I’m participating in Nonsuch Book’s Madame Bovary ‘Group Read’ starting on 14 October. It’s been twenty years since I last read the novel, which I considered one of my favourites at the time. My sense of anticipation is fuelled by this first rate article about the new translation:

Perfect translation, in the common-sense fantasy of one-to-one correspondence, is of course impossible. Even the simplest message, moved from one language to another, inevitably gets warped: It loses its music, its cultural resonance, and the special pace at which it surrenders its information. This warpage is magnified, by a factor of roughly 10 million, in the case of Madame Bovary.