translators from the French

Lydia Davis & Anna Moschovakis

read from their work

Friday, December 9, 2011, 6:00 PM

The Center for Fiction

17 East 47th Street
(between Fifth & Madison)
New York, NY 10017
(212-274-1160)

Lydia Davis is an acclaimed translator and fiction writer. Her most recent translation is Gustave Flaubet’s Madame Bovary (Viking Press, 2010); past translations include works by Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, Vivant Denon, Michel Butor, and Pierre Jean Jouve. Her translation of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way (Penguin Classics, 2004), part of a complete new translation of In Search of Lost Time, received the 2003 French-American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation Translation Prize, which is the second time she has received this award—in 1992, her translation of Michel Leiris’s Scratches was similarly honored. Davis has been named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for her translations and her fiction. She is the author of numerous short story collections, including Varieties of Disturbance (a finalist for the National Book Award), Samuel Johnson is Indignant, Almost No Memory, Break It Down, Story and Other Stories, Sketches for a Life of Wassilly, The Thirteenth Woman, and of one novel, The End of the Story. Her stories were recently brought together in one volume, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (FSG, 2009), which was called “one of the great, strange American literary contributions” by James Wood in The New Yorker. Davis has received MacArthur and Guggenheim grants and she is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Anna Moschovakis has translated The Jokers by Albert Cossery (New York Review Books), The Engagement by Georges Simenon (New York Review Books) and The Possession by Annie Ernaux (Seven Stories Press). She is the author of two books of poetry, You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake (Coffee House Press, 2011) and I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone (Turtle Point Press, 2006), and a number of chapbooks including The Blue Book, Dependence Day Parade, and No Medea. Her awards include fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Fund for Poetry, and a translation fellowship from Le Centre National du Livre. Her translation of The Jokers was a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award and the French-American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation Translation Prize. She is a longtime member of Brooklyn-based publishing collective Ugly Duckling Presse, for which she edits several books a year and heads up the Dossier Series of investigative texts.