Lizzie Davis
 

Writer, Editor, Translator from spanish and italian to english

Lizzie
Davis

 
 

About

Lizzie is a writer and a literary translator from Spanish and Italian to English. For eight years, she worked in various editorial roles at Coffee House Press, where as senior editor she had the privilege of acquiring and championing work by such writers as Jamie Marina Lau, Tom Comitta, K-Ming Chang, and Aurora Mattia, as well as Jawbone by Mónica Ojeda, translated by Sarah Booker (a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award for Translated Literature) and When Women Kill: Four Crimes Retold by Alia Trabucco Zerán, translated by Sophie Hughes (a finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism). Among her translations are Juan Cárdenas’s Ornamental (a finalist for the 2021 PEN Translation Prize) and The Devil of the Provinces (longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature); Elena Medel’s The Wonders, cotranslated with Thomas Bunstead; and a cotranslation, with author Valeria Luiselli, of Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (winner of an American Book Award and finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction). Her cotranslations of Daniela Tarazona’s The Animal on the Rock and Divided Island with Kevin Gerry Dunn are forthcoming from Deep Vellum in 2024 and 2025 respectively, and her translation of Pilar Fraile Amador’s Euphoria Days is forthcoming from Great Place Books in 2024.


Full-length Translations

The Animal on the Rock, a novel by Daniela Tarazona, cotranslated with Kevin Gerry Dunn (Deep Vellum, forthcoming)

Astro, a children’s book by Manuel Marsol (Transit Children’s Editions, forthcoming)

The Abandoners, essays by Begoña Gómez Urzaiz (The Borough Press, UK; Norton, US; 2024)

Euphoria Days, a novel by Pilar Fraile Amador (Great Place Books, 2024)

Divided Island, a novel by Daniela Tarazona, cotranslated with Kevin Gerry Dunn (Deep Vellum, 2024)

The Devil of the Provinces, a novel by Juan Cárdenas (Coffee House Press, 2023)

The Wonders, a novel by Elena Medel, cotranslated with Thomas Bunstead (Pushkin Press, UK; Algonquin Books, US; 2022)

Ornamental, a novel by Juan Cárdenas (Coffee House Press, 2020)

Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions by Valeria Luiselli, cotranslated with the author (Coffee House Press, 2017)

My First Bikini, poems by Elena Medel (Jai-Alai Books, 2015)

 

Selected translations and writing

The Brixton Review of Books, December 2019: “State of Emergency” by Alia Trabucco Zerán

The Brooklyn Rail: In Translation, November 2014: Selected poems by Pilar Fraile Amador

Granta 155: Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists, April 2021: “Sea of Stone” by Aura García-Junco

Granta Magazine, March 2022: Excerpt from The Wonders by Elena Medel, cotranslated with Thomas Bunstead

Guernica, June 2016: “The Boa’s Embrace” by Daniel Saldaña París

The Paris Review Daily, July 2020: “The City Has No Name,” translator’s note for Juan Cárdenas’s Ornamental

Southwest Review, January 2021: “The Bird” by Juan Cárdenas

Tank Magazine, April 2017: Excerpt from Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, cotranslated with the author

MAKE Magazine, October 2016: “How to Be a Performance Artist” by Daniel Saldaña París

Two Lines 31: Hauntings, September 2019: Excerpt from The Animal on the Rock by Daniela Tarazona

 

Selected Readings

the Center for fiction, New York, NY

Reading and conversation with Elena Medel, March 2022

Dallas Literary Festival, Dallas, TX

“Translating the Surreal: A Conversation with Juan Cárdenas and Lizzie Davis,” March 2021

Brown University, Providence, RI

Reading and talk for the Writers on Writing lecture series, October 2019

University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN

Panel on editing and nonprofit publishing for the creative writing program, November 2019

Twenty-five years of Two Lines, San Francisco, CA

Featured translator, read works in translation by Daniela Tarazona , September 2019

Mission Creek Festival, Iowa City, IA

Featured translator, read works in translation by Paulina Flores, April 2018

Two Lines 28 Launch Party: Celebrating Women in Translation, San Francisco, CA

Featured poet and translator, read works in translation by Pilar Fraile Amador, March 2018

American Literary Translators Association Bilingual Reading Series, Minneapolis, MN

Featured translator, read works in translation by Pilar Fraile Amador, October 2017

Escribe Aquí Bilingual Reading Series, Miami, FL

Featured translator, read works in translation by Elena Medel, October 2015

Panic cure: Poems from Spain for the Twenty-First Century, Providence, RI

Cohost and translator, read works in translation by Pilar Fraile Amador, September 2014

 

Selected honors

Translation house looren, Wernetshausen, Switzerland

Translator in Residence, June 2022

Pen translation prize finalist

For translation of Juan Cárdenas’s Ornamental, December 2020

omi international arts center, ghent, NY

Translator in Residence, September 2021

Bread Loaf Translators' Conference, Middlebury, VT

Katharine Bakeless Nason Scholarship, June 2017

A-FEST TRANSLATIOn COlloquium, New York, NY

Featured Emerging Translator, March 2017

Fiesta Del Libro y CUltura, Medellín, Colombia

Featured Independent Publisher, September 2017

OMI International Arts Center, Ghent, New York

Translator in Residence, November 2016

Brown University, Providence, RI

Kim Ann Arstark Memorial Award in Poetry, April 2015

Francis Mason Harris '26 Award in Poetry, April 2015


Endorsements

"Given the opportunity to invite any translator to help me with Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda Poems, I chose Lizzie Davis. She isn’t only a brilliant and intuitively gifted translator; she's a poet first. Her translations of Pilar Fraile Amador, one of the signal writers from that first generation to grow up in a Spain without Franco, are as strange and gorgeous and magnetic as the originals."  

—Forrest Gander, Author of BE WITH

 

“I’ve always believed that translating poetry requires much more than just being a good translator: it requires a special sensitivity that very few people have, as well as curiosity, a capacity for wonder, and a good ear. Lizzie Davis has all that and more. We’ve worked together on several projects, and each time she has proved to be a sharp and perceptive reader. I’m confident that her translation career will be full of great surprises.” 

—Daniel Saldaña París, author of Among Strange Victims

 

"In 2015, Jai-Alai Books brought out the first United States publication by the Spanish poet Elena Medel, Mi primer bikini / My First Bikini, translated by Lizzie Davis. The project was a dream come true for us, and working with Davis was a huge part of that. Medel wrote the book when she was sixteen, and the poems are full of obscure pop culture references and teenage idioms, while also displaying a strong sense of the magical and the mythic; in other words, it is a tricky book to translate. Davis put her whole heart and soul into the project, and her dedication is visible on every single page. I can't imagine the book without her." 

—P. Scott Cunningham, Founder and executive director, o, miami

 

“Seeing your own work in translation, especially if it’s a work of poetry, can result in an overwhelming sense of vertigo. Apprehension about whether the new text will conserve the spirit of the original is inevitable. But reading Lizzie’s first draft of Larva & Hedge banished every doubt. Lizzie has an extraordinary ability to capture the sense of the Castilian language and transfer it to English. The English version isn’t just faithful to the original text, it’s renewed, improved, even—as if in translation the book took on the breadth of the two perspectives, the two languages, on either side of the Atlantic. I have had the pleasure of working with Lizzie on the final versions of the poems, witnessing her acuity and agility in coming up with linguistic solutions that are both creative and precise. I sincerely hope to keep working with her in the future.” 

—Pilar Fraile Amador, author of días de euforia

 

"I loved working with Lizzie Davis. She’s an amazing editor, and I was very fortunate to have her. Lizzie has a very intelligent, keen eye. She was able to remove a lot of the excess, which helped elevate the manuscript to another level as a result of her acuity for language and plot. She’s also very thorough, and she read the manuscript several times. Each time, she was able to see something that would make it even better. There’s a maturity to the way she edits that can’t be learned; it’s an intrinsic or natural talent." 

—Vi Khi Nao, author of Fish in Exile


Recent projects

"[In The Wonders,] Medel’s poetic sensibility is evident in rhythmic, incantatory prose ably translated by Lizzie Davis and Thomas Bunstead, yet she also looks at the world through a good novelist’s magnifying glass. . . . A vivid and painfully intimate account of two easily overlooked lives.”

—Aaron Schulman, the new york times Book Review


“With pitch-black comedy, Ornamental, nimbly translated by Lizzie Davis, channels the ways that egomaniacs in science and art—in any field—rise to the top, up the pyramid of capitalism. . . . The rhythm of Cárdenas’s writing compels and reassures, as if driven by the very humanity the lab has helped suppress.

—Nathan scott Mcnamara, the new york times Book Review

 

Education

Brown University

B.A. LITERARY ARTS & ROMANCE LANGUAGES

Languages

  • English

  • Spanish

  • Italian
     

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