In her note on the translation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Lydia Davis writes: “‘A good sentence in prose,’ says Flaubert, ‘should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.’ To achieve a translation that matches this high standard is difficult, perhaps impossible.” Reading a translation of Madame Bovary is a compromise, a dilution not only of style but of idiom.
Intending to satirise the bourgeois of his day, not bourgeois with Marxist connotations, but the philistine obsessed with material circumstances, Flaubert drew heavily on his work-in-progress, the Dictionary of Accepted Ideas. Over three decades, Flaubert recorded in this Dictionary his irritations with “intellectual and spiritual superficiality, raw ambition, shallow culture, a love of material things, greed, and above all a mindless parroting of sentiments and beliefs,” as Davis describes it.
The dialogue between Emma Bovary and her husband and lovers, and the pedantries of Homais, are drawn directly from this source. Hugh Kenner adds: “If the Dictionary is useless for guiding conversation, it is useful for the writer; and the writer who used it was Flaubert himself, turning, it would seem, from entry to entry precisely like a correspondence-school novelist. For the dictionary entries on which he based the discourses of Emma and Léon, Flaubert need not have listened to thousands of Emmas and Léons; he could have gotten ‘Sea: image of the infinite’ directly out of other novels, and perhaps did.”
With Madame Bovary, Flaubert crafts a study of provincial life as polished as a diamond, but also initiates a lifelong theme: “writing books about what books do to the readers of books,” one eye always on the effect his own work might have.
Flaubert populates his novel with a dubious array of unsympathetic characters, whom he annihilates with apparent relish. “Who are the ‘good’ people of the book?” asks Nabokov in his precise examination of Madame Bovary, concluding: “Emma’s father, old Rouault; somewhat unconvincingly, the boy Justin, whom we glimpse crying on Emma’s grave, a bleak note; and speaking of Dickensian notes let us not forget two other unfortunate children, Emma’s little daughter, and of course that other little Dickensian girl, that girl of thirteen, hunchbacked, a little bleak housemaid, a dingy nymphet, who serves Lheureux as clerk, a glimpse to ponder. Who else in the book do we have as good people? The best person is the third doctor, the great Lariviere, although I have always hated the transparent tear he sheds over the dying Emma.”
Completing my rereading of Madame Bovary, I remember why Emma always has my sympathies. Not only because of her savage destruction by the narrator, by Flaubert himself, if we trace it far enough, but also because she represents the repressed sensuality within us. Our response to the ennui of everyday life is often to sublimate it: into work, into family, into the distractions of alcohol, tobacco, or drugs. A part of us, however deeply buried, perhaps wishes to live with the abandon of Emma Bovary.
When I first read Madame Bovary many years ago it left the impression of an artist producing the last Victorian novel. Now, its romance feels closer to the Moderns. Kenner, drawing a straight line between Flaubert and Joyce, notes: “His [Flaubert’s] tight, burnished set pieces slacken considerably in translation: if we want to see something in English that resembles them, we cannot do better than consult Ulysses, where Bloom’s cat ‘blinked up out of her avid shameclosing eyes,’ or ‘Frail from the housetops two plumes of smoke ascended, pluming, and in a flaw of softness softly were blown,’ or ‘Two shafts of soft daylight fell across the flagged floor from the high barbicans; and at the meeting of their rays a cloud of coalsmoke and fumes of fried grease floated, turning.’
Lydia Davis counted nineteen translations of Madame Bovary; there are at least a dozen film interpretations, and numerous critical works by writers such as Nabokov, Sartre, and Proust. The book’s irresistible attraction endures. There are few novels I have read three times; clear evidence, perhaps, of the inexhaustible depths of Madame Bovary.
Harold Bloom concludes: “Though he murders her, Flaubert performs the work of mourning for her, a work that takes the shape of his masterpiece, the purest of all novels in form, economy, and the just representation of general nature.”