January 2, 2008
From an interview with Lydia Davis
The poet Sarah Manguso interviews story writer and translator Lydia Davis in the January issue of The Believer. Among the treats is this exchange on style:
BLVR: In his biography of Beckett, James Knowlson says that Beckett chose to write in French because in French it was easier for him to write “without style.” You’ve said similar things about translating—that it’s an exercise in not imposing one’s own style on the writing. It sounds like the least postmodern position one can possibly take—that there’s some essential truth that style only cloaks.
LD: No, I wouldn’t say there’s some essential truth that is cloaked by style—if I’ve understood your question. I’d say that if I were to translate into my own style rather than preserving, insofar as I could, the style of the original, I would change the nature of the work in an essential way.
I tried, once, for fun, translating Laurence Sterne into more contemporary English. It worked to some extent—some of the narrative content was preserved, some of the humor, quirkiness, etc.—but it was painful. Each time I abandoned some phrasing of his in favor of an “updated” version, an essential, delightful peculiarity of the work was lost.
BLVR: So you’re talking about the need, as a translator, to avoid covering the writer’s style with one’s own. Beckett, on the other hand, seems to suggest the possibility of writing without style. Do you think that’s possible? Maybe he was referring only to writing without the burden of his own familiar English-language style.
LD: I don’t believe, in the end, that there is any such thing as no style. Even a very neutral, plain style, one that doesn’t use colloquialisms, lyrical flourishes, heavy supplies of metaphor, etc., is a style, and it becomes a writer’s characteristic style just as much as a thicker, richer deployment of idiom and vocabulary. I would have to go look for Beckett’s own explanation, but I can imagine that he might have been resisting a Joycean sort of profusion that would have been natural to him in both speaking and writing English.
To read the full interview, click here.