Lydia Davis has long been regarded as a ‘writer's writer’. Her working form is the short story and often these are very short, some only one sentence long. In a reading public used to novels, it's easy for Davis’ work to slip between the cracks. The publication of her Collected Stories, in 2009, gave a much more substantial view of her career as a writer than had previously been available in one place. Davis won the 2013 Man Booker International prize, giving her much more international recognition.

Yet Davis had already received international recognition as a translator. She became a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres in France in 1999. She has translated a substantial number of books from French, including, most famously, a new translation of Marcel Proust's Du côté de chez Swann (Proust 2002). She has also translated five of Maurice Blanchot's fictional texts, including Death Sentence (Blanchot 1978), and two volumes of the surrealist poet Michel Leiris’ autobiography, Scratches (Leiris 1997a) and Scraps (Leiris 1997b). Most recently, in 2010, she published a new translation of Flaubert's Madame Bovary. These are only the most high profile translations; between 1978 and 2002 she translated over twenty book-length works, including four novels by Pierre-Jean Jouve, two novels by Conrad Detrez, a travelogue by Michel Butor, a biography of Alexis de Tocqueville, as well as a book on masculine identity by Elizabeth Badinter, and several more novels and non-fiction works. Davis’ career as a translator began at the same time as her career as a writer: she published her first book-length translation, with Paul Auster, in 1975. The pair went on to translate four more books together, including a book of Sartre's interviews and a novel, Aboard the Aquitaine, by Georges Simenon.

Davis’ work, I argue in this book, challenges the separation between writing and translating. Through an exploration of the relationship between her translations and her own work, as well as an investigation into how Davis uses translation in her stories, The Many Voices of Lydia Davis questions the division between her roles as a writer and as a translator and the separation between the two modes of creativity.