I hugely recommend it. She does not flinch. Let me give you an example. Which suggests a further question to the opening list: would you rather have your great novel translated by a good writer or a less good one? This is not as idle a question as it seems. Writer-translators with their own style and worldview might become fretful at the necessary self-abnegation; on the other hand, disguising oneself as another writer is an act of the imagination, and perhaps easier for the better writer.
Madame Bovary is many things — a perfect piece of fictional machinery, the pinnacle of realism, the slaughterer of Romanticism, a complex study of failure — but it is also the first great shopping and fucking novel. Though — to enter the world of micro-pedantry — she or her publisher prints the two dedications in reverse order to the original French edition. But then translation involves micro-pedantry as much as the full yet controlled use of the linguistic imagination. The plainest sentence is full of hazard; often the choices available seem to be between different percentages of loss.
In his early years, Charles Bovary is allowed by his parents to run wild. He follows the ploughmen, throwing clods of earth at the crows; he minds turkeys and does a little bell-ringing.
Il acquit de fortes mains, de belles couleurs. The meaning is quite clear; there are no hidden traps or false friends. If you want to try putting this into English yourself first, look away now. Here are six attempts from the last years to translate yet not traduce:. Some of the matters these translators would have considered on a scale from pertinent reflection to gut feel would include:. Whether to lay the paragraph out as two sentences or one; if the latter, then whether the break should be marked by a comma or a semicolon.
Whether, indeed, to lay it out as a separate paragraph anyway: thus 1 chooses to run it on at the end of the previous paragraph, which makes its summarising effect less pointed. Only 1 does this by putting them both in the singular; the rest introduce an imbalance of number.
What to do about belles couleurs. All five translators agree that there is no way of preserving the plural form. All these six versions — given in chronological order — have their virtues; none is obviously superior.
It is also slightly baffling: where else might you feel wine if not in your mouth? On your foot? There is similar mouthfeel about translation. Its general development over the last century and more has been away from smoothness and towards authenticity, away from a reorganising interpretativeness which aims for the flow of English prose, towards a close-reading fidelity — enjoy those tannins! Succeeded, and yet not supplanted: some of us continue to read the Garnett translations.
Mainly because they do the time-travelling work instantly, and give a better illusion of being a reader back then, rather than a reader now inspecting a text from long ago through precision optical instruments. It may be, however, that something different, or additional, is going on: a kind of imprinting.
Subsequent interpreters may have a better grasp of the language, or play the piece on period instruments, but that initial version always takes some shifting. The authentic rendering of every last nuance of meaning cannot be the sole purpose of translation. The language of the Mimes is precious, with unpleasant affected archaisms, and an honest translation, it seemed to Dilly, must be the same. Cloistered in his study. Dilly worked out his English equivalent to Herodas.
Here is a typical addition or rather, substitution which will act as a good test of what a reader requires. I was convinced that, if set back in its own linguistic context, with our awareness of Victorian literature shadow-playing in the background, an English Madame Bovary could seem searingly radical again. Two years in, at around page , I felt I had been doing this all my life. Davis admitted, in a reading given during her own struggle, that, Emma-like, she was "a little bored with the whole project".
I can't say I was ever bored, but often seriously frustrated. Inch by inch, I would cover the ground, only to slip back when, for example, I realised that Flaubert had been using an extended metaphor military, legal, whatever for an entire paragraph. There were times when I tumbled into the crevice between the two languages, lost all sight of a natural English sentence, felt myself turning into the constituent molecules of a linguistic object — a pattern of auxiliaries, participles, pronouns.
Like Joyce, Flaubert can be drily comic, but humour is dependent on a precise selection of words, registers and double meanings, so I had to take an irony geiger count of every sentence — whose "right" translation lurked just around the corner. This was the version that combined accuracy, naturalness and musicality. The problem was the lack of corners: as in a dream, there would be one long traverse with nothing on it.
The solution would appear sometimes the novel felt like a vast crossword puzzle through a combination of experiment, meditation and lateral thought: I had to step firmly away from the French and face a contrary direction — another track entirely. The solution usually had only two out of the three essential elements, and more work had to be done: less a path to climb than a Rubik's Cube of words to be twisted about or thrown at the wall.
Even more is at stake when the very genius of the novel lies on the shimmering surface. This is not to do with ornament, but meaning. Flaubert wished to close the gap not just between words and emotional truths, but between words and things: the sound of Hippolyte's wooden leg in the church "They heard on the flagstones something like the sharp click of an iron-shod pole tapping them with even strokes" ; the lumbering sway of cattle; the scoop of a hand in sugar-white arsenic.
This was crucial to get right, not only because it was what previous translators had largely omitted, but because I'm obsessed by the same equation in my own work. There's an extraordinary moment when Emma waltzes up at the chateau, surrounded by the "indifferent … brutality" of the upper classes. In the French, the whirling dissolves the words into a streaky, clicking blur of vowels: "Ils tournaient: tout tournaient autour d'eux …" It seemed essential to mimic this mimicry, but how?
Previous translations had not even tried: "They turned, and everything turned round them …" Alan Russell ; "They were turning: everything was turning around them …" both Geoffrey Wall and Davis. Of course. To me, the answer is obvious, but I have discovered that some people, strangely, are not interested in their past, and some are horrified by the very thought of reading an old letter of theirs. It dated from my early twenties.
And when I read it, I found a list of books I had read over the previous months, in which time I had turned twenty-three. There, in the list, was Madame Bovary. But disappointingly, although I had comments for some of the other books, I said nothing about this one:.
For the record, as we like to say: I graduated in June, to my great surprise, in general; since then, the four months have slipped by with nothing substantial to show for them. My position now, at the end of September, is this: a great uncertainty about future and jobs, and a rather pervasive depression about it.
Some of Hebdomeros and I want to finish that, certainly, one of the most beautifully written in the purest of prose styles. Although I say nothing in my journal about Madame Bovary , I know I was left with an impression of it that was more negative than positive.
I had probably read it expecting something quite unlike what I got. I had probably come to it expecting. I did not like the heroine, the story was depressing, and where was the style for which Flaubert was so famous?
I can catch his irony, his poking fun at what he considered the stupidity of the bourgeoisie, the priesthood, the self-styled enlightened rationalist. But that was not what I was hoping for when I read it the first time. This love story—was not at all a love story. Anything drearier, more sordid, more vulgar and desolate than the greater part of the subject-matter of this romance it would be impossible to conceive.
I wondered, as I read Madame Bovary for the first time in English all those years ago, and after I was done reading it: Where was the style for which Flaubert was so famous? In translating it, I embrace it actively, and I particularly relish the English results of certain passages, though others remain frustrating.
To many people Madame Bovary will always be a hard book to read and an impossible one to enjoy. These three variables have subsets that can recombine infinitely, which is why one work can have such widely differing translations. Publishers selecting a translator seem to proceed on the assumption that the most important qualification is the first. Marx Aveling. For a while, the Marx Aveling—de Man seemed to me the very worst translation out of the eleven.
But then, such a thing is hard to judge, because in certain specific passages, it is the worst. He then apparently handed most or all of the work over to his wife, and did not acknowledge her. Wrong reason 3: people buy the book not because it is an excellent translation of this important novel but because it has a useful apparatus of essays, et cetera—handy for a teacher, for instance.
So, readers have a collection of useful material to read about the novel but are reading one of the most important novels in the history of the novel, and one of the most famous, in a less than excellent translation. I read them to know him better and to hear him grumble, usually, about Madame Bovary and the experience of writing it:. My head is spinning with annoyance, discouragement, fatigue! What atrocious work!
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