What I've Been Reading, Snijders + L.Davis

Speaking of obsessions, I did a section of my Reed thesis on Lydia Davis and have been stalking her around the internet ever since (which I clearly have far too much time to do). Yesterday I found her translation of Dutch short, short story writer A.L Snijders's text from "The Mole and Other Very Short Animal Stories," which was published in the online journal Asymptote. She is a well-known translator of Proust and other French writers, thus my first thought was, wow, I didn't know LD spoke Dutch.

Turns out, she doesn't. In the translator's notes (one of the reasons I like reading lit mag translations), Davis writes: 

"I had not thought of translating from the Dutch until I visited Amsterdam last May. A book of my own had just come out there, published by Atlas. I was very pleased by the whole experience—the visit and the book—and thought I would like  to offer something in return by attempting to translate some work from Dutch. Preferably short-short stories, since that form was so natural for me, and preferably not too difficult, since I had no previous acquaintance with the language." 

This changes my whole perception of translation, which I always took to require a strong enough knowledge of a language to get creative with it. Apparently not, as Davis uses only the internet, a "tiny, yellow, stained travel dictionary," and Dutch speaking friends. On the other hand, it only enforced my conclusions that however dedicated Davis is to language, for her a source of a career and constant refiguring, she views it's accuracy rather lightly, always a part of a game. Unsurprisingly the subject of these pieces is also playful, like the cows whose action and inaction she narrates in Cows, her most recent publication. 

As to Snijders's storie,s they are pleasing in just the way that Davis's are, and seem to trouble over similar issues. He touches on philosophical questions, while describing the ordinarily banal:

"I have never—and that is very difficult—seen a mole. Via language, certainly, I have certainly heard him described, but I have never seen him, in my life the mole is a creature that is never seen, like the crab that lives eight kilometers deep in the Indian Ocean and that no one has ever seen, not even my neighbor."

In this case he addresses Davis's own favorite question of how much we, as human observers, can ever know, especially through language. Both are wonderfully true to the smallest of human observations all the same. I truly enjoyed Snijder's stories, and if you have never read such short pieces of this prose-poetry hybrid, you must read them, and if they peak your interest, Davis's Collected Stories.