Classic makeover

Philip Hensher finds Flaubert’s scorn for his characters relieved by hilarity

Astonishingly, this is the 20th time Madame Bovary has been translated into English. I say ‘astonishing’ because, as everyone knows, great novels in foreign languages tend to get done once, if at all. Most of Theodore Fontane has never been translated, or Jean-Paul, or Stifter; only in the last few years have the antique H. T. Lowe-Porter translations of Thomas Mann been superseded, and if you want to read most of Balzac’s immense work you will have to resort to 19th-century collected editions. Couldn’t one of those translators or publishers have turned their attention instead to Balzac’s Louis Lambert, a novel Flaubert himself loved?

The attraction of Madame Bovary, of course, is its reputation as the pinnacle of the scrupulous French style. The stories that Flaubert propagated to his correspondents of the immense, almost abstract, labour of his composition are undoubtedly true: the manuscript (which may be inspected online) shows how agonising was Flaubert’s wrestle with prose and language.