As read from the short story Free, from the Night Train collection. I read a Henry Oliver tweet today that asked: what is your favorite fiction you’ve read this year? This entire collection by A.L. Snijders would be my answer.
The stories don’t always make sense, a stream of consciousness type. But I enjoy every short morsel.
Hope Lydia Davis has another translation of Snijders’ stories in queue.
Snijders, A. L.. Night Train. United States, New Directions, 2021. pg 81
The tearoom was built in 1936, one year before my birth. The weather is bleak and rainy, I have my woolen cap on. He takes the photos. Head a little higher, no, back just a little, now turn, can you look more toward Van Eeghenstraat. I look and wonder which window it was. I tell the photographer: my mother fell out of a window there in 1912.
Lydia Davis is a legendary short story writer. But her translation work should be heralded as well. Her translation brings Dutch writer A.L. Snijders’ stories to life in English.
One of my favorite books of this year. Snijder’s short stories read like jokes + poems + journal entries + essays. Wicked combination.
Must find more.
Snijders, A. L.. Night Train. United States, New Directions, 2021. pg 33
“Bake bread” is the first thing my grandson calls out when I meet him on the path. He has made a long journey, I lift him up, and my plan is to talk a little about a poem by Ezra Pound, in order to sway his thoughts. He is just four years old, but with poetry you can’t begin to early.
From the short story “Soup Bowl”
The late A.L Snijders was unique, prolific, producing a story nearly everyday. His stories read like poems-journal excerpts-glimpses-into daily Dutch life.
Snijders, A.L..Night Train: Very Short Stories. Translated by Lydia Davis, New Directions Publishing, 2021.
Lydia Davis on translating the late A.L. Snijders’ short stories:
I continued to work on it, still without a dictionary, “getting” a little more of it each time I read through through it. Simply reading a sentence carefully a second time yielded more understanding—I’m not sure exactly what happens in the brain between the first and the second readings.
Alomar came to the United States in late 2008 to join his mother and older brother who had emigrated in the 1900s. The fact that he was willing to leave behind and established career as a writer for an uncertain life speaks to the hopelessness of the situation in Syria even before its decent into open Civil War. He and I made these translations together in difficult circumstances: most were done in the front seat of his taxi in a Chicago suburb heavy with the ache of immigration and the unimaginable pain of watching one’s country implode from afar. With books and dictionaries piled on the dashboard, hoping the taxi line wouldn’t advance too quickly and force us to break our concentration with another “load,” we were able to make some part of that lost world in Damascus live again, however briefly. This pamphlet is some of the fruit of that soul-affirming work.
C.J. Collins, Fullblood Arabian, from the translators note, pg 62.
Osama Alomar‘s Fullblood Arabian deserves more attention. It’s a perfect book for returning to the office. You can get through five or six short stories while eating your lunch in the shade. Five or six meaningful stories while eating your lunch in the shade.
C.J.’s depiction of the translator’s life, sitting in Alomar’s Chicago taxi cab, getting through pages, stacked dictionaries on the dash, all the while hoping the taxi line doesn’t move, is a reminder of the hidden work that brings a book to life.
I cherish writers, like C.J. who bring you back to a moment with specific, clear, descriptions. It’s like I was in the backseat of the cab, watching a dream unfold.
I’ve been waiting months for this podcast episode. Tyler Cowen and Lydia Davis did not let me down.
For a writer of her stature, Lydia openly admits she finds very long books hard to approach:
COWEN: Do you think the late Thomas Pynchon became unreadable, that somehow it was just a pile of complexity and it lost all relation to the reader? Or are those, in fact, masterworks that we’re just not up to appreciating?
DAVIS: Since I hesitated to even open the books, I can’t answer you, because I do find — not all long books — but very long, very fat books a little hard to approach, and some of them, I try over and over. If I sense that it’s really a load of verbiage, I really don’t. I fault myself for not having the patience to get through at least one, say, late Pynchon, but I haven’t.
Don’t despair! Lydia Davis also struggled to read Ulysses. It took two cracks and a move to Ireland for her to finish:
I had a problem a long time ago trying to read Ulysses by Joyce, and started it twice, and finally read it when I lived in Ireland, which made it much easier because I had his context. That too — I suppose because it had different chapters, each of which approached the ongoing story in a very different way — I found that possible too.
I’m believing more and more, that what great books do, what the internet at it’s brightest light does, is make introductions.
Today’s introduction? The Catalan writer Josep Pla:
There’s a book by a Catalan writer called Josep Pla that’s called The Gray Notebook. That’s very fat, but I keep going back to it and delighting in it, but I’m not reading it all at once. I’m going back to it and just sort of nibbling away at it. It was an amazing project. He took an early, very brief diary of his when he was 21, I think, and it only covered a year and a half. He kept going back to it rather than publishing it. He kept going back to it and expanding it with more memories and more material, and I love that idea. Maybe that’s why I can read it.
Lydia admits the Harry Potter series didn’t captivate her. She preferred the writing in Philip Pullman’s The Dark Materials trilogy. But she understands, Harry Potter’s greatest value is hooking kids on reading:
COWEN: How would you articulate why you don’t like the Harry Potter novels?
DAVIS: That’s fairly easy, although I should have a page in front of me. It’s always better if you have the page, and you can say, “Look at this sentence, look at that sentence.” At a certain point, my son was reading Harry Potter as kids do and did. I think he was probably 11 or 10 or 11, 12, 9 — I don’t know. Also, the Philip Pullman trilogy, whose name I always forget. I thought it would be a lot of fun to read the Harry Potter books because I knew a lot of grownups were reading them and enjoying them. I thought, “This is great. There are a lot of them.”
But when I tried to read them, I didn’t like the style of writing, and I didn’t like the characters, and I didn’t like anything about them. Whereas, I opened the first Philip Pullman book and read the first page and said, “This is wonderful. The writing here is wonderful.” I really think there’s an ocean of difference. I wouldn’t put down the Harry Potter books because, as we know, they got a lot of kids reading and being enraptured with books. I think that matters more than anything, really — getting kids hooked on reading.
Brilliant and insightful. Do give it a listen or read the transcript in full here.
after spending more than 35 seasons in the Antarctic, my shelves are now crammed with field books. Many of the entries have since been logged into endless computer spreadsheets and exist in digital pixels to be shared with colleagues instantly around the world. Nevertheless, the daily context in which the data really lived is only revealed by going back and slowly thumbing my way through the books, page after page. It’s an enjoyable process returning to what have become, essentially, my indispensable ‘friends’.
Lydia Davis returns to a sentence to better understand its meaning. Ecologist David Ainley returns to his journals, his indispensable ‘friends’, for enjoyment.
Sometimes I read straight on without going back, but often, when I learn one word, it explains the meaning of other words that came just before it, so I look back, and, one by one, each newly acquired word gives me the clue to the next one. Knowing Tom had gotten onto his knees before climbing into bed gave me the answer to another word: rezar = pray. And another, later: arrodillarse had to mean “kneel.” Reading a sentence several times over is often enough to teach me most of the mysterious words.
Lydia Davis, Reading Las Aventuras de Tom Sawyer, pg 93, Essays Two
The essay Reading Las Aventuras de Tom Sawyer makes owning Essays Two entirely worth it. Lydia Davis’ passion for translation and foreign language led her to read a Spanish translation of Tom Sawyer by Sara Gomez. In the essay, Davis describes the little games she devised to bolster her understanding of Spanish. One game was, she decided to not look up any word in the dictionary while reading through the book. The idea being, to learn words from context only.
Lydia again reminds us of the power rereading a sentence. Here though, it’s to reveal the meaning of “mysterious” Spanish words. My guess is, not only did the rereading reveal the meaning, but it would likely have embedded the meaning into her memory.
I find that simply reading a sentence carefully a second time can yield significantly more understanding. I’m not sure exactly what happens in the brain between the first and second readings.
Lydia Davis, Before my morning coffee, pg 374, Essays Two
Here Lydia Davis is referring to re-reading a passage while translating an A.L. Snijders’ story from Dutch to English. But practicing a careful second reading could be applied to many other readings too. Emails and poems come to mind.
Floodlights and Goalposts 