Essays Two collects Davis's writings and talks on her second profession: the art of translation. The award-winning translator from the French reflects on her experience translating Proust, Madame Bovary, and Michel Leiris. She also makes an extended visit to the French city of Arles, and writes about the varied adventures of learning Norwegian, Dutch, and Spanish through reading and translation.
... 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.
