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| Gustave Flaubert by Tierry Coquelet |
Review
Lydia Davis’s new translation
of Madame Bovary
The Beaver
March 22, 2012
In Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert wrote in a highly controlled and economical prose style that was, in 1856, something quite new in European fiction. As he was drafting what would be his most famous novel, Flaubert toiled under the belief that a line of prose should have the rhythm, the sonority, and the unbreakability of a line of verse. The result, as critic Michael Dirda has quipped, is that “you can shake Madame Bovary and nothing will fall out.”
For a book so carefully constructed, it’s hard to think of a happier choice of translator than the eminently precise fiction writer Lydia Davis. Though she’s been acclaimed recently as a translator of Proust, Davis’s pairing with Flaubert seems even more apt. After all, Proust’s lush, expansive narration (lengthy, too – many translators of In Search of Lost Time have died before completion) has little affinity with Davis’s characteristic fiction: compressed, scrupulous short stories, some a mere sentence or two long, that often evince an ironical sensibility. A good match, then, for the exacting Flaubert, who drafted so many more pages than he published, and who saw irony even in his most serious aspirations and sentiments.
Lydia Davis is a virtuosic restoration artist, and her Madame Bovary has an astounding clarity. To say that her translation is excellent is not simply to say that she has performed well by such and such technical criteria that matter primarily to translators and literary critics. It is to say something more fundamental: that Davis has decisively reanimated this novel, which has been slowly obscured, over the last century and a half, by translators who were only good enough.
There have been at least nineteen translations of Madame Bovary into English; Davis’s new version makes twenty. Hers is a very close translation, the closest yet, and perhaps the closest possible. But though she cleaves so closely to the nineteenth century text, there’s no stuffiness to her prose. The same can’t be said even for the most popular translations of Madame Bovary: Gerard Hopkins’s from 1948, Alan Russell’s from 1950, Francis Steegmuller’s from 1957. More impressive still, Davis’s version has an immediate feel without taking recourse to odd anachronisms, for example phrases like “No way!” (Margaret Mauldon, 2004) and “the damage was done” (Geoffrey Wall, 1992).
In a move bolder than it may seem, Davis has retained practically all of the flaws and quirks of Flaubert’s prose. His little slips in calculation and plotting (chronological implausibility in Emma’s assignations, an odd-number amount counted out in even-number coinage, etc.) remain intact in Davis’s version, as do certain crucial grammatical idiosyncrasies: italicised phrases, comma splices, non-parallelism. These are quirks that many previous translators have seen fit to erase or ‘correct’–with the effect of stilting the cadence of Flaubert’s lines, and deadening his ironies.
Davis brings a deft and tasteful sensibility to the rendering of Flaubert’s images, a quality that’s essential in translating this particular work. Flaubert was famously obsessed with style. Of the nineteenth century prose writers, no one was more discriminating about the words he put on the page; no one’s details more carefully chosen, no one’s images so meticulously drawn. In an 1852 letter to Louise Colet, Flaubert even expressed a desire to write “a book about nothing, a book without external attachments, which holds itself up by the internal force of its own style, as the earth, unsupported, holds itself in mid-air…”
But a writer’s aspirations don’t necessarily reflect the book he ends up producing. Flaubert may have dreamt of “a book about nothing,” but Madame Bovary is not that book. In fact, it’s remarkable for its very something-ness — its absolute reliance on concrete detail, on a steady progression of plot, and on minute social observation of characters and environment. Though Flaubert considered “provincial ways” (the novel’s subtitle) as simply an occasion for the practice of his style, his finely tuned descriptions of clothing, food, and speech are not just local colour garnishing bigger themes, nor are they an exercise in ethnography – as was the case for many of Flaubert’s contemporaries. They are the very engine of the story, the source of its studied anti-romanticism. What previous translators have done to Madame Bovary is craft it in the image of what a nineteenth century novel ‘ought’ to sound like. But Flaubert’s novel didn’t sound like that; it didn’t sound like a typical novel then, and it doesn’t sound like it now. A translation like Davis’s helps us see that.
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