Podcasts Education Self-Improvement Conversations with Tyler Lydia Davis on Language and Literature

Lydia Davis on Language and Literature

Published: March 23, 2022, noon

A prolific translator, author, and former professor of creative writing, Lydia Davis\u2019s motivation for her life\u2019s work is jarringly simple: she just loves language. She loves short, sparkling sentences. She loves that in English we have Anglo-Saxon words like \u201cunderground\u201d or Latinate alternatives like \u201csubterranean.\u201d She loves reading books in foreign languages, discovering not only their content but a different culture and a different history at the same time. Despite describing her creative process as \u201cchaotic\u201d and herself as \u201cnot ambitious,\u201d she is among America\u2019s best-known short story writers and a celebrated essayist.

Lydia joined Tyler to discuss how the form of short stories shapes their content, how to persuade an ant to leave your house, the difference between poetry and very short stories, Proust\u2019s underrated sense of humor, why she likes Proust despite being averse to long books, the appeal of Josep Pla\u2019s The Gray Notebook, why Proust is funnier in French or German than in English, the hidden wit of Franz Kafka, the economics of poorly translated film subtitles, her love of Vel\xe1zquez and early Flemish landscape paintings, how Bach and Schubert captured her early imagination, why she doesn\u2019t like the Harry Potter novels\u2014but appreciates their effects on young readers, whether she\u2019ll ever publish her diaries, how her work has evolved over time, how to spot talent in a young writer, her method (or lack thereof) for teaching writing, what she learned about words that begin with \u201cwr,\u201d how her translations of Proust and Flaubert differ from others, what she\u2019s most interested in translating now, what we can expect from her next, and more.

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Read a\xa0full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the\xa0full video.

Recorded February 3rd, 2022

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