May 2026 – Ruminations

Lydia Davis is a writer and translator. In her first book of essays (Essays One, which I haven’t read), Google tells me her subjects are the craft of writing, literary influences, the visual arts, found arts, religion, and translation theory. In Essays Two, she focuses on translation theory and practice. In a lead-off essay, Ms. Davis explains her love for the translation process. From there, she discusses specific English translations from French (Proust, Leiris, and Flaubert), how she learned Spanish, Dutch, and Norwegian, and observations from visits to various parts of France. Along the way, she discusses her own theory and style of translation, comparing it to other well-respected translators of canonical novels, in particular Proust and Flaubert. There is also an interesting essay on translating older English—particularly nineteenth-century North English and Scottish dialogue—into more modern English.

I do not usually read books of essays, but I chose to read this because I am a writer—ironically, mostly essays—and like many of my contemporaries, my novels (there are presently four) may someday be picked up and translated into languages other than English (fat chance. Maybe if I pay). I was interested in the various philosophies that motivate particular translations and translators. In particular, one essay, her translation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, caught my eye because of all the novels Ms. Davis discusses, Madame Bovary is the only one I’ve read, and it just so happens in her translation.

What did I hope to get out of these essays? I thought I might pick up some stylistic nuances—in English—by exploring different approaches to translation. Particularly as regards Flaubert, who has been translated many times, Ms. Davis does not disappoint, giving numerous examples of differences between her translation and others’, even showing us changes in her own work as she revised her opinion for later editions. This has helped me as a writer in at least one specific way. Ms. Davis points out that, beginning with a lyrical passage in the original, the translation can be more literal, but less lyrical in English, or the translator can try to retain the lyricism of the original and possibly sacrifice some literalness. Her examples help me to understand the difference, in English, between lyrical and non-lyrical language that nevertheless—and in perfectly good English grammar—faithfully represents the original.

What struck me was that her non-lyrical examples were, nevertheless, examples of perfectly good style, even if they did not reflect the poesis of the original.

In my Kindle edition of Bovary, Ms. Davis includes an introduction in which she discusses the novel, Flaubert, and her translation. There is material here that is duplicated in the essays volume or vice versa—I do not know which came first.

At one point in her introduction, Ms. Davis points out that in the first love scene between Rudolphe and Emma, Flaubert waxes lyrical about Emma’s reverie—giving it 20 or so lines—followed immediately by the short sentence: “Rudolphe, cigar between his teeth, mended with his penknife one of the bridles which was broken.” The reader is left to surmise that while Emma still lies on her back in reverie, Rudolphe has gotten up and is standing next to his horse. Davis calls this an irony in the “… juxtapositions Flaubert creates between the ‘poetic’ and the brutally commonplace.” Flaubert, she says, “undercuts his own lyricism.”

Me thinks she has missed a point… This is a brilliant Flaubert commentary on men, women, and affairs, especially adulterous ones… Emma is experiencing post-coital reverie, what my girlfriend and I call “basking in the glow.” Emma is in love with Rudolphe (always a bad idea where adultery is engaged). Her mind floats on the experience’s aftermath. By contrast, for Rudolphe, Emma is but one more successful seduction. Sex being over (hopefully, the cad gave her at least one good orgasm. We never know in these novels), one moves on to other tasks—fixing the bridle being necessary for the ride home, after all.

All in all, a book that helps one appreciate the art of translation and a pat on the back to the translator community. There were a few useful insights for me here. She spends far more pages on Proust (whom I haven’t read) than on Flaubert, but all of it together enlightened me at least a little.

Oil companies have become the scapegoats for rage against onrushing climate disasters. The combustion products of hydrocarbon energy are largely responsible for climate change, and oil companies have lied about the effect of their product on the climate for as long as there have been oil companies.

What was the lie? Earth scientists understood the physics of carbon warming as early as the mid-19th century. They also knew that the planet’s ecosystem absorbed atmospheric carbon by several pathways. What they didn’t know was the tipping point, the point where the CO2 generated exceeds the capacity of the sinks. The oil companies couldn’t lie for very long about the basic effect of atmospheric carbon, but they could deny that we were anywhere near saturating the carbon sinks, and they continued to do so well into the 1980s and beyond, when the capacity of the sinks was being better quantified. They also lied about the ecological damage caused by oil spills, well leaks, and their copious release of methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

Humans have been putting carbon into the atmosphere since they learned to control fire. It wasn’t very much. There weren’t many humans after all. In those days, human-generated carbon—most from burning wood—was a small fraction of the carbon produced by volcanoes and lightning-triggered forest fires.

A few thousand years ago, humans discovered coal. As the expanding population needed more heating and cooking, carbon emissions jumped. Coal was the energy source that powered metallurgy and produced steam for the Industrial Revolution, while also heating homes and cooking meals. Another jump in carbon output. Some people noticed. In the 18th and 19th centuries, London was infamous for its coal-caused “killer fogs.”

Coal producers didn’t lie about the climate implications of their product. Not until the mid-18th century did anyone even suspect such a connection, and not until the mid-19th century did earth science have experimental confirmation. Nor did coal producers “push” their product. People adopted coal because it was better than wood for all uses, old and new, as the centuries marched on. Coal is more “energy dense” than wood, a superior energy source—when it could be obtained—for most uses.

By the time oil came along, earth science was well aware of the causal link between carbon and atmospheric warming. Suppose the oil companies didn’t lie about it? Suppose their executives, all saints, began to preach the danger of too much atmospheric carbon (remember, they didn’t know how much was too much) in 1910? Do you suppose there would have been, between then and now, a significant moderation in the exploding development of technology energized by oil?

Would the German admiralty have forgone the production of submarines (the first modern ships designed around oil), the British abandon tank production, and everyone eschew airplanes? Would the industrial nations of the world have heeded oil company warnings and artificially limited growth in carbon-linked energy until research had cleared up the “limits” issue decades later? Humans shifted away from wood because coal is more energy-dense. Coal energy supported larger populations and, therefore, expanded military and economic power. Oil, when it came along, triggered and sustained a further expansion of energy-intensive technological innovation, all having military implications. Would it ever have been politically possible to restrict the expansion of an oil economy?

What could oil producers have said without lying? They might have honestly said: “We don’t know how much is too much, but given an expansion of carbon-based energy from 1910 onwards, we must eventually reach those limits.” Unfortunately, for various technical reasons, even the most pessimistic earth scientists could only guess at the limits until we began to breach them. Only by observing a failure here and there could we become aware of the real limits. The first breaches likely occurred in the early 1950s. Scientists didn’t begin to notice them until the 1970s. By the 1990s, the limits became quantifiable. We are still refining the numbers today.

In the second half of the 20th Century, the world’s much-expanded population and virtually all of its technology and economy were dependent, directly or indirectly, on oil. The first international agreements aimed at reducing the use of carbon-based energy were signed in the 1990s. By 2015, the combined nations of the world were, every year, pumping twice as much carbon into the atmosphere as they were when those first agreements were struck—see reference to the Wallace-Wells book below.

There were “climate scientists” in the first half of the twentieth century, and also “climate change deniers” who were not oil executives. These people are still with us today. Others accepted the science, but the excuse was always “we do not know how much is too much.” If oil companies hadn’t lied? There would, I think, have been more and better-funded early research. We might have begun quantifying “too much” in the 1950s rather than in the 1980s. But by 1950, the world was already addicted to oil.

By the 1950s, there had been two carbon-intensive world wars. International air travel was an established industry, and America—at least—was addicted to cars. In those days, there were no “clean” alternatives (and we can argue about how clean the present alternatives really are). By 1950, it was already economically untenable and politically suicidal to attempt to minimize, let alone abandon, carbon. Had we, in the 1950s and 60s, invested more in solar and wind technology, we might, by the 1990s, have developed renewable, efficient energy and transport technologies at scale. But the same carbon-intensive mining and material processing required to produce the technological inputs for those products would still be necessary, and no military on earth would have abandoned faster fighters, bigger bombers, more powerful tanks, and so on. None of that would have changed.

The economic and social forces driving the doubling of annual atmospheric carbon emissions in 2015—twenty years after the first international agreements to limit them—were equally present in 1975! There might have been some moderation in the growth of atmospheric carbon emissions if we had understood the Earth’s limits thirty years earlier than we did. Still, by that time it was already too late—economically and politically—to do more than produce a small alteration of the present trajectory.

Oil companies lied about atmospheric carbon to protect their markets. But they didn’t need to lie. The energy density of oil, coupled with the coal-based technological explosion that began in the 19th century, ensured oil’s ready adoption over coal (which took over from wood without any lies by the coal industry). Even if oil companies publicly acknowledged the science already known in their earliest days, it wouldn’t have made much difference to the world’s present addiction to oil. Almost literally everything in our lives, everything we own, or use, in every culture, rests on oil in some part of its lifecycle. The oil companies are not responsible for climate change. We, ourselves, our governments, our culture and economy are responsible. It has been us all along.

References: The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells (2018)

The Geography of Risk by Gilbert Gaul (2019)

The End of the World is Just the Beginning by Peter Zeihan (2022)