The Lost Bovary and the New Bovary and Other Bovaries

Julian Barnes has a worthwhile essay on Lydia Davis’s new Madame Bovary translation.

Here he is on the “original” and lost translation of Bovary, reputedly made by one of Flaubert’s lovers:

As it happens, this dream was once a reality. The first known translation of Madame Bovary was undertaken from a fair copy of the manuscript by Juliet Herbert, governess to Flaubert’s niece Caroline, in 1856-57. Quite possibly, she was Gustave’s lover; certainly, she gave him English lessons. ‘In six months, I will read Shakespeare like an open book,’ he boasted; and together they translated Byron’s ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’ into French. (Back in 1844, Flaubert claimed to his friend Louis de Cormenin that he had translated Candide into English.) In May 1857, Flaubert wrote to Michel Lévy, the Parisian publisher of Madame Bovary, that ‘an English translation which fully satisfies me is being made under my eyes. If one is going to appear in England, I want it to be this one and not any other one.’ Five years later, he was to call Juliet Herbert’s work ‘a masterpiece’. But by this time it – and she – were beginning to disappear from literary history. Though Flaubert had asked Lévy to fix Juliet up with an English publisher, and believed he had written to Richard Bentley & Sons about the matter, no such letter from Paris survives in the Bentley archives (perhaps because Lévy objected to the idea and declined to act on it). The manuscript was lost, and so – more or less – was Juliet Herbert, until her resurrection by Hermia Oliver in Flaubert and an English Governess (1980).[*] If Juliet’s ‘masterpiece’ were ever to resurface, we should hope it comes attached to the lost Flaubert-Herbert correspondence, and to a photograph of Juliet, of whom no known image has survived. The translation of Candide has also been lost. As for Flaubert and Shakespeare: it’s not clear if he ever achieved fluency in English – with or without Juliet – but his library contained the works of ‘le grand William’ in both English and French.

The way Barnes sets this up is top notch: he starts the essay by wondering what makes a good translation, taking us through various answers until settling on the idea that we might want a translation from someone who “not only knows the author, but lives in his house, able to observe his spoken as well as his written French.”

Then he gets to Davis and wonders if her talent as a writer isn’t a bad thing for her translation:

This is not as idle a question as it seems. That perfect translator must be a writer able to subsume him or herself into the greater writer’s text and identity. 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. So if Rick Moody tells us that Lydia Davis is ‘the best prose stylist in America’, and Jonathan Franzen that ‘few writers now working make the words on the page matter more,’ does this make her better or worse equipped to render the best prose stylist of 19th-century France into 21st-century American English? Davis’s stories, typically from two or three lines to two or three pages, are decidedly unFlaubertian in scope and extent; they vary from the wry episode and rapt reverie to the slightly cute aperçu; and if there is French influence around it is from a later date (thus Davis’s ‘The Race of the Patient Motorcyclists’ seems to owe a debt to Jarry).[†] Her own life is clearly the basis for some of the stories, whereas Flaubert’s aesthetic was famously based on self-exclusion. On the other hand, Davis’s work shares the Flaubertian virtues of compression, irony and an extreme sense of control. And if Flaubert in his monasticism and exemplary pertinacity is a writer’s writer, Davis was described to me recently by an American novelist as a ‘writer’s writer’s writer’.

He also calls Bovary “the first great shopping and fucking novel.”

The whole essay is a great piece on the art of translation. I’ve never heard of Barnes translating anything, but we would be in an enviable position if all novelists knew as much about the art as he does. Then at least when they were asked to review translations they could write something like this instead of something like this.

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