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Anonymous
2016-07-04 21:58:45 Post No. 8241306
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Anonymous
2016-07-04 21:58:45
Post No. 8241306
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I've been wanting to read Madame Bovary for a long time but I can't figure out which translation to read. What's the best English version of the novel?
I know the Lydia Davis is very popular, but it got torn apart in this review:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n22/julian-barnes/writers-writer-and-writers-writers-writer
>After Emma’s seduction by Rodolphe, there is a paragraph describing her post-coital, semi-pantheistic experience of the forest surrounding her, with which she is for the moment in harmony. But with the last sentence, Flaubert cuts this mood brutally: ‘Rodolphe, le cigare aux dents, raccommodait avec son canif une des deux brides cassée.’ This great anti-romantic moment has Rodolphe turning both to another physical pleasure (as Gurov will with his watermelon in Chekhov’s ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’), and to masculine, practical matters. All the versions cited here begin, unsurprisingly, with ‘Rodolphe, a cigar between his teeth . . .’
>Wall goes on:
>was mending one of the two broken reins with his little knife.
>Steegmuller:
>was mending a broken bridle with his penknife.
>Hopkins:
>was busy with his knife, mending a break in one of the bridles.
>Davis:
>was mending with his penknife one of the bridles, which had broken.
>Rein or bridle? Knife, little knife or penknife? The difference is slight; all the versions contain the same information. Flaubert’s sentence does its business by not drawing attention to itself; its very downbeatness is the point, after the more rhapsodic prose that has preceded it. Wall, Steegmuller and Hopkins all get this. Davis doesn’t. Instead, she ‘faithfully’ sticks to Flaubert’s sentence structure. But English grammar is not French grammar, and so the quiet cassée (which for all its quietness also hints at Rodolphe’s ‘breaking’ of Emma) has to be unpacked into a ‘which had broken’ – a phrase which now seems pretty redundant, as what would he mend that wasn’t broken? The sentence has a clunkiness which is imported, rather than faithfully transmitted, and quite unFlaubertian.
