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.
Many translators besides Hopkins and Steegmuller have
added their own layers of style and meaning, and several have toned
down the references to illicit sex.
One edition, however, a Penguin paperback of 1992,
actually spiced up a steamy scene describing eye contact (yes, that
was also pushing it in 1857) between Emma and her future lover
Leon. Flaubert daintily describes their excited thoughts as
comme deux poitrines palpitantes. Mrs. Davis soberly
renders this as “like two trembling hearts.” The Penguin
translator, Geoffrey Wall, also a Flaubert biographer, went
considerably further and made it “like two tremulously naked
bodies.” In another passage, Flaubert uses the English word “Yes”
in a passage of dialogue. Wall renders it as
“Jawohl.”
Ms. Calabria remains perplexed by all the American fuss
over Madame Bovary. 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.”
“Why do you keep translating it?” she wonders.
Lydia Davis’s “definitive” version just might bring about
a pause in the translation frenzy.
