Warpage

It has been twenty years since I last read Madame Bovary. I remembered it as a favourite, though I barely trusted that memory. Some books become distorted by the way we preserve them: not the book itself, but a version constructed from youth, sentimentality, or need.

Reading about a new translation, and the claim that translation warps meaning “by a factor of ten million”, made me pause. Perhaps all rereading is a kind of translation: from one moment in a life to another, from one self to the next. Even when the language is unchanged, the reader is not.

What does it mean to approach a book again, after decades? I do not expect the same encounter. I expect warpage. I expect to find a text that both is and is not the novel I once loved. A book that once seemed tragic might now seem cruel; a scene that once felt tender might now seem absurd. Perhaps I will see Emma differently. Perhaps she will seem closer. Perhaps more remote.

It is comforting to think of translation not as betrayal, but as evidence that nothing we encounter is ever fully fixed. We meet a book; we meet ourselves meeting the book. The space between those two things is never stable. It alters with time, with tenderness, with fatigue, with understanding.

I will start Madame Bovary again next week. Not to recover what I once felt, but to see what kind of reading is possible now.