Essays One

by Lydia Davis

  With the third line, then, we are moving away from the shepherd-sheep metaphor and into the more explicit message concerning the Lord’s spiritual guidance and our salvation.

  * * *

  Now, in the fourth stanza, we come to another very famous part of the psalm and also to an interesting shift in person. The psalm up to this point has been narrated in the third and first persons: “The Lord” and “he” interact with “me” and “my.” Now, although the “I” is retained, the “he” is addressed directly and personally as “you,” or, in the KJV, the familiar “thou.”

  Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

  This shift could be read as an emotional one: the speaker has been objectively describing a situation, how the Lord interacts with him; now, overcome by the emotion of this relationship, he, or she—but, although I don’t know what the latest scholarship has decided about the authorship of the psalms, it would be convenient here to assume the psalm was written by King David—directly addresses the Lord, in gratitude, perhaps.

  The explanation could also be that the two parts of the psalm—the first three stanzas and the last three—were composed by different hands.

  This fourth stanza is perhaps the emotional heart of the psalm, strong though the first line is; longer, more dramatic than the other lines, it is certainly climactic both rhetorically and imagistically. It may be this part that has made the psalm so memorable to so many believers, as well as nonbelievers, especially in times of fear or crisis, its phrases being so charged with emotion, even including the intimate “thou”: “the valley of the shadow of death”; “fear no evil”; “thou art with me”; “comfort me.”

  It is this stanza that I think about when I am contemplating the effect of translation, and, more generally, the importance of the effect of the beauty of the King James Version in conveying the spiritual messages contained within many of the most eloquent passages of the Bible.

  Would this line have had the same emotional effect if it had been known first, or only, in any of the other available translations?

  Even when I walk through a valley of deep darkness;

  even though I walk through the darkest valley;

  even when I go through the darkest valley;

  even when I must walk through the darkest valley;

  even if I shall walk in the valleys of the shadows of death;

  Maybe. And then there is also Young’s Literal, which claims to be the closest to the original—though it does not claim to be the most eloquent and is sometimes impossible to understand:

  also—when I walk in a valley of death-shade.

  I can’t compare any of these to the original Hebrew, although evidently Young’s Literal should be reasonably close, but I do prefer the KJV, again. Is this merely because of long familiarity?

  It is rhetorically, or stylistically, different from the preceding lines: it begins with an exclamation—“Yea”—followed by a dependent clause—“though I walk,” in contrast to all the other sentences so far, which have employed a plainer, more direct subject-verb construction.

  “Yea” is not the same in meaning as “even,” the favorite choice of the other translations. Although the word, or at least this spelling, often appears incorrectly in student writing when the author really intends “Yeah,” or even the cheer “Yay,” it actually means, most simply, “Yes,” as in the phrase “yea or nay.” But in some contexts, including this one, it means “indeed” or “truly”: “Indeed, though I walk in the valley.” And since “though,” here, is ambiguous, meaning either “although” or “even when,” the line may be understood to begin: “Truly, even when I walk in the valley.” And notice the comma after “Yea,” an important pause. The translator is writing “Indeed” or “Truly” and asking us to pause and prepare ourselves for what will follow. And what will follow is highly dramatic: we are very concretely and suddenly walking through a valley—to continue the sheep and sheepherding imagery—and it lies in shadow, and the shadow is cast by death itself.

  Now, this is a phrase I have always found very powerful: “in the valley of the shadow of death.” Is it awkward, or not? Is it more, or less, effective writing to repeat the “of”? I vote for more effective, for reasons of both imagery and rhythm: in this translation, the line unfolds part by part to reveal the image, the valley coming first, the shadow second, and death, climactically, last. Any compression, or economy, I think, takes away from this gradually developing image—any compression such as “darkest valley,” “valley of deep darkness” (which, besides the compression, contains an awkward alliteration), or even “valley of death’s shadow”—which is also hard to say. To my ear, the repetition of the two “of” phrases creates a strong and pleasing rhythm—and an accumulation of menace, “shadow” being followed by “death.”

  The image of the valley, with its unfolding darkness and its repeated phrases, is then followed by the very brief and succinct statement, especially strong by contrast: “I will fear no evil.” This phrase, in turn, is followed by a colon, again signaling that what follows will explain or interpret what came before—“I will fear no evil” because “thou art with me” and, after the semicolon—indicating an equivalent statement—“thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.” Here, we return to the sheepherding imagery, though it is not at first apparent to me why the shepherd’s traditional single staff has been doubled by the rod.

  Shepherds have traditionally carried what we normally call crooks—they are staffs, or staves, that serve as walking sticks but also have a hooked end useful for catching hold of the neck or leg of a lamb or ewe or ram that has gotten caught in an inaccessible place, perhaps a thicket of brambles, or simply for guiding it into the correct path or direction, or restraining it for any one of many purposes. The crooked end, I learned at one point, is also useful for hurling clods of earth at recalcitrant sheep to get them moving. But perhaps the ancient biblical shepherds, and others, too, carried a rod as well as a staff. In some early medieval illustrations, shepherds are depicted carrying only a sort of cudgel. Perhaps the rod referred to in this psalm was a stout stick or club for fending off predators or even disciplining wayward sheep.

  In this context, however, since both the rod and the staff “comfort” the sheep, the rod would be for protecting, not disciplining, the sheep and the staff for gently guiding it.

  * * *

  The penultimate stanza seems to desert the sheepherding metaphor:

  Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

  One commentator, however, ingeniously defends the idea that the metaphor has not actually been abandoned, since, he maintains, it was an ancient practice, in at least one sheepherding culture, to lay out feed for the sheep on low stone tables. Similarly, the anointing of the head, he posits, was possibly the administering of a protective medical treatment to the sheep.

  Structurally, the elegance of the prose style is maintained with the alliteration of the pr’s in the first clause—“preparest” and “presence”; the parallel structure of “Thou preparest” and “thou anointest”; and the harmony of the set of three clauses—three statements—within the one sentence, the clauses becoming progressively shorter.

  The colon suggests that the second and third statements, the anointing and the cup overflowing, describe events that take place as part of the dinner.

  * * *

  The last clause returns us from the second person address (“thou”) to the third-person narration (“the Lord”):

  Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

  Here, the opening “Surely” echoes the earlier opening “Yea,” creating another parallel within the six stanzas of the psalm—both “Yea” and “Surely” being adverbs of intensification, as opposed to the openings of the fir
st three lines and the fifth, which are subject-verb pairs. Adding to the eloquence of this final stanza, I hear the double alliteration in “follow” and “life,” though it is subtle; I hear the alliteration also in “dwell” and “Lord,” and “Surely” and “shall,” and the assonance in “life” and “I.” Quiet though these echoes are, they effectively bind these closing statements together and strengthen their emotional impact.

  Besides the positive emphasis of the opening “Surely,” and the alliteration and assonance, this last stanza gains further force from its return to a mainly Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, as in the opening line. (Only “surely” and “mercy” are Latinate.)

  Here, the colon is ambiguous, because of the “and” that follows it: the colon appears to introduce what follows, as an extension of the statement, but the “and” implies something else—that the second part of the sentence provides new and different material.

  As for the extended sheepherding metaphor, though it would seem to have been definitively left behind in this final sentence, the same determined commentator who found a husbandry reference in “preparing a table” made an interpretive reach and chose to see “goodness” and “mercy” as, just possibly, two kindly and watchful sheepdogs.

  2015

  Remember the Van Wagenens

  The age of fifty, whether it is or not, looks very much like a halfway point. So this may be why—imagining rightly or wrongly that we are nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita—we find ourselves reconsidering our life to come (looking forward) and our life past (looking back).

  I quote this Italian not to show off my familiarity with foreign languages, but because these are some of the few “memorized” words that tend to float into the forefront of my mind quite regularly, if not necessarily accurately. These particular words are sometimes followed by others no doubt even less accurate: mi ritrovai in un’ selva oscura.

  * * *

  Dream about Mademoiselle Roser: She was in a small-town library, probably this one here in my town but not resembling it. She had short, straight white hair (she did not, in life), and she was very kempt and fashionable, and rather small (she was large, in life). I was very happy to see her there. At last I could tell her that I had grown up to be a translator, and was now in fact translating Proust, which would have to appear to her as a sort of pinnacle of a translator’s career, whether it really is or not (the real pinnacle being, perhaps, the less popular Leiris, who may be, in fact, stylistically more intricate and daunting than Proust, and doesn’t a translator test her mettle on style more immediately, at least, than on other aspects of the work, on its larger conception or form?). I realized that she might not remember me, but she would still be pleased that a pupil of hers was now translating French. She was an emphatic, exuberant, and generous person, with severe, high standards. I was very happy. Then I remembered that she had died.

  * * *

  I tell my mother I think Mlle Roser, though dead, can still see me and understand. She is shocked. “You don’t really believe that!” But I do. I did not use to believe the dead lived on, but I have changed my thinking about that.

  * * *

  There was a hunt, last month, at my old school, for evidence of Mlle Roser. We went down into the basement, even into certain locked inner rooms behind the utility or shop rooms. There were no old boxes of that particular textbook. But back upstairs there were some letters and a few photographs. She was an impressive-looking woman. The photographs seemed to confirm my memory of her, but once I had seen them, I had to work hard to remember what it was I actually did remember, without the influence of the photographs.

  * * *

  When you think you will not remember something, you write it down, either in a notebook or on a handy piece of paper. You have many pieces of paper all over the house and in all sorts of pockets and bags with things written on them that you either don’t remember or do, also, remember—either do not have in your mind also or do have in your mind also. So the pieces of paper with writing on them supplement the living tissue of your memory, as though your usable, active memory goes beyond the bounds of your head out onto these pieces of paper.

  * * *

  Could one say that, in outward-moving circles (or planes—rectangles or squares), not only does the notebook supplement and represent the mind, but the desk also, and then the study, the house, and the grounds of the house? (Stopping at the fence: The street beyond it and then the neighborhood and the town are no longer private spaces.)

  * * *

  Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space is of course very important to think of (though the translation is in spots unnecessarily abstract and obtuse) when we are talking about the identification of the mind and physical space. The verticality of the house; the rationality, the intellectuality of the attic; the darkness, the subterranean, the unconscious of the cellar.

  * * *

  Where would your oldest friend, Mary, your oldest childhood friend, be, after forty years of disappearance? When you locate her again, where is she? To your surprise, in Africa. But then you see the naturalness of it: Where else would the material of the most essential old memories retreat, but to the continent that has always been so mysterious to you?

  Her last name, too, is one that shines, so now there is a light shining in the place that harbors the old memories.

  Her two younger sisters, being less essential, have receded only as far as Massachusetts and Philadelphia.

  * * *

  The difference between the thing remembered (the landscape of memory) and the thing as it continues to exist in present-day reality—both of them existing. The difference between the street of the childhood memory, and the street now. The house then, and the house now. Mary and her sisters then, on Crescent Street, and now: in Massachusetts, Philadelphia, and … Nigeria. Their grandmother’s Whately farmhouse then—surrounded on three sides by vast fields—and now: crowded by other houses. My other earliest childhood friend, Marilyn, next door, then—eating a lamb chop at her kitchen table (clear as day in my mind)—and now, living with her husband and children in Paris (less clear). The thing remembered and what there is now both exist. But one exists only in my brain and the other out there for other people to see, too.

  * * *

  The memories exist physically in the brain cells. A smell opens a pathway to the memory of a canvas book bag that I haven’t remembered for years. At least I don’t remember that I have remembered it, and yet the cells containing the memory, the memory of the smell, have sat there in my brain for years.

  * * *

  Why is there any need to find them again (childhood friend and grammar book)? To tie together that past and this present, but also that self that I was then with this self now? Is it once again a question of saying, Yes, I do exist, and Yes, I did exist all along? This self that must somehow be dealt with—reaffirmed, subdued, or merely ignored and taken for granted.

  * * *

  Trying out the idea that this particular past does not matter anyway. Another person has another past that matters to her. But that doesn’t matter in any absolute way, any more than mine absolutely matters. She also wants to find her childhood friends. But I could exchange mine for hers; mine have no more weight than hers. It is all circumstantial and accidental. Which is why other people’s “earliest” memories are so often banal: they have no objective interest, and yet their authors are bent on “truthfully” reporting them.

  * * *

  William Bronk writing it over and over again: that we are each only temporary manifestations of Life. Or at least, this is what I want to think he is writing, and so this is how I remember it.

  * * *

  That the dead are still “with us”: it started, anyway, with Mlle Roser. I say to my mother, quite sincerely (I am trying again to remember it correctly), that I believe Mlle Roser, whose company my mother remembers sharing more than once for dinner and once for some sort of theatrical performance in Paris, and who died some years ago, is still
alive in some form and taking an interest in what I may write about her and in what I may “do” with my French. I say to my mother that I believe Mlle Roser is still aware of some things, and she says in a shocked tone, “Are you serious?” In her tone is not mere interest or curiosity, as I would prefer, but incredulity and a hint of scorn—this notion of mine, if sincere, is ridiculous, even hysterical. (Or am I misreading her tone? Is this really, instead, the urgency of an old woman who can’t afford to waste precious minutes of her remaining life reacting to insincere or foolish statements?)

  * * *

  What is certain, in any case, is that the dead do live on in memory, in the recesses of the mind of the living. But seem to be outside the mind. Just as a childhood landscape remembered seems to be outside, as it was really outside at the time. That landscape was outside me at the time, but is inside me now. No one sees it but I. Others see what is there now instead of that landscape (what is there being usually a more crowded landscape).

  * * *

  The dead living on, “really”: in the case of Mlle Roser, is this impression stronger because she was a teacher, and a teacher of young children, therefore someone overseeing, someone taking command and assuming responsibility for the many young lives who passed through her hands? So that even “up there” she would still feel somehow responsible?