Abstract
When an author translates a text by another writer, this translation is one form of a response to that text. Other responses may appear in their own writings that are more inflected with their authorial persona. Lydia Davis translated six books by Maurice Blanchot, including fiction and theoretical writings. Blanchot’s concept of the récit privileges non-conventional forms of narrative and it can be considered to have influenced Davis, a view shared in critical writing about Davis. However, responses to his fiction can also be found in Davis’s work. This article reads Lydia Davis’s story “Story” as a response to Maurice Blanchot’s récit, La Folie du jour, translated by Davis as “The Madness of the Day”. Both texts develop a narrative that questions the possibility of arriving at a single story: Blanchot’s narrator cannot tell the story of how he came to have glass ground into his eyes, while Davis’s narrator must try to understand a contradictory story told to her by her lover. However, Davis responds to Blanchot by reversing the perspective in the story: where Blanchot’s narrator must and cannot create a story that explains his situation in a judicial/medical context, Davis’s narrator is struggling to understand her lover’s story which does not explain the situation that they find themselves in. Davis’s narrator is therefore motivated by an emotional need to find an acceptable story that is absent from Blanchot’s narrator. This difference in motivation is central to the difference between Davis’s and Blanchot’s approach, and complicates any reading of his influence on her because she responds to his text in her own.
Highlights
The American writer and translator Lydia Davis’s first book as an author, The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories, was published in 1976, a year after she published her first book length translation, Arabs and Israelis: A dialogue, by Saul Friedländer and Mahmoud Hussein, which Davis co-translated with her husband Paul Auster
Her most enduring relationship as a translator is, with Maurice Blanchot. She began publishing her translations of his work in 1975, when an early draft of her translation of Death Sentence appeared in the magazine Living Hand, which Davis and Auster edited
The fifth, “The Madness of the Day”, is a short text that was published separately as a book in 1981, despite only being nine full pages in length in its 1977 English magazine publication and the same when it was reprinted in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader [191-99]
Summary
The American writer and translator Lydia Davis’s first book as an author, The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories, was published in 1976, a year after she published her first book length translation, Arabs and Israelis: A dialogue, by Saul Friedländer and Mahmoud Hussein, which Davis co-translated with her husband Paul Auster. I refer to Davis's story “Story” (Story 27-30; reprinted in Break it down 3-7), and Blanchot's récit La Folie du jour/“The Madness of the Day”, which are the focus of this article.
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