Lydia Davis: evaluation

Transcript context

…If one, as a writer, sets out to create an intentionally fragmentary or intentionally incomplete literary work, can that succeed? Or does it have to, in a sense, be accidentally fragmentary? I think it can succeed. In fact, not to bring it back to myself necessarily, but obviously, I am so well acquainted with my own work — pretty well acquainted anyway. I think the novel I wrote, the one novel, The End of the Story, was meant to give the impression of fragmentation because the narrator was trying to remember incidents, so the memories come back in fragments. I was thinking even first of a book that influenced me a lot in my writing of that, and that was Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights, which I haven’t revisited in a while. But that, too, gave the impression of being fragmented, but was written that way deliberately. I think also A Sorrow beyond Dreams — which I’m about to revisit — by Peter Handke also gives that impression of fragmentation. In his case, I think it may be a combination of actually trying to retrieve memories that he had trouble retrieving and allowing the book to work that way and be that way. Do you worry, as a translator, that some languages are word poor? This charge is sometimes leveled against French and Spanish relative to English and German. Or do you think that is not correct?…

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