Lydia Davis: commitment

Transcript context

…At current margins, what is your dream translation job? Oh, I actually don’t want to translate anymore. [laughter] What I decided at a certain point — it’s partly because I have a lot of other things I want to do urgently — at a certain point, I thought I do want to go on translating, but they will all have to be very, very short stories. I, at that point, switched over to translating. There’s a Swiss writer I like a lot called Peter Bichsel. Some of his early books were translated here, but these are newspaper columns — autobiographical — that I really like a lot. I translated a few of those, and they’re only a page and a half long. If I wanted to answer your question properly, I’d say that’s my dream translation job — texts like that that are autobiographical and short. The last question: As readers, in terms of publication, what can we expect next from you?…

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