The voice of the translator and negotiating loss in Lydia Davis’s Can’t and Won’t

Abstract

Lydia Davis, the 2013 winner of the Man Booker International Prize for her body of work, is mostly known for her very short stories, some of them one line long. But Davis is also a translator who has translated Proust, Flaubert, Blanchot, and Leiris and in 2015 was made Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for her translations and her short stories. A reader, stumbling upon Davis’s fiction for the first time can be taken aback by the succinct and often absent storyline. Unlike other short story writers who can be appreciated upon the reading of one short story, Davis demands more time. She breaks language down, and as Josh Cohen (2010, 504) has said, “she estranges language, not by setting it apart from everyday speech, but by putting us in almost uncomfortable proximity to it and forcing us to hear resonances of the unknown in the most familiar scenarios”. This paper will examine Davis’s manner of meaning in her collection Can’t and Won’t. The “uncomfortable proximity” to language is due in part to Davis’s familiarity with how the English language “means” but also how it “can’t” mean and “won’t” mean. We will further examine how, though she is writing in her mother tongue, it is almost as though we are reading a translation of English into English. Reading Davis as a translator is one of the keys to discovering how the coherence of this collection works.