hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with tyler today i'm here with a very special guest lydia davis lydia is unique she is one of america's best and best known short story writers and her short stories are indeed very short she is a leading translator best
known for translating parts of proust and also flaubert she is a wonderful essayist her latest book which i loved is essays2 lydia davis just out of course there is also essays one which is excellent as well and she has in fact done much more than that uh lydia welcome thank you it's a pleasure to be here
now i have a question about writing very short stories and that is what's the kind of content bias that's introduced by making them very short so if i think about thomas bernhardt who also wrote very short stories he tends to use either a very bad event or some kind of misanthropy to hook the reader
and that's not what you do but what is the content bias in writing very short stories i suppose um it's it's limited by something that is short in duration uh necessarily either an action that's very short in duration or a perception that's very brief and glancing it it might be a perception that could lead
to a great many more perceptions or could be developed but for the moment it's it's very brief and that that is the constraint the stories are born very spontaneously from from these immediate perceptions or immediate actions that are there and over in the blink of an eye
do you think the writer has to use something that is incongruent to hook the reader in the very short story so it seems to me a lot of your stories there's an element of the paradoxical or the ironic or the quizzical instead of bernhardt's misanthropy but you share this interest in the incongruent
i i suppose i mean the examples it's always easier for me to work from from examples because i forget that there's so many of these stories by now many volumes and so hundreds but i tend to remember the stories about ants just because i still have dealings with ants and interactions with ants and
try you mean yes yes well i have interactions with au nts i guess in the in the past but um but yes i mean the the little insects that come to the cat bowl cat bowls if we're not careful so um the incongruous would be probably perceiving myself as a person who actually respects ants and tries to deal
with them on a in a respectful way in other words not squashing them but persuading them to leave so that would be the incongruity perhaps how do you persuade an aunt to leave if you really want to know um i usually don't brush them away because that might harm their little tiny body so
i blow them away and then remove the the reason for their interest so if they're interested it's always food so i blow them away and clean up the food very thoroughly and i do usually persuade them not to come back in very short stories does the difference between poetry and prose blur
because every word counts so much in a very short story i think it it only blurs in that sense i i think of a poem as more lyrical and and i think that's a a test that i can depend on to some extent um there are poems that aren't very lyrical but they're clearly poems for other reasons so
i don't see mine yeah i go back to the idea of song with with poems and i don't see my very short stories as songs i see them sort of pedestrian in in other words thump thump thump you know they're not rhythmical or imagistically beautiful most of the time and i'm talking about the very very short ones
there there are longer short ones that are a paragraph or a page and some of those are lyrical so are there any great writers who don't have a great sense of humor oh yes um absolutely well i don't know did conrad have a great sense of humor i mean it depends who you think is great um in the first place so maybe we
we are leaving conrad for certain other reasons but he was one i was reading recently and i i don't detect much of a sense of humor there but i do in beckett beckett and bruce people usually don't think of proust as very funny but he's he's quite funny if one reads conrad for instance there's
a thickness to the language right you have to cut through it with a machete proust there's an elaborate nature to the language uh the irish writers whether older or contemporary there's something quite mellifluous about it do you think it's hard for a contemporary american writer to develop
a truly appealing language um no but it would be very different it might it might i mean we do tend towards shorter shorter sentences now anyway i mean not not you know every writer is very different but um in general we have less tolerance for long elaborately constructed sentences but i
think with a very with very short sentences you can also be very sparkling and lyrical um magical do you think the late thomas pension became unreadable that somehow it was just a pile of complexity and it lost all relation to the reader or are those in fact masterworks that
we're just not up to appreciating well since i hesitated to even open the books i can't answer you because i guess i i do find not all long books but very long very fat books um a little hard to approach and some of them i try uh over and over and if i sense that it's really a load of verbiage
you know i really don't you know i i fault myself for not having the patience to get through at least one say late pension but i haven't so so if for you long books are hard to approach and you've translated the first section of proofs how is it you approached proust in a way that helped
it make sense for you uh well maybe it helps that he conceived of the the individual books or the parts that make up the whole book he conceived of them one at a time or published them one at a time um wrestled with them one at a time he was he was not he didn't set out to write as much
you know as he as he ended up writing in that one novel which i can really understand if there are a lot of projects if you realized how long they were going to be and how long they were going to take you might not start them so he thought it was going to be a matter of say three small volumes or
even two in the beginning two small volumes or reasonable volumes and it grew and grew which i can also sympathize with but um so i i didn't have a problem with that i had a problem a long time ago trying to read ulysses by joyce and started it twice and finally read it when i lived in ireland which made it
much easier because i had his context and and that too i suppose because it had different chapters each of which approached the ongoing story in a very different way i found that possible too uh but it's tricky there's a there's a book by a catalan writer called joseph
pla that's called the gray notebook i think or the other gray notebooks or the gray notebook and that's very fat but i keep going back to it and delighting in it but i'm not reading it all at once i'm going back to it uh and just sort of nibbling away at it it was an amazing project he took an early
very brief diary of of his he was 21 i think and it was only covered a year and a half and he kept going back to it rather than publishing it he kept going back to it and expanding it with more memories and more more material and i love that idea so maybe that's why i can read it
and what language are you reading it in well i'm reading it in english i can actually read catalan if i put my mind to it but i see no reason to in this case a number of readers have written me and complained that when it comes to reading proust the secondary language secondary literature is of no use to them or very
little use do you think that's a fair characterization or if one wants to read something on proofs that's useful where does one start well the fact is that i i did not as a matter of principle did not read any secondary material before i started translating proust and even now would not
want to read a great deal of it um i like the one-on-one confrontation with with the text um and i really think that's where reader should begin and maybe end um i don't like the idea i mean i'll modify this in a minute but i don't initially like the idea of some so-called expert coming in between me
and my perception of the book and that was particularly true translating it i didn't want someone else to tell me what was important or what i should look out for um and then i suppose once you know uh if you've read all of the proof's novel and read it again or whatever and then you you
just want to read more about it and share the experience in a way with a with another person who's written about it there again i can't really you know there are people like roger shattuck um who who've written a great deal about proust and there's beckett's essay on proust which
i do i think i probably did read that it's short by the way um you know just but in that case i would be curious what another favorite writer of mine thought about proust although he was quite young at the time so that would be sort of my answer sort of i get i guess the easiest answer
really or the most sensible is to dip dip in and out of um the different writings on proust and see which which um writer you feel comfortable with some some you'll hate and some you'll you'll love oh yes i want to hear what he has to say now your first foreign language was german what do you think of the german
translation of proust by ava rachel mertens i haven't read it it's very good it's very you're saying it's very good it's much funnier uh than produced in english uh-huh that's interesting has anyone done speaking of studies has anyone done a a study of the difference um in the in the humorous passages in
between the german and the english that would be fun to that would be fun to read i don't think so i think what works well in german and french is the difference between a very long pristine sentence and a very short observation fits those two languages well but doesn't really
work in english you just end up a little bit confused i love the fact that proofs does have very very short sentences people kind of forget that why isn't franz kafka funny in english well i think he he is um i think he is i think some of these writers are burdened by their reputations and that would be true of
kafka and proust you know that we hear so much more about how important they are um that we've we are we sort of tune out the moments that are really funny um kafka i i'm thinking of his diaries have very funny entries not because he was trying to be funny but just he described people walking in the
street as i think trying to unstick their feet from where they are to stick them down in another place you know he's just he's observing and what he observes ends up seeming funny to us and probably to him if one is a writer sets out to create an intentionally fragmentary or intentionally incomplete literary work
can that succeed or does it have to in a sense be accidentally fragmentary i think it can succeed um in fact i not to bring it back to myself necessarily but obviously i i'm so well acquainted with my own work pretty well acquainted anyway but i think of the novel i wrote the one
novel the end of the story was meant to be give the impression of of fragmentation because the narrator is trying to remember remember incidents and so the memories come back in fragments but but i was thinking even first of a book that influenced me a lot in in my writing of that and that was
elizabeth hardwick's sleepless nights which i haven't revisited in a while but that too gave the impression of of being fragmented but but was written that way deliberately and i think um i think also a sorrow beyond dreams by hank which i'm about to revisit by peter hanke
also gives that impression of fragmentation in his case i think it may be a combination of actually trying to retrieve memories that he had trouble retrieving and allowing the book to work that way and be that way do you worry as a translator that some languages are word poor discharge is
sometimes leveled against french and spanish relative to english and german or do you think that's not correct um well i i would be very cautious about accusing another language of having deficiencies but i do think english has a wonderful advantage in having the doubled vocabulary the
anglo-saxon vocabulary and the latin vocabulary examples being you know underground would be the anglo-saxon version and subterranean would be the latin um of the same idea and not all languages or most don't have that advantage so we can we can play with the different vocabularies and uh
you know speak more plainly or speak more abstractly and intellectually we have that great facility because of our vocabulary as a translator why do you think that film subtitles are so often so bad there's certainly enough money in cinema compared to literary translation uh well that's kind of fun i mean
are they pressed for time i'd have to guess because often people people press translators to get things done overnight and more and more so i think i mean the constraints are obviously you have to you have to translate you can't translate faithfully what you're hearing you have to translate it in such a way
briefly more briefly so that someone can read it quickly so it's very hard to retain all of the flavor of the original i i usually don't see any that are really bad but um i think i've learned something from some of them you know when i was stuck on a vocabulary word or something i actually
might have learned something but i'd i'd hesitate there to blame the translator because i think usually it is a time constraint or or i used to discover that i could not earn much of a living if i translated very very carefully and that was simply you know i could not take so much time
uh i did take time when it mattered and got paid very poorly like a dollar an hour on some books uh but so time and money and film industry i bet it doesn't work too well how would you best describe your own motives for being a translator my motives your motives what do you get from it
um i really just love foreign languages which may sound a little dumb because it's such a blanket statement but even here at home i find myself wanting to just break into german or french just just for a second i get i don't know what it is i don't obviously not tired of english really because that's my
language i write in it i love it um but i love the sound of other languages and and and also as soon as you speak another language or read it you enter a completely different culture and a completely different history and i really loved that so you know i i do think sometimes that my first
experience of another language made me want to translate the rest of my life and that was being in that austrian classroom and not understanding anything anyone said and and yet feeling that the surroundings were hospitable and friendly so it wasn't an alienating experience
and then learning gradually what they were saying so i think i've wanted to repeat that maybe over and over do you think that reading fiction can be a better experience simply because you don't understand the language as well as your own language reading fiction in another language that
you understand less well than english can it be better because you understand it less well um no i don't think i experienced the fiction itself or the content in a more enjoyable way i'm sort of experiencing both at the same time the the content probably less well and then the language
is a pleasure in itself and that doesn't mean i would enjoy reading a washing machine how-to manual in french or german and get the same enjoyment but it's it's you know i read two different peter hanke books in german just because i wanted to one was the um the left-handed woman and that he he wrote in such a
straightforward style and the material repeated so much that i was able to read it without a problem so then i tried reading whatever it is the day in the in afternoon of a writer i think it's called afternoon of a writer and that was terribly complicated with difficult constructions and huge
vocabulary i had terrible trouble with it i already knew it in english so it was more the it was more the challenge of the language i was after which languages do you dream in it's really i don't actually don't think there's much language in my dreams actually come to think of it but i think it would
be mostly english but sometimes in waking life another word in another language will just pop up into my head spontaneously and i don't ever quite know why could you translate from the norwegian if you were asked to well i actually have um i i never translated that long book which
i learned norwegian by reading but i did translate uh some some short stories uh by gunhild oyahog it's hard to say her last name um they were actually in a in the other norwegian language near new norsk which is norwegian has two languages bokmal and nunorsk so it was in that language i i found her
short story so delightful that i did translate um at least one of them and also some um some other works by a friend um by my norwegian translator actually but these were all very short putting aside your husband's own work but what in the visual arts excites you the most well it's hard to put aside his work
since that's the we live with it and i think about it the most but um oh dear that's that's very hard um not because there aren't painters that i love i it was velazquez that i um that i paid a lot of attention to for a while and that was partly because i i was in europe um
on many different trips and would often go to a museum and i found museums overwhelming so i i just thought i can't do this i feel sort of ill after an hour so what i'm going to do is just look at look at two two areas of painting one is velazquez just sort of i almost made a game of it
how many velazquez paintings can i find in the different museums you know make it sort of running list and then um the other area was was early flemish paintings very very different but i i love them and i i'm partly interested in them sometimes i mean some of them are a lot of them are interiors but
i'm interested in the landscapes i like to just look at what was going on in their landscapes at that time so part of my interest was sort of documentary they they were there and they were painting what they saw so they're not trying to imagine what life was like back then does your own work ever remind you of
joseph cornell well no um i like i like joseph cornell and i like i like what he was doing and why but i don't do collages and i never have and i i don't know if i ever would but you know you never know but um my pieces are always composed sort of very much uh in in a very unified way from from
beginning to end i mean in the first place then i go back to them and work on them but so the collage idea doesn't appeal to me although just once a neighbor and friend here in new york state he was writing haikus and he said would you like to collaborate on on a poem and i i usually
don't want to but i but i i said well okay if if if we can do it this way i'll give you a poem and then you can um intersperse your what what ins what inspires you to what what inspires you by what you read you can compose something and intersperse it with mine and that worked out quite well
but that wasn't me responding to him which is not quite fair what is it in the classical music repertoire that most captured your imagination when you were young um well i was very very much into classical music and and uh you know from a pretty early age i tried to branch out into moments of
you know pop music folk music um rock and roll and i always managed to like some of it a little for a little while but i always went back to classical music and uh i guess it was bach and the schubert's songs were very important to me maybe because there was a little narrative element in them but
i keep coming back to bach and in high school there was a very good program in which i played the orchestra played in the orchestra and sang in the choral groups and so on studied music theory and that was very very heavily oriented towards bach but you know it's again it's like with
writers i mean how could i do without foray and how could i do without you know verdi's requiem so on and so forth how would you articulate why you don't like the harry potter novels um well that's fairly easy although i should have a page in front of me it's always better if you have the page and you can say
look look at this sentence look at that sentence but um at a certain point my my son was reading harry potter as kids do and did and i think he was probably 11 or 10 or 11 12 9 i don't know but also the philip pullman trilogy whose name i always forget um and i thought it would be a lot of fun to
read the harry potter books because i i knew a lot of grown-ups were reading them and enjoying them and i thought this is great there are a lot of them but when i tried to read them i didn't like the style of writing and i didn't like the characters and i didn't like anything about them whereas
i opened the phil first phillip pullman book and read the first page and said this is wonderful this the writing here is wonderful and i really think there's an ocean of difference um i i won't you know i wouldn't put down the harry potter books because as we know they got a lot of kids reading and
being enraptured with books and i think that matters more than anything really getting kids hooked on on reading so on page 418 of your new book essays 2 you imply that you don't finish most of the books you read is that correct yeah and how do you think about that you
get to try more books because i'm very much the same way i'm not sure that i finish one in ten that i pick up but that's for me mostly non-fiction for me it's both it i'm always annoyed by it so i won't say that it's um i'm i pride myself on it or it's a wonderful thing i'm always uh annoyed by it and now i'm
trying to develop the ability to skim i know how to skim but it doesn't usually occur to me to skim a book that i should take seriously but now i'm thinking well i either skim it or i don't read it at all or don't finish it i think the reason over the years usually was that i kind of got what the
writer was doing in the first 30 pages or whatever i read carefully and i seldom felt that i really had to read every word to get it and i did feel that way say as i mentioned with ulysses i felt i really wanted to read every word but for example we mentioned conrad i started the heart of darkness
i had read it years ago and i started it you know a few months ago and really liked the writing and wanted to go on but i i think the other problem is that there's always a new book coming into the house another and another and another and the temptation just to open a brand new
book and start reading it is just too difficult for me to resist but sometimes i think well i'm going to go back to this bookcase and i'm going to finish every single book that i started but so far i haven't done it what do you think is your most unusual productivity habit unusual and successful that is
well it's hard to say because i i imagine that a lot of writers share some of the things i do or or a lot of them so unusual but i know that i have a more chaotic approach than some writers would want to have uh and that's always been true it's it's in a way very wasteful i mean like like
the reading the books i don't finish reading there are also a number of very interesting projects are very interesting to me that i've done a lot of work on and you know then gone on to another project so i have at least three or four or five big projects these are not small stories these are
you know biographical projects or grammar projects or you know um history projects you know crossing genres that i've done a lot of work on and then gotten distracted from um but that when you say productive or successful uh it does work very well with very with shorter things that you
can actually finish so the way i work on stories is to um to to get busy immediately and write down what occurs to me and write it until i've sort of exhausted that vein for the moment and then i usually have enough to come back to later so i'll have 10 15 20 30 unfinished stories and um
every now and then i'll pick one up again sometimes i don't even remember what it is i'll see a title and think i don't know what that story was i'll pick it up again and try to discern what it was that moved me and what it was that made me want to write it and get back into that and see if i could
finish it so that that's a sort of chaotic method that works pretty well how ambitious are you um i'm not ambitious in the worldly sense you know i'm i've never been someone who was driven by you know oh the public's gonna forget me so i've got to get another book out within the
next two years which i know does motivate some writers or at least if they wouldn't if they'd prefer not to think that way they sometimes have an agent or a publisher who says you know you've got to give us another book in two years but that's never been never been the case for me and that's
why some books are seven years later or you know and i i i'm doing other things often i'm working on say another project that won't bear fruit i think um george steiner has has a book which i have not read i haven't even opened it but a book uh detailing all the all the books he didn't write you know
yes that's quite interesting yeah yeah have you read the whole of that one i think so yes well that that seemed lovely and i thought well someday that'll have to be my last project maybe i'll have to write a book like that modeled on that about all the projects i didn't finish but um
so my ambition if you call it that is really just in terms of what i'm interested in doing and doing next and so on will you ever publish your diaries i'm i'm already doing that actually um in in magazines uh so um um and i will do it in book form i'm reading i have lots and lots of of notebooks and journals
depending how you count 90 to 100 to more some of them don't have much in them so i wouldn't even count them but some are very full so i've been going through them and picking out the the parts the entries that are of general interest they're not the autobiographical ones as much as just
observations again or um interesting things from my reading and putting them together and publishing them uh some have been in the magazine noon that diane williams uh edits and founded so because she asks for something each year i give her something and if i don't have stories i give her
journal excerpts so sooner or later i'll publish an excerpt a volume of excerpts of journals and then much much later when i don't have to know about it maybe more complete books will come out of of journal entries that dana goodyear wrote in the new yorker and i quote when davis was
younger the obsessions of her narrators tended to be amorous and now they are philosophical unquote do you agree or disagree oh i suppose i mean one friend writer friend when i i forget which book it was almost no memory maybe or one earlier one she said because of the because of the sort of
subject matter of those stories she said oh now lydia discovers marriage or something like that so it's true that um my stories you know maybe they were more about i don't think they were really about love in the beginning they're not only about love because i think in the first in the first
collection there was there was a story called what an old woman will wear um that may have been in the second collection so i was thinking about other things not just love but um and then the latest ones will have much more about ants in them because i wasn't thinking about ants quite so much when i
was uh 30 in my 30s um so yes the stories will reflect whatever whatever i'm what's going on in my mind to put it more generally you have taught and you still read other people's work if you're looking for talent in a young writer just from the page not from the person what is it you look for what gets you
excited i don't mean finished product but in what do you see potential oh just as a certain spark a certain um a certain way of being able to look with his or her own eyes at the world and see it the way he or she sees it without sort of i mean what what discourages me completely of course is
the cliched observations you know one after another um a student just just picking and using what everyone else picks up and uses but so i've had some students who were exciting i mean it's partly the use of language but the use of language implies that they are really thinking about
language and paying attention to what language can do so it'll be use of language and then use of their own honest vision um usually if if the grammar and syntax are just too bad you know i mean you can have sort of a spark and but if if it's too bad i've learned from experience it's really hard to
change that at that point you know the students in college or after so uh you know i have to sadly kind of i mean it's not that i didn't try my best but um there has to be minimum recognition of how language is used i don't know there's so there's so many things you look for in in in teaching writing
it gets very complicated do you feel that meeting them or interviewing them gives you a better sense of how good a writer they can become or that's worthless and don't get distracted just look at the printed page well in my experience i have not had to or really wanted to interview students in
person before accepting them into a class so it's it's been either that they were already signed up and enrolled and i did what i could or um with some of the classes at the writers institute in in suny albany those are for con continuing education you know general public and graduate students
and you're handed you know a pile of samples 30 pages i mean 30 samples anonymous so i really think that's the best way if you're selecting students for a class i always wanted to balance the genders and that was a bit of a game with me to say well this seems like a guy this
seems like a woman you know nowadays who cares but i thought it was good to have the balance um but i was often wrong and that was fine too how do you teach differently differently yes what is it you do that other teachers of writing don't do when you do master classes or when you taught at albany um
well i know i gave many well again we get back to the last the uh the lack of being systematic for one thing i didn't i didn't like to give out a curriculum at the beginning this is what we're going to do every week till the end of the term because i never knew i like to i like to um
see what they needed or see what i was reading or see what occurred to me and give the next assignment based on that rather than something i had already decided so that was one difference and that led to some very fun things like i i myself was trying to think of all the words that began with wr
this was just something i was happened to be doing walking around the house reeling that realizing there weren't very many of them so i thought okay i'll give that as an assignment next week the students will have to think of all the words they can that begin with wr and they can they're allowed to ask other people but
obviously they're not allowed to look online or in the dictionary to find them and that was a lot of fun because we also realized that all the words beginning with wr except for one in in um the lancornish language or something uh had to do with twisting so wrench or wrist or or wrangle wrong
right sure yeah why is that well that that's the kind of thing i love and i have i don't i can't really tell you why except that i'm sure if you go back to the indo-european or the gothic or you know go way back you'll find it there the answer is there somewhere that
i mean i sometimes think the the sounds um are related to the meaning in the sense of you know mama mama the m is is good for mama ma um but wr i'm not sure you know is it is it something to do with with that um that's a bit of a mystery i don't think i ever went and really tried to answer that
but i like having these discoveries i liked i should say in the past tense having these discoveries with the students and having that freshness like i didn't plan it i haven't done that with the students every year from time memorial have you read don quixote yet well i actually i belong to a kind of
pretty high-minded book club a zoom a remote book club um and i say high-minded because i have another one that's much more casual um and we read detective novels or we read you know i don't know it's it's much uh we don't we're not ambitious very ambitious um but this one we're willing to tackle
difficult things so i thought well my choices will all be books that i've been meaning to read and i'll make them read them with me and that way i'll actually read them so we did read a hundred pages of don quixote we all agreed we couldn't try to read the whole thing this is the edith
grossman translation it was um i had various you know i asked someone once you know which one do you think is the best he was someone who was in a position to know and he he did have to think of it but he decided that all in all that was the best one but um so we read like the first four books or
whatever it um books meaning not books but chat you know long chat long sections about 100 pages and um i was very glad and so was so does everyone else we also read beowulf because that was another one i'd never read and thought that i should read and that was the haney translation or which um
i think it was several uh i i read the haney but also referred to was it a nabakov from nabico what am i thinking of that was much more literal did he attempt a very literal one or am i mixing him up with someone else i think of his is quite poetic haney well haney's was farther from the original
because i also tried to you know i read it alongside the original because it's not impossible and his was his his departed much more from the original than whichever one it was that i was comparing it to but that was very interesting we all enjoyed that too there's something about the cumulative
effect of don quixote that i quite enjoy so book two to me is much better than book one oh yeah so if your hundred pages were from book one book one makes book two better but i'm trying to reread it i found i was experiencing a certain impatience that i kept on wanting to skip ahead to the
better book too but that's also a mistake and have you read the whole of don quixote yes but i have not reread the hall recently and i think when i read it it was maybe the walter starkey translation which i suspect isn't that good but it's a good book to read like some of the early dostoyevsky translations
like maybe constance garnet is not very good as a translator but she might be quite good to read especially if you're young well that was true of um stieg miller's translation of flo bear i think is also a good book to read but it goes quite far away from flo bear how would you put what you did with flo
bear in contrast to that translation well staying much more much closer to the french i mean that that was something i tried to do with bruce and flo bear was really really not stray too far you know no farther than absolutely necessary whereas he stig miller would put in a phrase that
isn't even in the flow bear like poor thing is the one i remember after charles's first wife dies the wife that precedes emma bovary he the the narrator or the the narrator says poor thing i don't i don't remember if charles says it or or it's just in the narration but poor thing is not in the flow bear so
stigma was making a readable very vibrant novel out of it and that's okay as far as that goes i mean i think that's what you mean by a good book or a good book to read that isn't necessarily you know a scholar would not necessarily approve of the approach and at current margins what is your
dream translation job well i actually don't want to translate anymore um what i decided at a certain point what is just partly because i have a lot of other things i want to do urgently but at a certain point i thought i do want to go on translating but they will all have to be very very short
stories so um i i at that point switched over to translating there's a a a swiss writer i like a lot called peter pixel um who isn't uh some of his early books were translated here but these are sort of newspaper columns autobiographical that i really like a lot so i translated a few of those and
they're only a page and a half long so that's if you wanted if you wanted to if i wanted to answer your question properly i'd say that's my dream translation job is is texts like that that are autobiographical and short and last question as readers in terms of publication
what can we expect next from you um well i actually have a pile of stories that have been sitting here and accumulating and they're in a folder called new book and it's very fat there are a lot of them but i keep you know i keep having to put it aside because of all the other things i'm
doing and that get in the way but that that should be the next book because it's all there i just need to organize it maybe complete one or two of the longer ones and there it'll be another book of stories lydia davis thank you very much it's been a real honor thank you very much it's been enjoyable you