Geoffrey Wall’s recent Penguin version has: “he could see Emma there in the room, dressed just as he remembered, and in his head he stripped her clothes off.” But Wall adds extra words (like “just”), and his “stripped her clothes off” spoils a characteristic rhyme that Flaubert has, the repeated sound of “habille” and déshabillait” (“dressed”/ “undressed”). Flaubert writes that as he walks home he mentally undresses her: “il revoyait Emma dans la salle, habille comme il l’avait vue, et il la déshabillait.” Literally, this means: “he saw Emma in the room, dressed as he had seen her, and he undressed her.” It is a simple and brutal sentence, and Flaubert’s English-language translators seem to shy away from its simplicity and its brutality. After the aristocratic libertine, Rodolphe, first sees Emma, he goes home certain that he is going to get his way with her. Davis was criticized for saying in an interview that she didn’t much care for “Madame Bovary,” but all good readers of Flaubert are always in two minds about him anyway, and her own contempt for Flaubert vitalized, as it were, a contempt in Flaubert’s own prose: the novel seemed suddenly Swiftian, less like a nineteenth-century humanist-realist masterpiece than an eighteenth-century piece of biting French satire and misanthropy.įlaubert’s strict, elegant, rhythmic sentences come alive in Davis’s English. I read it alongside the original, and alongside three other English translations (by Eleanor Marx Aveling, Francis Steegmuller, and Geoffrey Wall) and I consistently admired Davis’s attempts to get as close as possible to a quality of hardness, or coldness, in Flaubert’s own prose.
Unlike Valtat or Foulds, Davis got lots of attention, but rarely of the right kind, because her translation was too often reflexively praised by people who were not familiar with Flaubert’s French, or wanly criticized (see Julian Barnes in the London Review of Books) by people who have possessive agendas. Lydia Davis’s translation of “ Madame Bovary” was one of the most important books of the year.
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