Davis translated three books by Michel Leiris: Brisées: Broken Branches (1989), a collection of occasional essays, and two parts of his fourpart autobiography, Rules of the Game: Scratches (1997a) and Scraps (1997b). As mentioned in the Introduction, Davis wondered if Leiris was the ‘real pinnacle’ of a translator's career (Davis 1999: 87), given the complexity of his style and its close ties to the sound and sense of French. This chapter explores how Davis’ translations of Leiris produce a dialogue between the two authors, focusing, because of its centrality in Leiris’ oeuvre, on Davis’ relationship with La Règle du jeu. Leiris wrote in many genres, from surrealist poetry to ethnography, but for many critics his most important works are in the field of autobiography.

I begin with analyses of Davis’ translations of Leiris. Her approach to his work is uniquely radical, as Davis broke norms of translational procedure in responding to an unorthodox, poetic text. The recreative form of translation she practises here suggests a productive dialogue between the translation and Davis’ stories, which is also suggested by two texts by Davis with an intertextual link to Leiris, ‘Swimming in Egypt: Dreams While Awake and Asleep’ (Davis 2007b: 35–44) and ‘To Reiterate’ (Davis 1997a: 83). The second section of this chapter argues that these texts position Leiris as a precursor and influence, and the final section reads La Règle du jeu in relation to Davis’ writing, focusing on how Davis and Leiris have an affinity in their privileging of what Roman Jakobson (1960: 356–8) calls the ‘poetic function’ above narrative development in their texts. The poetic function is where language brings attention to itself, ‘focus[ing] on the message [i.e. the verbal text] for its own sake’ (ibid.: 356). This is not only relevant to poetry, but to any verbal text that is self-reflexive, folding the reader's attention back onto the text and the formal construction of that text.