In Aguilar’s case, the questions and answers continued as Davis and Cote sped her to the Albany train station. Inside the big brick building, the three cats dart up and down the stone steps and lounge in squares of sun under the tall classroom windows.”īoth interviewers describe Davis as a gracious and conscientious hostess. Fronth-Nygren describes the scene: “In the field across the road are the cows Davis has written about in ‘The Cows.’ Or rather, two of the cows she wrote about have been slaughtered and replaced by new cows, while the third, which refused to enter the van to be taken to slaughter, is still grazing in the field. Their public conversation was supplemented the next spring by two private sessions, one with Fronth-Nygren and another with the Spanish journalist Andrea Aguilar, each of whom visited Davis at home, in the converted school building she shares with her husband, the painter Alan Cote, in upstate New York. “That knowledge, of cats and gardens and family members, followed us onstage.” “Soon we were talking about cats and gardens and family members, all in Norwegian,” Fronth-Nygren remembers.

The day before, Davis had met Fronth-Nygren for an introductory lesson in Norwegian.

This interview began in Oslo, in September 2013, as a public conversation between Lydia Davis and her translator Johanne Fronth-Nygren at the Norwegian-American Literary Festival. Interviewed by Andrea Aguilar & Johanne Fronth-Nygren Issue 212, Spring 2015

The cows by lydia davis