... whatever the topic, Davis is always superb company: erudite, adventurous, surprising ... Trying to learn a language from scratch by reading a book is like trying to write a complicated cake recipe by sitting and staring at the finished cake for several hundred hours. Is it the most efficient form of pedagogy? No, but Davis extracts endless thrills from the painstaking process. Her essays do a beautiful job of transmitting that satisfaction to the reader, although I was occasionally tempted to exercise my skimming muscles in places where she dove deep into the weeds. Skimming, however, would be the wrong move in a book that contains an incredible amount of life-enhancing morsels ... Davis’s essays are packed with these windows of opportunity to think more deeply — or at all — about many subjects ... I enjoyed the book’s plenitude so much that I wasn’t distracted by its squat physical shape, which is adorable to hold but designed in such a way that the book tries to flip itself shut as you read. No amount of violent spine-cracking would break the object’s resistance, and around Page 300 I turned a corner and became charmed by its antagonistic construction. I will read you and you will like it, I warned my copy of Essays Two. And lo, I liked it, too.
... excellent essays ... Here, she's more verbose than in her stories, but still succinct, clear and eloquent ... This is a celebration of the beautiful and bewildering intermittences of language ... Far and away the best and most fascinating section here is the one on 'Translating Proust' ... Davis' work is a productive blend of authority and doubt, solution and exploration, confidence and humility ... Essays Two may not be light reading for the general interest reader, but for all its erudition it's always accessible, comprehensible, and even fun. Davis is a literary treasure.
Essays Two is a companion to Essays One, an earlier volume of critical pieces about reading, writing, and art. Like many of the narrators of her short stories, Davis is a taxonomist and enumerator ... As a translator, Davis is known for fidelity, clarity, and, in the case of Proust, decluttering ... Davis occasionally casts a cool eye on the kind of translator’s liberties and blunders she wants to avoid ... Her goal of staying as close as possible to the vocabulary of the original novels leads her far down the path of etymology, both in English and in French ... Davis doesn’t often release her reader into laughter ... Davis’s case is narrowly bounded, local, and specific: here is one bad new word that shouldn’t displace a good one ... She can only offer a suggestive example, hope to nudge the development of the language in directions that are useful rather than destructive, and be prepared to fail.
It’s a guide, however, to new dimensions of thought. Davis makes translation seem like a sublime exercise of mind and self ... Davis’s adventures in translation are full of such realizations, and the lessons they sustain are encouraging. Reading for fun, it turns out, can make things happen ... A hopeful mood prevails in this book ... She makes it seem so obvious that reading a foreign language for enjoyment leads to astonishing new vistas, because she reminds us that fun is naturally propulsive ... This gets to the wonderful paradox of Davis as a translator, who finds a comfortable mode for thrilling mystery, for language far from home.
The voice of these essays never forgets its own limitations, or the inherent comedy of passing critical judgment. Sometimes Davis reminds you of the tone of Geoff Dyer’s criticism, with acknowledgments that her mind is forever wandering from the task at hand ... The shift from the abstract to the local and concrete is typical. It finds its most persuasive expression in a wonderful essay about a version of the gospels produced by a group called the 'Jesus Seminar', which includes a fifth gospel created in a scrapbook by Thomas Jefferson, who cut and pasted the few verses of scripture in which he had most faith ... Davis, in her fiction and in her criticism, proves a vivid disciple.
As every essayist must, Davis devises a persona through which to transmit her thoughts, and its voice is quite different from that of her stories: warmly companionable, fair-minded, civic, reasonable and (sorry to say) rather humourless. She downplays her intellectual or academic side, addressing the reader in a simple, accessible manner as a sort of everywoman with a passion for languages ... The Proust essays, along with a pungent discussion of Flaubert, are the highlight of the collection ... Sometimes, she gets carried away with examples of individual words intriguing: her sixty-eight-page essay on translating a novel by Dag Solstad from Norwegian becomes something of a slog ... Between the success of her problem-solving and the 'exhilarating' experience of tackling a rock face single-handed, a quiet air of self-satisfaction and self-appreciation spreads over the volume, leaving readers with no option but to applaud her tenacity. This can, however, deprive the essays of a certain tension. From my own perspective as a lover of the essay, these pieces do not, for the most part, deepen or darken, nor are they composed in shapely, surprising ways ... We come away from Essays Two with renewed respect for a writer whose grasp of languages is profound, and whose capacity to shape-shift from one to another is quite exceptional.
... a collection of exacting, entertaining, and instructive reflections on [Davis's] lifelong preoccupation with other languages. Her passion for words and syntax charges her candid and probing inquiries into the cascading challenges and revelations of translation ... With a closing essay about her fascination with the French city of Arles, Davis’ articulation of her literary pursuits and processes will set kindred minds alight.
Riveting and erudite ... Thorough, idiosyncratic, and inimitable, Davis is the kind of intelligent and attentive reader a book is lucky to find. Readers, in turn, are lucky to have this collection, a worthy addition to the Davis canon.
A vivid portrait of the translating life ... [An] immersive collection ... For those wondering what translators do and how they do it, this collection is a must.
