Lydia Davis came to my attention via Dennis Cooper’s blog on his Blanchot day. In that particular post Lydia Davis describes how she wanted to meet Blanchot regarding her translation of his work and because she was curious about his personality. By that time, Blanchot had become so much of a recluse that he met with nobody, not even close friends who he’d know for years, apparently only exchanging letters. Below is more on Lydia Davis and the novel The End of the Story.

The End of the Story: A Novel (1995) – Lydia Davis
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“The last time I saw him, though I did not know it would be the last, I was sitting on the terrace with a friend and he came through the gate sweating, his face and chest pink, his hair damp, and stopped politely to talk to us.”

More on the first sentence of novels here.

Biography

Lydia Davis (born 1947) is a contemporary American author and translator of French. She is the daughter of Robert Gorham Davis and Hope Hale Davis. From 1974 to 1978 Davis was married to Paul Auster, with whom she has a son.

She has published six collections of short stories, including The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories (1976) and Break It Down (1986). Her most recent collection is Samuel Johnson is Indignant, published by McSweeney’s in 2002. Her stories are acclaimed for their brevity and humour. Many are only one or two sentences. In fact some of her stories are considered poetry or somewhere between philosophy, poetry and short story.

Davis has also translated Proust, Blanchot, Foucault, Michel Leiris, and other French writers. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydia_Davis [Oct 2006]

See also: translation – American literature – French literature