Translation and response between Maurice Blanchot and Lydia Davis

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 then husband Paul Auster. In her career, writing has always co-existed with translating. Her identity as a writer is sometimes overshadowed by her activity as a translator: as James Wood remarks, when he first heard of Davis in the mid-1990s, “[s]he was known as a translator of the French autobiographer Michel Leiris and the philosopher and critic Maurice Blanchot” (88). Since the 1990s, she has published two other major translations: The Way by Swann’s, a translation of Marcel Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann, in 2002 and a translation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary in 2010, showing a continuation of her translation activity throughout her career.