是自信。


在她的作品中，她避开了描述性的细节，但在人前，她是令人放心的，没有丝毫阳刚之气。她有一双晶莹的蓝眼睛，戴着吊坠耳环，涂着指甲（尽管是自然色调）。她喜欢喝水果冰沙，喜欢动物。她在纽约市由两位作家抚养长大，显然她对自己安静的乡村生活很满意，远离喧嚣的书友。她和她的丈夫住在一个古老的砖砌校舍里，戴维斯从她的钱包里掏出几张照片。"哦，这些是牛，"她笑着说，提供了一张田野里两头相邻的牛的照片，在黎明的蓝光下，牛的轮廓清晰可见。

戴维斯知道她在年轻时就会写作--她很优秀，而且家庭生活是围绕着写作、阅读和教学而建立的。但她发现这个前景是个负担，甚至不讨人喜欢。"我实际上更喜欢音乐"。弹钢琴可以立即得到满足，不同于讲故事的挣扎，她可以高兴地练上几个小时。但她知道自己不是演奏家（"我可以听到每一个错误的小东西"）。音乐理论课--关于结构和主题、分析和练习--最终帮助了她的写作。

她13岁时，贝克特的《马龙之死》让她看到了书中语言的使用。"这本书与我所读的所有令人着迷的故事几乎完全相反。这是一个几乎什么都没有发生的故事，但同时语言又是如此清晰。"

大学毕业后，她花了好几年时间为短篇小说流汗，但似乎从来没有正确的感觉。当她读到美国散文诗人罗素-埃德森时，情况发生了变化。"她说："当你试图把你的生活写成一个故事时，它有点太整齐了。但是，如果她非要整齐划一的话，埃德森的写作让她看到了富有表现力的小叙事，与她试图编织的更传统的纱线完全不同。他的作品 "似乎在说你可以做任何你想做的事。你可以尝试所有这些不同的东西，它们可能不成功，但这没关系。"

她自己的写作变得更具实验性，更短，更抽象。"她说："我会想到一个想法，一个我认为有趣的想法，然后我将它旋转到它的逻辑结论，就像解决一个小问题。她的家人和朋友对她所做的事情接受得很慢。"他们希望我写一种不同的东西。她笑着说："他们希望我写不同的东西，更多他们习惯的东西，更多他们喜欢的东西。"其他人必须先喜欢它，他们才会喜欢它。"

她早期的一些故事似乎是为了抚平生活中的坎坷而做出的努力。她的主人公在焦虑的孤独中挣扎，或在失败的婚姻后将自己重新组合起来。戴维斯说："写作有一种形成感觉完整的东西的满足，"。"它不一定是治疗性的。要写一个个人困扰的情况，你必须与它保持一定的距离，因为你在用它来制造一些东西"。她说她不记得她所有的故事，也很少有理由重温旧作。"当我读它的时候，它是作为一个作家。"

自20世纪70年代末以来（最初是与她的第一任丈夫、小说家保罗-奥斯特一起），戴维斯还担任过法国文学和哲学的翻译。她最有名的作品是她最近的作品：2003年翻译的《Swann's Way》，即普鲁斯特的《回忆往事》的第一卷。比C.K. Scott Moncrieff更克制，它在页面上揭示了戴维斯的偏见。她认为每个句子都是一个 "小谜题"，并努力忠实于普鲁斯特的声音、节奏和词语选择。弗兰克-温恩在《爱尔兰时报》上说："这个新版本的亮点在于语言的简洁性和对普鲁斯特散文的忠实性，"他称这个译本 "华丽、精确"。


戴维斯被法国政府授予艺术和文学骑士勋章，并获得了麦克阿瑟基金会的 "天才 "奖，因为她展示了 "语言本身是如何娱乐化的，一个词说了什么，没有说什么，都能引起读者的兴趣"。该奖项使她30年来首次集中精力创作小说。现在她正从奥尔巴尼大学副教授的职位上休假，她仍然在全国各地教授特殊的创意写作研讨会。

"翻译使我更敏锐地意识到意义的深浅，"她解释说。"你有一个既定的问题，你不能通过回避它来绕过它。你必须选择一个合适的词"。因此，当翻译福楼拜的《包法利夫人》的机会来临时，她抓住了它。她现在正在努力工作，每天工作四五个小时，以便在年底前完成这项工作。

她说："我一直在学习新词，"她高兴地说道。"我也喜欢沉浸在另一种文化中，用不同的方式来表达事情。进入另一种文化，然后再回到我的生活中来，这让人耳目一新。"

戴维斯对语言的严格使用在谈话中体现出来，她的小毛病也变得很明显：不理解语言或用自己的材料进行修饰的翻译，过度写作的作家，以及几乎任何不精确的迹象。她说："普鲁斯特并没有过度写作，"尽管他的那些句子很有名，长达数页。"他实际上是非常简洁的，只是他的主题太大，每个句子都必须包含这么多内容。" 但任何简单地堆砌短语的人都是在炫耀，"而我已经决定，傲慢是我最讨厌的东西"。她不相信同义词，如果一个词被误用，她会退缩。当我说有些故事就像 "小插曲 "时，她彻底解释了为什么这个词不合适--太珍贵、太法国、太静态。"这只是我不喜欢的一个词，"她笑着总结道。

其结果是一个迷人的奇怪的作品--混合了形式上的独创性和一个神经质的头脑的马达声。进入戴维斯的世界，有点像一次漫长的、独自的公路旅行：即使风景在变化，头脑也是导航的风景。偶尔她的故事感觉有点太熟悉，有点缺乏活力。但戴维斯的天赋是把平庸的东西变成出乎意料的东西，把我们对我们的日子的困惑的看法结晶化。里克-穆迪（Rick Moody）曾预言："她的故事将在几个世纪后被阅读"。随着《故事集》的出版，他更有可能是正确的。

"莉迪亚-戴维斯的故事集》（Farrar, Straus and Giroux），现已出版。

Emily Bobrow是《经济学人》的在线图书和艺术编辑，也是《智能生活》的特约编辑。她为《智能生活》撰写的上一篇作者简介是关于玛丽莲-罗宾逊的。

图片来源：Corbis



Gained in translation
Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2013: Lydia Davis is a writer’s writer with some distinguished fans. In 2009, she spoke to Emily Bobrow about language, precision and Proust

May 21st 2013

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By Emily Bobrow

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Autumn 2009

Lydia Davis is either revered or ignored. She has won many awards, yet her books rarely reach the uninitiated. She is more like a secret handshake, treasured among those in the know—writers, mostly. Rick Moody has called her “the best prose stylist in America”; Francine Prose has admitted to reading Davis “when I feel that I’m becoming too narrow, too rigid, too limited”. Introducing Davis at a reading some years ago, Dave Eggers suggested that many writers can’t help but try to copy her.

Yet a recent visit to the Strand bookstore in New York (“18 miles of books”, new and used) yielded nothing by Davis. A woman at the help desk explained: “Her work is rarely reissued, and the people who have her books tend to hold on to them.”


Davis should pick up more attention now, as Farrar, Straus and Giroux publishes “The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis”. Though she is only 62 and still writing, this book has a career-culminating formality. Weighing in at nearly 800 pages and drawn from the stories in “Break It Down” (1986), “Almost No Memory” (1997), “Samuel Johnson is Indignant” (2001) and “Varieties of Disturbance” (2007), “The Collected Stories” is the kind of backbreaker that shoves an author into the canon.

Davis has made her name refining and redefining short stories. Her writing is chiselled and precise; her characters are often unnamed and very self-conscious. She has an almost clinical way of handling the knots and frayed edges of an over-active mind, which makes reading her a little cathartic. Consider the narrator in the title story of “Break It Down”. “He’s sitting there staring at a piece of paper,” it begins. “He’s trying to break it down.” The story is at first restrained, with a man calculating the cost of a holiday. But soon it is clear that he is trying to itemise a love affair, to make sense of something that is gone. The sentences grow longer, the memories more intense:


…I was afraid to say it but I had to say it because I wanted her to know, it was the last night, I had to tell her then or I’d never have another chance, I just said, Before you go to sleep, I have to tell you before you go to sleep that I love you, and immediately, right away after, she said, I love you too, and it sounded to me as if she didn’t mean it, a little flat, but then it usually sounds a little flat when someone says, I love you too, because they’re just saying it back even if they do mean it, and the problem is that I’ll never know if she meant it, or maybe someday she’ll tell me whether she meant it or not, but there’s no way to know now, and I’m sorry I did that, it was a trap I didn’t mean to put her in, I can see it was a trap, because if she hadn’t said anything at all I know that would have hurt too…

He continues to break it down, and the affair continues not to add up. Davis’s language captures the disorder with a deadpan tidiness that is almost comic.

Many of her stories are extremely short: a paragraph or a punchline, suspended within a milky page. Like walnuts, they are palm-sized and complex, yet complete. “Almost Over: Separate Bedrooms”, a story from “Samuel Johnson is Indignant”, goes like this, in full: “They have moved into separate bedrooms now. That night she dreams she is holding him in her arms. He dreams he is having dinner with Ben Jonson.”

It is a wisp of a story, but poignant and funny. Her sentences have an unpretentious clarity that vibrates with careful choices. From the same collection, “A Double Negative”: “At a certain point in her life, she realizes it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not want to not have a child, or not to have had a child.” Davis distils the ambivalence of motherhood in two clean lines, like a logic problem or a word puzzle. Such austerity is easy to underestimate but hard to replicate.

To go and see Davis is to enter the deliberative minefield of her stories. At first she is not sure whether she wants to be interviewed. Her publisher gives the go-ahead but then reneges (“Lydia needs a little more time to think it over”). Her editor tries to be reassuring (“Lydia is a very deliberative person…You might have guessed that”). After she agrees to see me, she ponders which train I should take—“each has its advantages and disadvantages,” she writes. The voice of her many narrators comes through: cerebral, conscientious, slightly awkward.

We finally meet in Hudson, upstate New York, not far from where she lives with her husband, Alan Cote, an abstract painter. The station glows red in the midday sun, as if painted by Hopper. Davis picks me up and drives to a quaint tearoom nearby. “It shouldn’t be too noisy,” she says, sounding more apprehensive than confident.


In her work, she shies away from descriptive detail, but in person she is reassuringly unascetic. She has crystal blue eyes, dangly earrings and painted nails (albeit in a natural hue). She enjoys fruit smoothies and loves animals. Raised in New York City by two writers, she is clearly content with her quiet country life, far from the madding book parties. She and her husband live in an old brick schoolhouse, and Davis pulls a couple of pictures from her wallet. “Oh, these are the cows,” she laughs, offering a photo of two neighbouring cows in a field, silhouetted in dawn’s blue light.

Davis knew she would write at a young age—she was good, and family life was built around writing, reading and teaching. But she found the prospect burdensome, even unappealing: “I actually liked music better.” Playing the piano was instantly gratifying, unlike the struggle of storytelling, and she could happily practise for hours. But she knew she was no virtuoso (“I can hear every little thing that’s wrong”). Lessons in music theory—about structure and themes, analysis and practice—ended up helping her writing.

She was 13 when her eyes were opened by Beckett’s “Malone Dies” to the use of language in books. “The book was pretty much the opposite of all the entrancing stories I was reading. Here was a story in which nothing happened, virtually, and yet at the same time the language was so clear.”

After college she spent years sweating over short stories that never seemed to feel right. That changed when she read Russell Edson, an American prose poet. “When you try to make a story of your life, it’s a little too neat,” she says. But if she had to be neat about it, Edson’s writing exposed her to expressive little narratives, quite unlike the more traditional yarns she was trying to spin. His work “seemed to say you can do whatever you want. You can try all these different things and they might not work out but that’s ok.”

Her own writing became more experimental, shorter and more abstract. “An idea will occur to me, one that I find amusing, and I will spin it out to its logical conclusion, like working out a little problem,” she says. Her family and friends were slow to accept what she was doing. “They wanted me to write a different kind of thing. More what they were used to, more what they liked,” she says with a laugh. “Other people had to like it first for them to like it.”

Some of her early stories seem like efforts to smooth out a rough patch of life. Her subjects struggle with anxious loneliness or piece themselves back together after a failed marriage. “Writing has the satisfaction of forming something that feels complete,” Davis says. “It is not necessarily therapeutic. To write about a personally troubling situation you have to get a certain distance from it, because you’re using it to make something.” She says she does not remember all of her stories and rarely has reason to revisit older work. “When I do read it, it is as a writer.”

Ever since the late 1970s (and initially alongside her first husband, the novelist Paul Auster), Davis has also worked as a translator of French literature and philosophy. Her most famous work is her most recent: a 2003 translation of “Swann’s Way”, the first volume of Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past”. More restrained than C.K. Scott Moncrieff, it reveals Davis’s prejudices on the page. She considered each sentence a “little puzzle”, and strove to stay true to Proust’s sounds, rhythms and word choices. “What soars in this new version is the simplicity of language and fidelity to the cambers of Proust’s prose,” said Frank Wynne in the Irish Times, calling the translation “magnificent, precise”.


Davis was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government, and received a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” grant for showing “how language itself can entertain, how all that what one word says, and leaves unsaid, can hold a reader’s interest”. The award has enabled her to concentrate on her fiction for the first time in 30 years. Now on leave from her position as associate professor at the University of Albany, she still teaches special creative-writing seminars around the country.

“Translating makes me much more acutely aware of shades of meaning,” she explains. “You have a set problem and you can’t get around it by avoiding it. You have to pick just the right word.” So when the chance came to translate Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary”, she seized it. She is now slogging away, four or five hours a day, to finish the job by the end of the year.

“I keep learning new words,” she says, giddily. “I also like being immersed in another culture, and a different way of saying things. It’s refreshing to go into that other culture and then come back into my life.”

Davis’s exacting use of language comes through in conversation, and her pet peeves become plain: translators who don’t understand language or who embellish with their own material, writers who overwrite, and nearly any sign of imprecision. “Proust is not overwriting,” she says, despite those sentences that famously run on for pages. “He’s actually very concise, it’s just that his subject is so large, and each sentence has to contain so much.” But anyone who simply piles on phrases is showing off, “and I’ve decided that arrogance is the thing that I hate the most”. She doesn’t believe in synonyms and flinches if a word is misapplied. When I say that some stories are like “vignettes”, she gives a thorough explanation of why the word is unsuitable—too precious, too French, too static. “It’s just one of the words I don’t like,” she concludes with a little laugh.

The result is a charmingly strange body of work—one that mixes formal ingenuity with the motor-drone of a neurotic mind. Entering Davis’s world is a bit like making a long, solo road-trip: the head is the navigated landscape even as the scenery changes. Occasionally her stories feel a bit too familiar, a bit lacking in juice. But Davis’s gift is for nudging the banal into something unexpected, for crystalising our confused perception of our days. “Her stories will be read down the centuries,” Rick Moody has predicted. With the publication of “The Collected Stories”, he has a greater chance of being right.

"The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), out now

Emily Bobrow is online books and arts editor at The Economist and a contributing editor to Intelligent Life. Her last author profile for Intelligent Life was of Marilynne Robinson

Picture credit: Corbis