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Special Report
At Last, the Real Madame Bovary
Flaubert’s famous novel enjoys a greater following in the U.S. these days than in France.
When I agreed to translate a management book from French into English a few years ago I thought it would be a breeze. I knew the languages and I knew the subject. But line by line, I learned that respecting another author’s style and nuances quickly becomes a living nightmare. What did he really mean? Why choose that word? How can I get out of this contract?
The project ended well but left me scarred, as I was reminded while reading the new English-language translation of Madame Bovary (Viking, New York) that has set the chattering classes alight in the U.S. Fortunately, Lydia Davis, the America novelist who wrestled with Gustave Flaubert’s highly-polished prose for nearly three years, has hidden the agony, although there was plenty of it.
She told me by telephone recently she weighed every word, phrase and sentence fastidiously, hearing Flaubert’s famous rhythms and sonorities in her head, although not reading paragraphs aloud for a sound-check, as he did. Of course no translation can quite duplicate Flaubert’s original resonances, which are particular to the French language. But by my reckoning, Mrs. Davis has come closer than any previous translator to capturing Flaubert’s style and content accurately for English-language readers.
Some critics stand by their favorite earlier versions of the book, and others quibble over this or that phrase — of which there are many to cherry-pick from in a book like this, most of them endlessly debatable. Even translating lesser stylists, Mrs. Davis says in her introduction, “requires millions of tiny, detailed decisions; many reconsiderations; the testing of one word or phrase against another …”
In her meticulous research, she caught one of the main earlier translators, Gerard Hopkins, patching in “added material in almost every sentence.” The other leading contender until now, Flaubert biographer Francis Steegmuller, was guilty of “regular restructuring of sentences and judicious omissions and additions …” Neither of them produced a translation that was “close to what Flaubert did,” Mrs. Davis writes.
Mrs. Davis was hand-picked by Viking to bring Flaubert to a new generation for two reasons: she is an accomplished novelist and short story writer and she has a major French translation project to her credit. Thus she combines her skills as a writer of expressive prose with her drive to find the best possible English-language equivalents for the French original.
As her editor, John Siciliano, told me, her previous rendering of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way was so literary, so accurate and so successful that he decided to cast about for a new project for her. He settled on Madame Bovary and she embraced the challenge enthusiastically.
The challenge was daunting. In Madame Bovary, Flaubert had created something new — a landmark work of realistic fiction that showed the way for future novelists. He reworked his writing for five years, sometimes toiling 16 hours a day, refining plot and style, always reaching for le mot juste, as he put it. His unadorned prose is so tight, wrote one critic, that you could shake this book upside down and nothing would fall out.
Like many in my generation, I read Madame Bovary English as a teen-ager and several years later in French. And so the publication of the Davis version is an event in book publishing but also one for me personally. Her version benefits from her finesse as a writer and seems fresh and different compared to other translations — stilted, dated or flavorless — I have read. She hopes this one will be seen as “definitive.” Viking has those same aspirations.
Oddly enough, Madame Bovary is one of those French products — like Pouilly Fuisse, Grey Goose or Nicolas Sarkozy — that is more popular in the Anglo-Saxon world than at home. A French high school teacher friend near Bordeaux told me she never got past the first chapter after her teacher dismissed Emma Bovary, the tragic heroine, as “an imbecile.” Emma’s husband Charles, one of the most pathetic cuckolds in modern literature, is equally thick-headed and blind to is wife’s adventures.
The book has long since been dropped from the list of required reading in French schools although excerpts are still part of literature studies and academia generally speaks admiringly of it.
Boston-based Sandrine Calabria, founder of the French language and culture school “French and the City” and a member of the Harvard University faculty, says many French today find the book “obsolete” although they consider it a masterpiece of its epoch. Emma seems “irritating” and modern readers are bored by Flaubert’s experiments in realism, particularly his “interminable descriptions.” The book is the least admired of Flaubert’s three major works, she says, the others being Sentimental Education and Salammbo.
In contrast, some American readers seem to like Flaubert’s details of provincial 19th century life in France, which is less familiar to them than to the French. “One of my students told me that, for her, reading Madame Bovary was like watching a well-made movie,” says Ms. Calabria.
One of the objections raised in U.S. high schools is that the behavior of Emma is aggressively adulterous and therefore unsuitable for young minds. Here too the French are different. “The majority of the French find nothing very shocking in the story,” says Ms. Calabria. Paradoxically, some even favor adultery as a way of staying alive and in love inside a marriage, she adds.
There has been no shortage of English-language translations. Oxford University Press brought out a new version a year ago and another American translation is scheduled for the end of this year. Since Flaubert’s original was published in 1857 (and briefly banned for offending public morals), at least 20 versions have appeared in English, making it probably the most frequently translated — and most messed with — of any modern work of literature.
Tim*| 10.27.10 @ 7:58AM
"Her heart was like the soles of those shoes. Wealth and luxury had rubbed against it and left upon it something that would never wear away."
- Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, Ch. 8
Uh Oh, Horse Poop !
Bob K.| 10.27.10 @ 8:36AM
Fair is fair.
The French are bigger fans of Edgar Allen Poe than we are.
Bob K.| 10.27.10 @ 8:39AM
I wonder how he translates into French?
Anthony| 10.27.10 @ 9:44AM
They also thought Jerry Lewis was a comic genius. Go figure.
Joseph Harriss| 10.27.10 @ 9:05AM
This is a really fine job of describing the intricacies and frustrations of translation, as well as the different ways Americans and French appreciate, or don't, Madame Bovary. Thanks, Mr. Johnson.
Thomas James| 10.27.10 @ 9:27AM
The French, in fact, say this: "Translations are like wives. They are either faithful or beautiful, but seldom both."
JD| 10.27.10 @ 10:43AM
> French literature of the 19th century, she notes, is a rich pool of talent, including Balzac, Baudelaire, Maupassant, Victor Hugo and Stendhal. "We still read them all, so we could never devote the time you do to Madame Bovary." <<br />
We still read them all, too, and yet manage to read "Bovary", plus a whole bunch of 19th century writers of English prose. Maybe we just read faster than the French?
Hannibal| 10.27.10 @ 10:53AM
Ms.Bovery--that's me!
Ken (Old Texican)| 10.27.10 @ 12:48PM
Here we are.
America faces the most crucial election of my lifetime, and this dork, (Johnson), is blabbing about France?
Editors,
I wish you would feature Booger instead. He is hilariously relevant. France is not since they killed their best in 1914.
Mr. Johnson,
You sir are so effete, that it makes my teeth hurt.
Al Adab| 10.27.10 @ 12:58PM
Ken, Ken,
Just because the French never learned to spell good Latin and of course they don't know beans about baseball... Let's see. The great French national heros are Charlemange( a german) Joan of Arc (14 years old) and Napoleon (an Italian) They did provide a navy for the Revolution on our behalf. At least we owe them that.
A. C. Santore| 10.27.10 @ 3:33PM
...which arrived after the war had been won, if I'm not mistaken.
Al Adab| 10.27.10 @ 4:02PM
Well, the fleet did prevent the British from evacuating or reinforcing Yorktown. And after all Lafayette did help and became like a son to Washington. However, that was more a personal assistance than one of French design.
I think it was Robert Novak who had the best approach to this issue. He overheard a Frenchman castigating America for being ignorant, arrogant etc. and asked the Frenchman if he spoke German. Naturally the Frenchman smugly replied, "of course not." Whereupon Novak simply said, "you're welcome." After all those American cemetaries in Normandy speak volumes don't they?
Fred| 10.27.10 @ 1:24PM
Mark Twain makes the point about difficulty of translation in one of the most hilarious things I have ever read. He reprinted "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" into French, then re-translated it literally into English. The re-translated title is "The Celebrated Frog Jumping of the County of Calaveras." It's worth the price of admission just for the line "I no saw not that that frog had nothing of better than each frog," a translation of the line "I don't see no pints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog."
Ken, I have a feeling there's a lot we would agree on but you, sir, are such a philistine it makes my heart ache.
Ken (Old Texican)| 10.27.10 @ 1:52PM
Fred,
I thank you deeply for that compliment in this context.
If giggling about France becoming irrelevant makes me a philistine, then I am delighted with same.
Fred| 10.27.10 @ 3:51PM
Ken,
Giggling about the current political, economic, and military irrelevance of the French. . . understandable. Giggling about the literary irrelevance of a culture that produced Rabalais, Racine, Moliere, Voltaire, Dumas, Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert, Beaudelaire, Gautier, Proust, Robbe-Grillet, Sartre, Camus. . .Sorry dude, can't follow you there.
Al Adab| 10.27.10 @ 3:57PM
Voltaire is worth the time as are Dumas and Hugo. But, to include Sarte and Camus? Can't follow you there dude.
PJ| 10.27.10 @ 7:05PM
Don't forget Edmund Rostand. Shakespeare is the greatest playwright, but Rostand wrote the greatest lines for the character, Cyrano de Bergerac. Everytime I read Cyrano's monologues describing his love for Roxanne or his impending death---------- it just takes my breath away!!
Tom| 10.28.10 @ 3:31AM
Thanks to Michael Johnson for this article about the admirable craftsmanship of Flaubert translator Davis. Johnson's contribution is a welcome diversion in this political season of "poitrines palpitantes" -- in the out-of-control sense that the translator adopts, not in the original measured sense of Flaubert.
Lydia Davis, the translator of Johnson's review may have badly misread Flaubert at the worst possible juncture. With the simile of two people embracing to become one, even unto their racing heartbeats, Flaubert depicted the outcome of a snap transition that aligns Emma and Leon. A compelling look at each other displaces in an instant the irresolute, noise-infested, opportunistic thoughts of Emma and Leon with new, urgently aligned intent":
CriticalIntelligence| 10.28.10 @ 3:21PM
Surely the interior of Ken (Old Texican)’s mind must be as dank as a crumbling double-wide without electricity. Bill Buckley showed us there was nothing to fear in education or intellectual breadth. Old Texican’s idea of “an intellectual pursuit” must still be chasing the brainy kids across the playground and beating them.
Curmudgeon| 10.28.10 @ 3:56PM
To Bob K: Edgar Allan Poe was translated into French by none other than the great poet Baudelaire. As a Frenchman, I must admit I find Madame Bovary pretty boring.