In her office, Davis shows me her Flaubert stash. Before long we’re knee-deep in Bovary, reading sentences from various translations aloud to each other. She points to a page whose margins are thick with pencil marks. “This is a passage where I really got indignant,” she says. (Indignant seems to be about as worked up as she gets.) “Those pluses are all things [the translator] added.” There are pluses next to the words dawdled, sauntered slowly, for their meeting, pirouetting, and thronging—places where the translator tried to jazz things up, or to help the reader out with exposition. Then Davis points to a passage at the end of the book, in which Charles Bovary sits in his garden and—in spite of all that’s happened—pines for his lost, unfaithful wife. It’s a moving scene: Nature is in full glory (“jasmine scented the air, cantharides beetles droned busily round the flowering lilies”), but Charles just sits there, lost in some fantasy of the past, “sobbing like an adolescent.” Davis shakes her head. For one thing, Charles isn’t sobbing in the original—he’s suffocating. But her real complaint is with those beetles. Flaubert never made them busy. “Now, you see, I think that’s completely unnecessary,” she says. “To insert ‘busily,’ which is a personification—something Flaubert was very careful to avoid. It may seem a small thing, but to me that’s a big thing. Because it’s so easy not to put it in. I think maybe it’s a reflexive thing that she wasn’t even aware of.” Which would, of course, make the crime even worse—an example of the kind of automatic thinking and language that Flaubert detested. (via Lydia Davis on Writing a Translation of Gustave Flaubert’s ‘Madame Bovary’ — New York Magazine.)
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In her office, Davis shows me her Flaubert stash. Before long we’re knee-deep in Bovary, reading sentences from various translations aloud to each other. She points to a page whose margins are thick with pencil marks. “This is a passage where I really got indignant,” she says. (Indignant seems to be about as worked up as she gets.) “Those pluses are all things [the translator] added.” There are pluses next to the words dawdled, sauntered slowly, for their meeting, pirouetting, and thronging—places where the translator tried to jazz things up, or to help the reader out with exposition.

Then Davis points to a passage at the end of the book, in which Charles Bovary sits in his garden and—in spite of all that’s happened—pines for his lost, unfaithful wife. It’s a moving scene: Nature is in full glory (“jasmine scented the air, cantharides beetles droned busily round the flowering lilies”), but Charles just sits there, lost in some fantasy of the past, “sobbing like an adolescent.” Davis shakes her head. For one thing, Charles isn’t sobbing in the original—he’s suffocating. But her real complaint is with those beetles. Flaubert never made them busy. “Now, you see, I think that’s completely unnecessary,” she says. “To insert ‘busily,’ which is a personification—something Flaubert was very careful to avoid. It may seem a small thing, but to me that’s a big thing. Because it’s so easy not to put it in. I think maybe it’s a reflexive thing that she wasn’t even aware of.” Which would, of course, make the crime even worse—an example of the kind of automatic thinking and language that Flaubert detested.

(via Lydia Davis on Writing a Translation of Gustave Flaubert’s ‘Madame Bovary’ — New York Magazine.)

Source: New York Magazine

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