In 2019, the literary magazine NOON published a story by Lydia Davis called “The Language of Armagnac,” a quietly comic meditation on the difficulties of translating “the patois of the city of Auch, which is a local form of the language of Gascon, which is in turn a dialect language of Occitan.” A second version of the story much like the first was included in Davis’s “Essays Two,” a collection of her writings on translation, a career that parallels her work as a writer of fiction. A third and notably different version appears in her story collection “Our Strangers,” under the title “Bothered Scholar on Train.” It refashions Davis’s elaborate philological commentaries as the tirade of a scholar whose attempt to read in the language of Armagnac is disrupted by noisy passengers. Davis designed the story to open with an exclamation—“Oh, can’t you quiet down, please!”—and end with an exclamation mark, too (“So, please!”). This symmetry would clue readers in to an irony underlying the scene. The bothered shouts at others to be quiet. He—or she—annoys strangers while insisting that they are the annoying ones.
As always in Davis’s fiction, an almost imperceptible line divides pedantry from precision, enthusiasm from solipsism. When I met Davis at her house in East Nassau, New York, this August, she eyed the galley of “Our Strangers” that I had brought with me and noticed that, in it, the final exclamation mark was missing from “Bothered Scholar on Train.” “You’ve got to have the exclamation mark there,” she said. When we looked at a finished copy of the U.K. edition that she’d been sent, we discovered that someone had blundered: the exclamation mark was still missing. “Well, that’s too bad,” she said. “That was important.” Then, while trying to find another story, we discovered that almost all of the table of contents had been misnumbered. “There’s so much trouble that goes into trying to get something right, and then they do something really basic wrong,” Davis said. She sat on the couch with Jack, her cat, curled at her side, and started to correct the errors with a pencil. “It’s terrible,” she said. “But it’s good we’re doing this, because I might not have done this on my own.”
Since the mid-nineteen-seventies, Davis’s fiction has often taken as its subject matter the mistakes that creep into writing, or the misunderstandings that arise from speech and silence. The stories in “The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis” and “Can’t and Won’t” reward what I think of as too-close reading: an attentiveness to the marvel of the individual letter, the punctuation mark, and the italicized word, perfectly and savagely deployed. In “Mother’s Reaction to My Travel Plans,” we hear, “Gainesville! It’s too bad your cousin is dead!” The shortest stories are often composed of a single sentence or a snatch of dialogue, as in “Overheard on the Train: Two Old Ladies Agree”:
The painstaking attention to how the smallest units of language can be used or misused scales up to momentous questions about errors or missteps in human relations. Davis’s novel, “The End of the Story,” whose protagonist negotiates an agonized love affair and separation, rivals Marcel Proust’s “Swann in Love” in its intimate yet analytic representation of the whirl of consciousness. One can see her great economy of style at work in her translations—of works by Proust, Michel Leiris, Maurice Blanchot, Peter Bichsel, and A. L. Snijders, and, most notably, of Gustave Flaubert. Her translation of “Madame Bovary” is the best English version by far, because its deadpan reminds us that the book is both a great realist novel and a satire of realism.
On and off the page, Davis is reserved, droll, precise, and principled. She does not fly, eat meat, kill insects, or buy anything on Amazon; “Our Strangers” will be available for purchase only at independent bookstores or through bookshop.org. She and her husband, the painter Alan Cote, live in a converted schoolhouse with their three cats. They—Davis and Cote, not the cats—are generous hosts. After speaking for several hours, Davis asked for half an hour of complete silence (she prepared lunch, I got on with some work), and then we ate: cucumber-mint soup, a vegetable quiche, chocolate-chip cookies on “teeny-tiny plates,” Davis and Cote joked, and, from their garden, white peaches and strawberries in cream in teeny-tiny bowls. Cote told me that he was rereading “Ulysses,” while Davis and her book club were reading Matthew Desmond’s “Poverty, by America.” She was hoping to persuade the club to read another hundred pages of “Don Quixote.” “There are still plenty of people who want to settle down with a big, fat, long novel,” she said. “But I hate to think that it’s the only thing people should read.”
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What attracts you to scenarios in which speech causes confusion?
I’m thinking of the story “Caramel Drizzle,” in which an airline flight attendant is stuck ordering her coffee because she doesn’t know what the difference is between a caramel drizzle or a caramel syrup. She has to think about what the words mean. That thinking is what captures my attention. But it always emerges from a combination of language and character. I don’t know if I would have been drawn to that scene the same way if the main character, the flight attendant, was someone else, someone different. But I liked her confusion and her alertness, and she seemed like a nice person. It feels natural to be drawn to a scenario like that because of my interest in language and then my interest in human relations. Where they intersect are these moments of dialogue and misunderstood dialogue.
It’s a misunderstanding that is easier to see in certain characters. I’m thinking of your story “Egg.” It begins with a paragraph on cognates for “egg” in several languages, and then shows us two little boys trying to say the word “egg” to describe a round, white object. It turns out to be a Ping-Pong ball.
You would relate to that because you have two boys.
I do, and I do relate to it. For those children, and for my children, too, there’s often a mismatch between a word and an object. There’s comedy in that mismatch, but there’s also pathos, especially when the characters are little.
I’m drawn to humor, but also how language, humor, and character create moving situations. And what is touching about “Egg” is that the boys are so earnest. Kids are very earnest. They’re so earnest in their little tiny way because they couldn’t have been very old. And yet they’re working so hard at identifying an object, which isn’t even an egg. And, at that age, they’re playing parallel to each other, not together, but they’re still influenced by each other.
The kernel of the story is obviously the kids and trying to identify that object. But then I added the first paragraph because they have their own way of saying the word. But then we have all these other languages that also have different ways of saying the word. And it’s similar to the boys. The boys get very close. Their words for “egg” or “Ping-Pong ball” are very close. And we have neighboring languages that are very close, but then the comedy for me comes in, you know, with the Scots Gaelic word for “egg” is just “ugh.” And the French is funny too, “oeuf.” They suddenly have nothing to do with the thing itself.
The Turkish for “egg” is “yumurta.”
It’s a much more complicated word.
It’s entirely too irritating to say when all you want is a boiled egg for your breakfast.
Another reason I was drawn to that story is that an egg is so primordial. It’s absolutely essential and basic.
Those boys were eggs not too long ago.
That’s right. They were eggs until they got inspired.
In other words, the yolk of that story was the boys and then you added the first paragraph to it?
Yes.
Did you not feel like the second paragraph could have stood on its own?
It could have. But sometimes I like to be mock scholarly, so I thought, Let’s have a little preface to this story. I liked the balance—the dry information, very straightforward and plain, and then moving to the scene in the living room with the boys. I like making fun of stuffy academics.
“Bothered Scholar on Train” gives us a stuffy academic who is offensive less for their stuffiness or pedantry than for the desire to impose themselves on everyone around him. Why are people comfortable with being so talkative and self-revealing?