Philip Hensher

Classic makeover

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

issue 11 December 2010

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Jean-Paul, or Stifter; only in the last few years have the antique H. T. Lowe-Porter translations of Thomas Mann been superseded, and if you want to read most of Balzac’s immense work you will have to resort to 19th-century collected editions.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. As he famously said in the novel, human speech is a cracked pot on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, all the time hoping to move the stars to pity. His translators, in trying to put the exquisite refinements of Madame Bovary into English, are labouring with an author who saw no reason why prose should not have the perfection and correctness of poetry — ‘unchangeable, rhythmic and sonorous’.

Not all of Flaubert’s refinements are, it must be said, compatible with what most people regard as good writing. Previous translators have tidied up his punctuation, and in particular the frequent moments when, by omitting an ‘and’, he commits the crime of the ‘splice comma’. It is rather a shock when Lydia Davis exactly preserves his punctuation — ‘all the evidence rose before her at once, her heart leaped.’

GIF Image

You might disagree with half of it, but you’ll enjoy reading all of it

TRY 3 MONTHS FOR $5
Our magazine articles are for subscribers only. Start your 3-month trial today for just $5 and subscribe to more than one view

Comments

Join the debate for just £1 a month

Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.

Already a subscriber? Log in