Translation is Hard Work. Lydia Davis Excites.

Lydia Davis learned German at age 7 after being stuck in a classroom in Graz, Austria. Schokolade mit Schlag (hot chocolate with cream) and if he slept late Schokolade ohne Schlag (no cream). After returning to the United States shortly after, he studied French, Latin, and Italian. This was followed by a lifetime of work as a translator (and novelist and short story writer and essayist).

His new book, The Second Essay, is organized around translation. As Davis points out in a foreword, the book focuses more on its material than its previous collection. “Articles One.” With “Two” it helped you have a pre-existing interest in translation, or at least a general curiosity about the language, while you only needed a pre-existing interest to enjoy the earlier collection. But whatever the subject, Davis is always the perfect companion: knowledgeable, adventurous, surprising.

In addition to translating Proust and Flaubert, he dealt with “books of all degrees of excellence and non-perfection, engaging and uninteresting”—among them an emotional biography of Marie Curie, art catalogues, travel essays, and Chinese histories. Whatever the source, Davis finds countless joys in his transformation. The first try here lists 21 of these pleasures. Translation, he says, puts a person in a close relationship with a writer, removes the invention anxiety that accompanies most writing work, and presents endless (but often solvable) riddles. It also offers a kind of hard seat travel: to puzzle with “Madame Bovary” is to shoot through a wormhole from 21st century America to 19th century France.

In an essay on translating Proust’s letters, Davis goes to the apartment where he wrote most of “In Search of Lost Time.” The flat was not preserved as it was, with its furnishings and artifacts as Proust had left, but instead became the site of a bank. Davis tours the writer’s former apartment, from an employee who has to occasionally run from the bank and grapple with banking questions. Client meetings are held in Proust’s bedroom, and the bank’s waiting room is where the author once stored a rebellious pile of inherited goods. “Any imaginative financier with some knowledge might be haunted by the ghostly presence of a crowded pile of heavy Fin de siècle furniture and personal connotations of proust sitting alone next to the potted plant,” Davis said. Writer.