 Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Zebart Lecture 2022. My name is Duncan Large, and I'm the Academic Director of the British Centre for Literary Translation, which is based at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. VCLT is a research centre in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at UEA, and we organise a busy programme of research seminars, translation workshops, translator residencies, book barges, panel discussions and other events, many of which in recent years have been online, so you can find recordings on our VCLT YouTube channel. Each summer we organise the VCLT International Literary Translation and Creative Writing Summer School, and in the first half of each year we organise this lecture in honour of our founder, my illustrious predecessor, WG Zebart. Max Zebart was Professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia, and set up VCLT in 1989. He was a German writer who opted to live in the UK and continue writing in German. His novels and essays established him as a leading writer of the 20th century, before his untimely death in 2001. We are able to bring the Zebart Lecture to you again this year free of charge thanks to the sponsorship of Arts Council England through our continuing core partnership with the National Centre for Writing in Norwich. As ever, we're also immensely grateful to the British Library for their support and expertise. This is now the third year running that the Zebart Lecture has taken digital form. We look forward to hosting the lecture in person again before too long, but in the meantime we can enjoy the advantages that the online format brings and reach out to a truly global audience. Once again then, wherever you are and indeed whenever you are, in whichever perhaps far-flung time zone, welcome. This afternoon it's my great pleasure and honour to introduce to you this year's Zebart Lecturer, Lydia Davis. Professor Emerita of Creative Writing at the State University of New York, Albany. Lydia Davis is one of our finest and most distinguished contemporary writers. She's the author of a novel, The End of the Story 1995, and several volumes of stories, including Varieties of Disturbance 2007, a National Book Award finalist, and most recently Can't and Won't 2014, A New York Times Bestseller. Some of the many stories Lydia Davis has written have been translations, predominantly from the French. She's translated works by writers including Maurice Blanchot, Michel Dutard, Michel de Foucault, Pierre-Jean Jouve, Michel Lérys, and the Belgian novelist Conrad de Trez. But she's best known for her translations of Marcel Proust's Swan's Way, published in 2002 as the first volume in the new Penguin Proust, and Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary 2010. In 1999, Davis was named a chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Government for her fiction and translations. In 2003, she received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the French American Foundation Translation Prize. In 2013, she was awarded an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award of Merit Medal and the Manbocca International Prize. Over the last decade, Lydia Davis has continued to diversify her literary output, publishing a new updated version of the children's classic Bob, Son of Battle, The Last Gray Dog of Kenyore by Alfred Ollivant in 2014, and a volume of translations from the Dutch of Short Stories by A. L. Snyder's Grasses and Trees 2016. She's also published two sizable non-fiction collections, Essays One 2019 and Essays Two 2021, the latter devoted primarily to her reflections on translation and language learning. So it seemed a highly opportune moment to invite Lydia Davis to reflect over her distinguished career as a translator for this year's Zebra Lecture. She will be doing so in conversation with my colleague Dr. Philip Wilson, who is lecturer in philosophy at UVA and has a particular interest in translation. Philip's monograph Translation After Wittgenstein was published by Routledge in 2016. Since then, he's co-edited the Routledge Handbook of Translation and Philosophy 2019 and his most recent publication is a volume of translations of the poetry of Karl Marx, Evening Hour, which came out from ARC publications just a few weeks ago. In a moment, I'll hand over to Philip in Norwich and Lydia in Upstate New York. I'll then return to your screens in roughly 45 minutes to host a question and answer session with Lydia Davis. We'll try to take as many questions as possible, but given the size of our audience, I hope you'll appreciate that we may have to be quite selective. If you would like to put a question, then I invite you to use the question box below the video on your screens, which will be live throughout the lecture. The lecture will also have live captions and you can access those by clicking the Enable Captions button. For now, though, let me hand over to Philip Wilson and Lydia Davis for the Zubat Lecture 2022. Hello, there, Lydia. It's great to see you. And I was thinking on my way to this meeting how during the Christmas vacation, I was sitting in a really lovely cafe in Norwich and I was drinking a cup of tea and I had a gigantic piece of chocolate cake and I was reading this book and I thought to myself, yeah, this is pretty good. I like this. So it's great. I wanted to meet you today and to be able to discuss your work and in literature and in translation. Now again, speaking of this book Essays 2, which is obviously the companion volume 2, Essays 1, what's drawn you to the essay as a literary form? Well, first I have to ask if the chocolate cake wasn't better than the book, really, in all honesty. I would like to have both the book and the chocolate cake. Perfect. I would say that the essays in both Essays 1 and 2 all pretty much came about by chance or by occasion or accidentally rather than my being drawn to the essay form. It's a little deceptive to see them all gathered like that. Essays 1 appeared three years ago at the end of 2019 and Essays 2 appeared more recently last year. So you see them all gathered together and they're rather thick books and you think, aha, she's writing essays now, but it's not really that way. I would occasionally write talk or a preface or an article and sometimes I had to write an introduction, say to a book I'd translated and I say had to because those were the most difficult. Those were the most academic and I'm not really an academic. I pretend academic occasionally, but I really started as a story writer and so I'm writing out of my interest in form and literature and writing, but I don't have deep training. I don't have higher degrees and so that's really my answer. I'm drawn to the essay when I need to write one or choose to write one, but that's always a departure from stories I suppose. Thank you very much and one essay that stood out for me was the final one because that's somewhat different from the others. The other essays are really about literature and translation, but you end with an essay about the city of Arle and I really liked it for its sense of place. What made you want to write it and what were the influences on you as you wrote this essay? Well, I should say first I'm a compulsive writer in the sense that I'm always writing about anything that interests me. So whether it's climate or environment or or aunts or my children, my family, whatever strikes me as interesting I write about. So I was in Arle, I carry around a little travel notebook about four or five inches high and I had been I guess working on recycling back at home or thinking about it and it began to strike me how the inner city, the old city of Arle, which is quite extensive and sort of self-contained. It's contained by the river and the height, the old city is high up and so it's got cliffs dropping down from it. And I began realizing that I don't know who was wonderfully behind the idea of not tearing down and building new, but the habit in the old city was to reuse. So the buildings as long as they were sound just stayed there and were repurposed for an art gallery, a grocery store. There was one I haven't figured out yet that is a carpentry shop, but you can tell from the stone facade and the ornamentation that it was certainly something very different in the old days. I cannot find out what it was. So I became obsessed by this idea and wrote and wrote and wrote and we were there only a week, but the city is really a wonderful city and we were there in November so what dominated was not tourist groups, but really more the life of the old city and it continues to have a real day-to-day life. Schools and businesses, shops all taking place within mostly the old buildings. And then when I got back home it was winter and what often happens to me in the winter is that I get very engrossed in some study or some project. So I just started reading more and more and more about oral and there's a great deal you can find out online and I even joined. I'd found many useful, very sort of dry technical articles, but very useful in the publications of the so-called Friends of Old Arles. Les Amis du Vieux Arles. So I joined their organization and I just spent all winter researching Arles. So there's a great deal more than what you see in the book. Many, many, many pages of notes and I hope someday to write a lot more about Arles or you know revise those notes and make something quite a bit longer. And when you ask about influences for form, the only work that came to mind was a work published back in the 70s by Kenneth Gangemi or Gangemi, I'm not sure how you say his name, called Volcanoes from Puebla about living in Mexico when he was young, younger. Which he wrote in alphabetical form. So when you ask about influences, I think you mean formally, formal influences. And so his entries were a sectional a's and a section b's and that's how he chose to record his experiences there. And I can say more about the fragment but I've already gone on and on about Arles. Okay that's brilliant and then maybe move on to the fact that the other a's in the volume obviously are about literature and translation. Now obviously you are a writer of fiction and you are a translator. Do you see yourself as having two different identities as writer and translator or do you see this more as a unity? Well it's a unity with two sides. I guess the easiest way to generalize the difference is that when I'm writing fiction I really am, even if I'm writing that's close to my life or which seems very autobiographical. I'm writing in a voice that isn't the voice I'm speaking to you now, it's an assumed voice. It's either the voice of a character or an exaggeration of some part of myself. So when I'm speaking, when I'm writing an essay or an introduction or talk, it is in my own voice. I would actually say the oral piece though might be a good example of me fading in and out or we're actually not writing in my own voice but assuming the voice of a woman who's touring oral you know it's even though I was there touring there's something about the artificiality of the construction of it that removes it from me personally. So it's the same person but different sides you know. I was very interested in some of the point that you make that translation is clearly always a work in progress even the fact that you know you've made changes between for example if I remember rightly you made changes between the British and the UK and the USA editions or between the paperback and the hardback and we've got a little bit more about this you know is translation ever finished in that sense? Well I think a lot about especially when I'm when I'm asking questions to myself I think the answer often comes back to time constraints strangely because there are many things I don't do because I run out of time like I may never finish the oral or go on with the oral because something else distracts and when it comes to translation I think all of us who did the Proust the multi-volume multi-translator Proust, Penguin Proust for the UK originally all of us wanted to make revisions for the paperback edition but in fact we were we were allowed only the most necessary revisions in other words to correct the actual mistakes that sort of thing so we and we all objected but you know there again there's an outside force but then when it went over into an American edition the American editor did not mind and I made 1500 changes from the UK edition to the American edition and that was not because I made 1500 horrible mistakes in translation it was really just the sort of thing any writer wants to change after some time goes by you know and again time constraints sometimes mean you never reread what you wrote you just don't have time you're going on to the next thing but if you do reread it you say oh that comma should come out or that word repeated you know one to once repeated I don't like that and you would make so 1500 isn't so much when you think about a 400 and something page book so it might be three changes on the page no writer would find that odd so I made those many changes and then even from the hardcover to the paperback in the American edition I made more changes it doesn't always necessarily mean it gets better sometimes you overthink something and it gets worse but I think on the whole it got better and it's also not something a reader would necessarily notice but the writer does notice um so actually I I brought out I was looking at my translation pages my I have folders and folders of stuff on translation so there's one page that is a pretty good example of a change that interested me greatly but may not even be an improvement and that's in a proust passage I think I'll read a read not the whole paragraph because it's a very long paragraph but it's it's about the narrator waiting to to see his aunt and his great aunt and waiting in a in in her sort of parlor and I'd like to read down to where I made the change I guess that is either a good change or a bad change the air was saturated with the finest flower of a silent so nourishing so succulent that I could move through it only with a sort of greed especially on those first mornings of Easter week still cold when I tasted it more keenly because I had only just arrived in Compré before I went in to say good morning to my aunt they made me wait for a moment in the first room where the sun still wintry had come to warm itself before the fire already lit between the two bricks and coating the whole room with an odor of soot having the same effect as one of those great country front of the ovens or one of those chateau mantle pieces beneath which one sits hoping that outdoors there will be an onset of rain snow even some catastrophic deluge so as to add the company comfort of reclusion the poetry of hibernation so I made I made several changes one was to take out because I got slightly obsessed with seeing how close I could get to the original proofs without and and still having it be good readable English so I took out a couple of commas you can you can say so as to add comma to the comfort of reclusion comma the poetry of hibernation and I thought I could get away with just taking them out so as to add to the comfort of reclusion the poetry of hibernation you can't really hear the difference but out they go and instead of catastrophic deluge which is fine I wanted to see if I could reproduce the French which is which which was I think it was catastrophic deluvian and so I changed it to even okay rain snow even some diluvial catastrophe or diluvian catastrophe I can't remember which I chose because they're it's scribbled in the margin here so you might say diluvian catastrophe is just not as vivid as catastrophic deluge but it gave me great pleasure so that's an example it's either better or or it's not thank you very much and now in terms of changes you know Alan the bottom has famously claimed that reading proofs can change your life I mean do you think he's right and can it actually change our life in translation as well do you mean when when translating proofs is that what you mean I think it can be taken two ways that and that's only one way I'd be interested in I mean has has proofs changed your life I suppose I'm asking translating proofs it it's what it what it did was because because I was so I won't say in awe of proofs because that might have paralyzed me completely but because it was definitely the most important I don't know any any choice I make seems not quite right but most important translation I can certainly say it's the height of you know if you've been translating for however many years I had been by then it's certainly a height of or the height of your translation work so the the difference was that I took infinite pains with it so I had been always a careful translator but um there was there's certain books that you you don't have to work as hard at or you some some books are even written so badly that you actually have to read work harder to make sense of them and translate them but this one was the one I had to pay the closest attention and take the most care over for sure and also not you know in my in my early days of translating I had to think a little bit about actually earning a living in which case you can't take you can't go infinitely slowly with the proofs I I had income from teaching and I hadn't income from other sources to some extent so I just said I'm taking all the time I need on this and so it changed my translating life radically that way and it was it was really great I really enjoyed being able to spend you know an hour on one word and look up the French etymologies as well as the English etymologies um it it didn't and it just it it required me to get to know that book very very well I had not read the whole book before um believe it or not I had read most of it in French years ago and for some reason even without having finished the book I I it made a very deep impression on me but this one I had to get to know very well because I was translating it translating is it sort of puts you up against the text inescapably you cannot as a reader you can skip you can skip over things you can say well I don't quite get that but I'm tired and go on reading of course you can't do that when you're the translator what what Proust I mean people often say that they'll have an experience in their lives and and say that's just like Proust or something and so I had to figure that out why you know many novels present interesting moments or feelings or scenes but you don't say oh that's just like Virginia Woolf I don't think you usually do that but many people say that's just like Proust and I think it's because he goes so deeply into something like say the grandmother's love of old things or things that were represented she would try to give a photograph of an etching of a scene or she liked multiple reproductions of something artwork so I think he goes deeply into each of those things each of those moments more deeply or extensively than other writers so I do often think of the grandmother also if I go out in the yard and take my time coming back looking at each plant on the way in because that's another thing the grandmother would do she would be eager to go see was it who's at the gate because she liked to go and take another look at her roses and her this and that so again it's a that's a long answer but a very interesting one and of course you've then gone on to translate Flo Bear now both Flo Bear and Proust have been translated before into English obviously you know we could fill my room with translations of Flo Bear and Proust how did that impact your work as a translator the fact that there have been so many translations before you Well actually in the case of the Proust although there were two revisions of Scott Montcrieve's translation his his remained basically the one that everyone read either the original or in revision so that was one case and the Flo Bear monobovary I kept collecting editions or translations and kept finding others and there by the time I was done I guess I had accumulated about 21 translations of monobovary so the cases were very different because people who discovered Proust and that is you know everybody who discovered what they were calling remembrance of things past discovered it in Scott Montcrieve's translation and so and that had endured I'm forgetting my numbers now but maybe 60 80 years a long time so for English readers that was Proust absolutely in Scott Montcrieve's style so when mine and the other Penguin translations came along people I got both reactions one was one was people who were relieved and said now at last I can read I can read and understand Proust I'm not all tangled up in the syntax and and it wasn't because I simplified the syntax obviously it was it was because I was not writing in the flowery Edwardian style of Scott Montcrieve and I could I could go on and on and on and on about about that translation because anyway I won't go on and on about it yet but so I got that reaction but then I also got the negative one that this is not Proust and people would say this very firmly and it wasn't Proust because it wasn't Scott Montcrieve I was I have mine is actually much closer to Proust and simpler and cleaner his his was not fussy his his original was not fussy and I'll just give I'll just give one example that he wrote the phrase the entrance to the underworld which is what I wrote in English but Scott Montcrieve wrote the jaws of hell which is very different hell is not the same as the underworld and jaws is introducing a very dramatic metaphor that is not in Proust he just says entrance and this goes throughout throughout the book and the revisions make make changes that had to be made but don't change that basic character of the translation so there's that example and I should answer your question more generally by saying there is a great deal more pressure if you're translating a classic um if you're translating say my early translations were novels by Blancheau Maurice Blancheau so people didn't know them at all they hardly knew Blancheau unless they read French so I'm introducing a brand new brand new work to people um but translating Proust and Flaubert I'm not introducing new work I'm I'm going to be scrutinized by critics and reviewers and teachers professors and and I also thought about classrooms you know I I want to make this reveal as much of the French as I can for the sake of students who are reading it in English I mean that wasn't a primary motivation but it was a thought that would go through my head and so in the case of Madame Bovary 20 other translations people are used to it being translated over and over in some sense although there was a favorite I'm going to forget the names but if Stig Muller I didn't that's the favorite translation in America and I think Gerard Hopkins was the favorite translation Madame Bovary in England but um so it's a little different from the case of Proust um I think I think that kind of covers a lot of it I did I I'll just add that I did not I I did not look at previous translations until the second draft and that was very important to me to do my own draft without looking so that I wouldn't get their choices in my head and then for the second draft and after that I would look and compare oh that's really interesting and one essay a couple actually a couple of essays on this with um you know obviously we're very used to people translating from French or German Spanish to English etc but um you've actually been involved in translating English to English if I put it like that because you've been working on you've had this translation of Alfred Oliver and could you tell us a little bit about this well you know why you wanted to do it and how you proceeded and you know what the text was that you you know why you thought it needed translating if that's the right word yeah that that's a very um hard choice of words if you're translating something written in English um I think I might have ended up saying version you know I had to put something on the cover in a new version by Lydia Davis or something this was Bob's son of battle um I can ask you did you ever encounter that as double white or earlier in your life I have to say completely miss miss now I haven't come across it but I'll do something I will never forget the image you you use of the sheepdogs who go to London with their masters and then go back by themselves staying in bed and breakfast that's been paid for in a bus that that will stay with me forever I thought that was superb I know there again if I'd had the time and another lifetime the notes that I wanted to write about what I learned doing that research was extraordinary um yeah that the shepherd would have paid on the way down at the various ends for his dog's keep on the way home so he would go to London with his sheep and stay with the sheep the dog would go back home and stop at the ends to be fed and to sleep and it's just amazingly what you learn oh and also the drovers who took the animals the flocks or the herds down to London to the markets were um were very respected people and rich families would send their son for example down to London with the drover the drover would accompany the son down to the city he was respected as a sort of I don't know someone watching out for the lad I guess to deliver him to his family down there so and so I'll get to get to what what motivated me I had read this book as it as a youngster and I was profoundly moved by it's it's an amazing story about sheep dogs and and sort of the good and evil the good master and the evil master of the of the of the dogs I can't explain the whole plot now but it was it was very deeply touching to me and after I grew up I I I never noticed people talking about it or or people having read it and I felt that this was was a terrible loss so I had this idea it that the book is filled with very thick dialect in the in the speeches in the dialogue um not only words that we might recognize from uh from the secret garden like naut no wt for nothing or just from your neighbors I don't know if that's still used but also just completely un unimaginable obscure words that he wouldn't recognize so I thought well if I sort of translate it into plain English um maybe the book will be readable again and and kids will will read it um but then I got into all kinds of questions you know I started not only changing the dialect but also trying to make the prose narrative narration a little easier some of some of the narration I thought was way above the heads of of 10 or 12 year olds now and then it was a you know then it was the problem of synonyms in English and there aren't any synonyms in other words melancholy is not the same as sad or gloomy or anything else so that became a problem and will the kids understand gloomy if they don't understand melancholy and I chide myself up in knots over this and began to think that project was really misguided which it probably was but I did finish it and publish it so um I think it may have been may have been of some use I guess if it took if it took the book to even a few kids who wouldn't have read it then then I guess it was worth it do this is the way that translation might start to move you know we would be translating Jane Austen into modern English I mean in some ways people already do with you know films and things like that but um what what do you think well I don't know I I would have to I mean I've I reread Jane Austen pretty regularly but I don't remember her English being terribly difficult but I may be wrong about that um I did try the same experiment with Lawrence Stern a sentimental journey I thought here's a kind of delightfully you know quirky and an eccentric piece of writing which it really is a very modern you know in a way but um nobody's reading it because it's it's a little too difficult or too old you know Englishy I don't know I just thought well let's see if I can modernize that but I I mean that not because I'm rejecting the way he wrote it all and I'm actually hoping that um an easy version would take people back to to the original but I had the same problem there and I was not going to do the whole book I was just doing a chapter to see what would happen um but um I actually shouldn't say chapter because I think the chapters are tiny that's one of the eccentricities some of the chapters are just a paragraph anyway um I ran into the same problem which is a lot of the delight of the book is in the very things that are are going to seem difficult to a reader now either the punctuation he has longer hyphens or triple hyphens or um it and it it's it's you have to just go with what he wrote and figure it out for yourself and that's what that's what I ended up thinking about Bob's son of battle that kids don't mind this was the horrible thing that I realized when I had labored over this so long the kids don't mind having things they don't understand and they even like the dialogue dialogue dialect dialect dialogue that they can't understand and they just sort of roll it around in their mouths and don't know what it means they don't mind at least lots of kids some kids and um then someone pointed out to me which really clenched it kids are surrounded you know say a 10 year old 8 year old is surrounded all the time by language they don't understand things grown-ups are saying that they don't understand and they're they're just used to it so a real reader probably wouldn't have any trouble with that book so um I guess the other example of in in the in my book of essays the the other example I talk about translating from English to English is converting an ancestor's memoir into a long poem and that's different but there I'm not experiencing frustration I am learning about line breaks that was the main thing I was learning about because I'm not a poet and in that sense and so I had to really learn how do you take a paragraph of prose and create line breaks that makes sense and I'm happy with that whole project again that's not finished either in other words I there's oh I want to do his entire memoir as the pawn and I love it because he writes very beautifully and so what I'm doing is isolating the the beauty of his writing so it's not lost in in a paragraph that has other things in it that are not interesting or not beautiful um so I'm not converting every word into this poem but selecting well we've talked about the fact that you you translate English to English but um you in there are also essays on translating languages that you don't know because it's usually regarded as a given that um you translate a language that you know um but um I think for example you've been translating from Dutch um in um what made you translate you know what what brought you to this practice of translating languages that um you actually don't know can you can you tell us a bit more about this and what you've gained from it well it's probably an outcome of of three compulsions when I say I'm a compulsive writer and and so even emails get too long or or I'm doing minutes of a committee I'm on they get too long so because I'm I'm not writing other things at the moment so writing writing so that's one compulsion another is just this interest in foreign languages and trying to decipher what I'm hearing um in a in another country um trying to learn uh what what another language is saying so that's another compulsion and then I think translating itself is another compulsion it's it's very hard for me not to want to translate something if I understand it and I like it and this happened in the last few years I did decide not to translate any long works anymore and that that that probably ended with the flow there um that long that was the last long work I think I'll ever translate but I did I did get very interested in two writers one Dutch and one German who were writing very short stories so the Dutch writers Al Snyders who died almost a year ago last year um who writes stories a page or page and a half the German these are actually the Swiss Swiss writers is Peter Bichsel who also writes very short stories and I really love both of of those writers and so again the compulsion to understand the compulsion to translate and the compulsion to write drove me to to tackle translating those so I have done New Directions has a collection of the Snyders stories the Dutch writer um it's called Night Train done a year or two ago I can't remember now or longer and um I haven't translated a collection of the Peter Bichsel stories but they've appeared in magazines so I already knew German to some extent and and Bichsel's German is not not difficult this was important I have to say when you ask about translating from languages you don't really know well um there are many things I could not translate or wouldn't even try but both these writers deal with uh they their subject is concrete um often every day so the vocabulary is limited to words I really do know and um and sentence structures that are not not difficult for me I didn't find Dutch difficult because I already had some German and um if you have German in English and even French helps because the Dutch borrow from French so it really is not not too difficult depending on the text what you what you lose if you don't know the language really well and the culture well what you might lose are subtle echoes um that that are coming into the prose that you don't recognize because you haven't read the the did the literature in Dutch or you haven't read the Bible in Dutch so you're not going to catch certain things I tried to make sure I wasn't missing anything by having Dutch readers read the stories um my translations and be sure that I was 100 percent correct you know in all those ways so I think that's it can work it wouldn't work with something like Japanese although I've I've tried to decipher say Chinese characters you know it's the compulsion to try to learn is there even if the language is completely difficult I would like to ask you if you think that translation can be translations clearly a practice is a skill but can it be taught do you think or is it one that we have to learn um I think it can aspects of it can be taught that would be the my same the same answer I would give for for writing can writing be taught so you know certain aspects technical skills can be taught um if if there isn't a great desire to translate or a great desire to embrace another language um you can't do much about that but you can um I mean the most important skill in translating I think but people would argue with me is is to be a good writer and the better writer the better your translation can be um you can learn more about the culture you can learn you know you can have people check check your work and so on but if you don't write well it's pretty hopeless and um because you can be a very profoundly well educated and skilled critic of French literature um and a brilliant teacher but if you don't write well no matter how qualified you are in those other ways I don't think you'll you'll produce a good translation I could be wrong um so I think you can teach writing skills to a student of translation um you can teach approaches you know my own approach as I've said some of the essays is not to read the whole book first um I won't go into that at the moment but um you can you know I would never dictate to a student how to go about it necessarily I would offer several different ways and see temperamentally what what they felt most comfortable with um so anyway yeah you can teach a lot a lot of the skills or thinking about translation but you you know then there's there's a limit you can't make them into brilliant translators thank you very much and um what are you actually what are you working on now in terms of literature or translation or both well I've gotten sidetracked by climate change um which doesn't mean I'm going to stop writing because that's not going to happen but um I'm doing a lot of work within my community to try to make at least our tiny village more sustainable and um to try to help us think differently about things like extensive lawns and pesticides and herbicides and some of the basics because that seems to me very very urgent now so I'm finding it it would be hard for me just to spend all my day translating another classic and ignore this huge problem um what I actually will will be working on as soon as I can stop getting so obsessed by by this other activity what I want to go back to is I have a whole fact folder of of stories that should go into a new volume of stories um so I really the the work involved is not going to be extensive I you know the the stories are there like they're probably only one or two I want to finish right so that that's my next literary project yeah and do you think we will see sas3 one day well as I said one of my great interests really is the environment and I have written some short pieces about you know how do you you know something like the untidy garden because the untidy garden is what is best for the creatures the little insects um the tidy garden is what people seem to still demand how do you have an attractive garden that's untidy so I have written an essay about that an essay about wildflowers that come up so if there's going to be another book of nonfiction I think it will be that sort of essay but also um probably memoir because I have that's another sort of category I haven't broached yet I I haven't collected yet I shouldn't say I have a number of small pieces of memoir and um I will eventually want to bring them together well let's not say that sounds very intriguing um we'll bring things to a close then and um I when I was really um looking back at your preface uh two essays to one essays two the other day um I was again I was uh very taken with uh a phrase you used um you know how in french people are very fond of saying things like bonnet good year well I guess we would say happy new year bonnie fair good winter um let's greet the winter however you want to translate that and you had been in a restaurant and you saw that you heard this phrase bon continuacion good continuation and that's what I'd like to wish you then uh good continuation in your work and thank you so much for giving us uh your time and for the for your very generous responses thank you thank you very much it's a pleasure and now we're going to go to a question and answer session which will be chaired by my colleague duncan large thank you very much for listening thank you philip thank you lydia what a fascinating discussion I'm sure there is plenty there which are our audience will want to respond to so uh do please put your questions in the question box and they will come through and I will put them now to lydia um we have some questions coming through already can I uh perhaps start by asking a question from ross Schwartz thank you ross for your question and ross says thank you very much for your insights when you were working on proust was there much communication between the translators working on the different volumes were you working simultaneously good question at first I thought you were you were going to ask if there was communication between me and the author proust um there was um there was quite a lot of emailing back and forth but um it was a little frustrating that we did not we tended to email intensively about terms like what should the slow train the milk train be called um or should we keep due conduct just in french or translate them into english and less of the sort of conversation you'd love to have with people equally immersed in proust you know larger questions about um no about what what about his syntax even you know or you know I don't know that any number of interesting questions that the trouble again was time I think um I think most of most of the translators I I wasn't teaching at the moment but I think most of them were active you know full-time professors at university and I don't think they were taking much time off to do this they were trying to do it in when they could or you know I don't know exactly but I think there just wasn't time again you know if if we'd all been able to get together for six months at some wonderful retreat in france but we would have had a ball you know talking about um the translation problems and proust himself but but in fact there wasn't you know it it was sort of back down to practicalities and necessities you know and were you being given uh much of a steer by the series editor by Christopher Pendergast we were given a pretty free hand um uh you know aside from some of these things we had to agree on for consistency and that was interesting because um you know it is nice to be given a free hand but also because we were all trying to stay pretty close to proust we all seem to be approaching the text with the same attitude um that the the the translations were not all that different in in a in approach you know they weren't wildly different um I'm not I'm not as good a judge of that as someone reading the whole book cover to cover you know all seven books of the whole book but um I think the constraint of staying closer to proust than the previous version really kept us um enough in line thank you um we have a question from Becky Lehmann this time about Flaubert about your translation of Madame Bouverie and Becky asks if a text has already been translated into English many times such as Madame Bouverie why might a publisher decide to commission a new translation um perhaps you might want to answer that from your own perspective of how you came to to translate Madame Bouverie to re-translate Madame Bouverie well sometimes it's just as simple as a publisher saying we want our own translation of Madame Bouverie it's not sort of there needs to be another one but we want you know whatever the publisher might be we want our translation and um it's surprising for me you know I I didn't I read enough of all the other translations of Madame Bouverie to see that there was really was a great difference from one to another um you know I think one of the earliest was by Karl Marx's daughter Eleanor Marx Aveling way back when and um so up through the decades the styles were different the um and then English to American is is is a difference and and I now believe that there should be a same of my Madame Bouverie there should have been an English edition of of my American translation because there are things like which I didn't wasn't really conscious of but um my translation sidewalk was jarring to an English reader who wanted pavement and it's it's truly jarring and now I sympathize and understand but I couldn't really translate my American version with pavement so I really think you know there should be a British edition of an American translation but all this is just to say all these different translations American and English through the decades of Madame Bouverie were were different and they had their different merits so I think it's just fine to keep having more I don't know if it's profitable there's certain competition but for money but for audience but why not no you mentioned in your discussion um with Philip that your aim was to in translating of course to reveal as much of the French as I can for students of English you said and I wondered whether to what extent that is a a priority for you among all the other priorities as a as a translator particularly when you're working with um with canonical texts like the the proofstand the flow there which are likely to be set for study in schools in universities and so on well yeah my my my um hope was magically to allow someone to look right through the English and see the French without the English sounding French so it's sort of an impossible impossible situation but for example in a very simple case of you know some translators feel it's it doesn't really matter if you start the sentence the same way and end at the same way as the original you can recast the sentence and use a different syntax set it up differently but I felt it was important to open with this word and or this phrase and close with that phrase um something I was going to say about the Madame Bovary but I can't remember it now um anyway that was fabulous so that was that was important to me yeah oh I know what I was I know what I was going to say when I first read Madame Bovary I was in my early 20s and I don't even know which translation it was because I didn't write down the name of the translator it did write down the name of the book in my journal but I didn't write down the translator ignorant naive as it was um but I I was puzzled because I had heard so much about Flaubert's famous style and I didn't see anything particularly interesting about the style now I understand better what what's interesting about the style but I don't think it was reproduced in the translation I read so that's a better example of trying to have it there for a student to study here is his style which often consisted of a sentence with lots of semicolons for example and you mentioned that um you only looked at earlier translations once you had your your first draft um would you say then that your translation style particularly uh with the the Flaubert uh was um would it have been any um would you have translated the way you did even if there had not been uh earlier translations then um if you're retranslating if you're translating a canonical text on which there are plenty of earlier translations does that affect how you approach the text how you approach the translation of the text um no I think actually it's an interesting point but I think my translation would have been the same if there'd been no previous translations I think what I was hoping to find when I looked at previous translations was either a that I had made a mistake so I can correct a mistake or um or that they had found a better way to phrase something here's a difficult you know I want it to be close to the French but it sounds rocky in English my English is there a better way it just didn't work um I don't think I caught very many mistakes I couldn't I can't believe I didn't catch any but um but their approach would be so different than the the phrasing it would their phrasing would not help me for my phrasing and um I certainly caught their mistakes and their mistakes were usually a result of jumping to a conclusion when there wasn't when it wasn't spelled out in the original they would make an assumption so like at the at the scene of the ball in Madame Bovary the the women were carrying little gold stopper flasks and and and um Flaubert doesn't say why or what was in these flasks um some of the translators jumped to the conclusion that it was perfume but it wasn't perfume so they would write out you know flasks of perfume so I would not do that because if he just says flasks I would just say flasks but I then I also did my research and looked at earlier drafts and what they were in earlier drafts he had specified they were carrying flasks of vinegar and the reason was that if they felt faint in the hot ballroom they would sniff their vinegar and vinegar occurs a few other times in the book as a revival reviving substance so there's where you make a mistake if you make an assumption jump to a conclusion and put in your assumption in the translation so that was sort of fun to discover those things thank you um again in your in your conversation with Philip you talked about the the difference um when you were translating the the post that you you had more time and you you had the time to really uh immerse yourself in in post style and um I wonder whether because and in your essays about translating post in essays too um you go into such wonderful detail about the choices that you made and make as a translator particularly when translating post and I wonder whether um therefore it would be be fair to say that you're almost translating post like like poetry and whether that distinction that generic distinction really has any great traction for you because I know that uh for example your own um short short stories have been included in um collections of the best American poetry and you write also and you talked about this with Philip about translating um the memoir um by Sydney Books is our village translating it into verse form and you seem to move very easily between these forms and I wonder if therefore those kind of generic distinctions perhaps have less meaning for you as a writer and indeed as a translator well it's it's interesting to think about that because I guess I I sometimes work on the dividing line but it would be um very much a prose poetry rather than um I mean it's very it's very close to prose and I sometimes say I have a paragraph of prose that I'm calling a story that um the language will be heightened in a way that will suggest poetry but it's still prosaic it's still flat prose it's still sort of sometimes not lyrical and I won't say anti lyrical because I'm not against lyrical but it'll be flat a matter of fact um the what would differentiate the translating prose from translating poetry what one thing would be and I haven't I've done very little translation translating of poetry because um you really do usually have to recast you know the rules are quite different when it comes to poetry certainly some kinds of poetry most poetry so you can't just follow closely um the the the literal the literal original you really have to recreate it so that's one major difference I was working within a further constraint with The Proust I really wanted to stay I mean I admire it so so deeply the way it's written and so I wanted to reproduce that but in a in a very prose way maybe I had I had picked out a passage I wanted to read would this be a good moment to read it it may not be the the most beautiful you know passage it's just a it's just a passage that um that I like because of the complexity of the syntax so I think I think sometimes this complex syntax is funny because it's so complex I mean because it's so complex about a maybe a mundane subject so I will try to read this it's it's hard to read because of the construction and it's about it's about his aunt again who's a terrific comic figure of course and I think it is only two sentences but it's about 12 lines doubtless since my aunt's strength drained by the least fatigue returned to her only drop by drop deep within her repose the reservoir was very slow to fill up and months would go by before she had that slight overflow which others divert into activity in which she was incapable of knowing and deciding how to use I have no doubt that then just as the desire to replace them by potatoes with bechamel sauce ended after a certain time by being born from the very pleasure she felt at the daily return of the mashed potatoes of which she never quote got tired she would derive from the accumulation of those monotonous days which she valued so the expectation of some domestic cataclysm lasting only a moment but forcing her to bring about once and for all one of those changes which she recognized would be beneficial to her and to which she could not of her own accord make up her mind so I just love the complexity and the way he's he reverses the bechamel potatoes with bechamel sauce and the mashed potatoes and and he must have had such delight in composing these senses about about subjects which delighted him so that was the a great pleasure to translate wonderful thank you and I've taught your translation to students at the university of East Anglia and for me and your translation really demonstrates the how untrue it always was the claims that were made about Proust style and how it would be impossible to produce a close translation which would convey the intricacies of Proust style and yet work wonderfully well in English too and so I'm certainly grateful to you for for that wonderful translation which manages as you say to to let students see through your style to some of the intricacies of the original French as well but it takes time that's the problem with the economics of translation you know the translators often just have to work too quickly you know and that's not right in a scapegoat I guess a question from Jan asks you mentioned in your book as well that you don't finish reading the full book before starting to translate could you explain why and following up you differentiated beautifully between begin to sing and begin singing I'm curious why in your writing you didn't use the in form say deciphering instead of decipherment but perhaps the first point about not reading the full book before starting to translate perhaps if I could might you say a little bit more about that yeah sometimes I've had to again constrain by outside forces a publisher occasionally has said I need you to give a sort of praise to you or of the whole book but I don't like to and one of the main the main reason is really to keep my energy high my excitement high because if I've read the whole thing and know not only what happens in the book I mean you can know that anyway you know who doesn't know more or less what happens in the proof even though they haven't read it but also just page to page what's coming next what what conversation what scene what image so when you don't know yet it's it's it just keeps the excitement high and lively as if you're writing it yourself after all when you write something of your own you don't know what how it's going to evolve and you don't know how it's going to end or what turn of phrase you're going to come upon in the next page and your excitement is is higher if you knew you it would be boring you'd be copying out something that already existed so that's really the main reason I think I don't know if there's another reason so the whole rest of the book is an unknown I would I would read say sometimes a paragraph or a page ahead because then the advantage is that you have the context but of course the reason for another draft and a third draft or whatever is that then you have the context and if you need to make corrections and shifts of tone or whatever you can with the proofs it was so long and and so intense that even at a certain point I I wouldn't even read the sentence ahead and that was not because I thought that was a great way to translate it was just it was just I was intrigued by the way meaning enters your brain in other words when a person starts speaking you follow them word by word or phrase by phrase and the meaning gradually comes into your brain could you read the French sentence word by word and have how soon how much would you have to read for the meaning to start coming in in which case you can read write the English so I did that more just to amuse myself thank you I wonder if I could ask you to follow up on a point you made in your discussion with Philip about translating the Olivant about producing the new the new version the modernized version of the Olivant and you said that actually what a strong impression you had after doing this was that actually kids don't need so much explaining to them and that they kind of that they exist to some extent in a world of which they don't entirely comprehend and I was wondering then whether there's whether that also affects your the amount of information that you want to add or include in your translations for for other readers for adult readers whether you the extent to which you want in your translations to to explain or whether you miss footnotes if you're translating without the option of footnotes or sizable translations introductions and so on or whether you actually generally would prefer to leave leave some things unstated well generally the latter but it would be it would just depend on the text you know when it's an excellent piece of writing because I have in the past translated pieces of writing that were not excellent by any means but when it's excellent I want to respect exactly what was what was written that's why I wouldn't have said flasks of perfume or flasks of vinegar you know it's awfully tempting to throw in the vinegar because it's so interesting but I wouldn't I wouldn't so I wouldn't over explain there were other places in so bearable where an explanation would have been handy where the text was rather mysterious but what I what I did I did have the advantage of having notes which were in the back and notes I also thought it was very important not to have footnotes on the page because it was not an academically presented text I didn't want the reader to be distracted by apparatus that had not been in the in the original so there were notes were in the back with no indication on the page that they were there so that's not my problem if you if you don't want to deal with that but then I had a lovely opportunity to do all the explaining I wanted to in the back which was fun and it's in its own way because the full bear I'm going to get my dates all messed up here probably but say he's writing it in the 1850s and it said in the 1830s that might be approximately right there will be things he refers to or describes in the book that a contemporary reader at his his time would have understood perfectly as a snide reference to something and we don't understand it so when he when he describes Emma Bovery having coral on her mantle piece for example we think that's fine okay I like coral you know why not but he he knows that it's a bourgeois fashion and an affectation on her part she's copying a certain fashion so he's making a comment that we won't get but I would not insinuate a fellow translator called it a stealth explanation so you know slipping in a few words into the translation to to tell the reader what the coral really means on the mantle piece I would not do that if it's not in the original so I think that more or less answers your question about explaining thank you a couple of questions have come through about environmental issues Kath Drake from Australia I think asks please tell us more about your ideas on environmental essays what writing inspires you most in this area at the moment and perhaps a follow-up from Elizabeth Vassaman from Leeds here in the UK I'd like to thank Lydia for such a fascinating talk and ask if any of her upcoming short stories are going to discuss environmental issues well to try to answer in some kind of reasonable order I would not embed I mean it's an interesting problem I would not embed my environmental views explicitly or my environmental concerns explicitly in the clothing of a short story because I I simply haven't ever done that in other words write a short story or a story with an agenda meaning I want to convey this urgent message what rather happens is that my urgent feelings about things come through without my even planning it so I wrote quite a long story or whatever you would call it because it was not fictional about the cows that lived across the road from me and it was really just a series of very close observations of the clown cows whom whom I loved whom I loved watching um so I was not writing it with an agenda but I realized later my respect for the cows and my love of them and these were just three cows who were just allowed to live there um that that would come through perhaps and you know send that message of respect for animals or whatever so my concerns might come through in a story very naturally or I've written a few different little tiny stories about ants tiny because ants are tiny but not only that so my respect for the ants which is also genuine would come through perhaps in those stories um so my writing about the environment won't go into fiction explicitly intentionally it will go into non-fiction as I said the piece about the untidy gardens I think was even in the TLS that was a few years ago but that's going to become a real design problem people are really going to have to develop a whole new area of garden design that incorporates untidiness in fact on one of the garden show that is English whose name I'm forgetting at the moment one of his clients was actually planting a bed of weeds she had a beautifully manicured estate beautifully mown lawn all around this bed but she was deliberately planting weeds in the bed which I thought was fascinating but um um I don't read a lot of uh a lot of I guess Wendell Berry would be a good good one to read A. O. Wilson I've enjoyed reading I don't read a lot of well I also read W. H. Hudson who's I always thought of his English but he really isn't you know he moved to England um it's in the early 1920s I guess early 1900s but he was he was from American parents grew up in Argentina but then he moved to to um to England and he's a wonderfully close observer of nature um writing in a surprisingly kind of modern way now there's one other whose name I'm not going to remember but who's that's very recent he's a rock star or rock singer who wrote something called the most remarkable bird on the most astonishing creature is this ring any bells for you don't know it's um darn it I can't remember his name but he writes beautifully about one particular kind of um bird of prey caracara I think I wish you'd see if it were a live audience I mean it is live but if you were all there you could someone could pipe up if anyone wants to put it in the chat room you've probably read this book um his name is almost going to come to me but not right away is this a most remarkable creature um Jonathan Mayberg yes there you go thank you it's beautifully written I have to say the writing surpasses many of our wanted writers of today better better than you know just wonderfully written and all about the bird so the fact of his being also a rock singer is just astonishing but anyway that is a wonderful again and he talks a lot about wh hudson in his book a lot about hudson so I highly recommend that book and also going back to hudson who's just wonderful thank you um we at BCLT we hosted a uh a conference on the theme of eco translation uh last year and of course it's a a really uh significant uh strand in translation studies and that conference was around the work of uh Michael Cronin in your discussion with Philip I was struck by the way uh you began by talking about the essay on our in essays two and your interest in the the recycling of stone in in our and the repurposing for different building works uh and you concluded your discussion uh returning to questions of recycling and the the climate crisis and I was I was wondering in response to that discussion whether there's any mileage in thinking about translation as a kind of recycling I suppose one one could argue that all writing in the sense that there's a kind of infinite into textuality all writing is a kind of a recycling but I wonder whether that applies particularly to translation which which takes an existing text and reuses it repurposes it yeah it's it's a very interesting idea of course it doesn't it doesn't um I guess you'd say it repurposes it if if say um I guess Philip mentioned that turning the Jane Austen novels into films or television series so that's sort of really repurposing it um and doing a straight translation is is more sort of just keeping it alive um you could you could do another version which would be closer to repurposing it and I I chrono's exercises in style was translated into English now I mix up the barbers I know I shouldn't but there's Barbara Bray and there's Barbara another Barbara translator over right yeah and I can't remember which one did the cano which is Barbara right Barbara right okay forgive me for you know it's it's one of those crossed wires things that I can't get over but anyway um she had to completely rewrite the the exercises um in in English terms you know English cockney or you know different dialects of England rather than you know she could not do us there was no way to do a straight translation so that's sort of taking his idea and his um his form and transforming it through translation uh thank you one uh question from Olly uh thinking of animal welfare um asking what's the name of the the cat sitting behind you in in in the uh in your discussion so to me she's almost invisible but her name is Lucy we have two others we had a dog at one time um I'm a vegetarian if that's relevant um we have great respect for animals and now increasingly have to have great respect for insects they are the urgent wildlife to try us to save so it's um it's an uphill struggle but we persist thank you so much Lydia for sharing your thoughts about your fascinating translation career with us this afternoon and for opening out to your other concerns as well um thank you Phillip for your expert interviewing there is for those who are interested in about 90 minutes I think the Society of Authors will be presenting awards online at 7 p.m. here in the UK if you want to come back so to speak for that but for now can I thank everyone in the audience for your excellent questions thank you to Phillip once again and thank you above all to Lydia Davis for absolutely fascinating uh discussion thank you very much indeed thank you