Lydia Davis on Translation

Local blogger Lydia Davis is blogging about translation, in anticipation of her new translation of Madame Bovary: “We say to ourselves, complacently looking to Darwin, that [translations] will compete with one another and the fittest will survive. But a significant problem is that the fittest will not necessarily be the best, although it, or they, may be. The ones that survive may be the best edited, and/or the best promoted, and/or the cheapest, and/or the ones accompanied by the most useful apparatus….”