Found in translation

FICTION: BARRY McCREAreviews Madame Bovary, By Gustave Flaubert. Translated with an introduction by Lydia Davis, Penguin, 343pp, £20

ONE OF THE mysteries of all translations is that they go off so quickly. Even when novels in their original language still seem fresh and immediate, their translated versions can sound stiff and archaic. This is why we need regular new translations of time-worn texts. But Lydia Davis's new version of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovaryis an update of a different order: a real literary event in itself.

It may be that no other novel has had as much of an influence on the fiction we read today as Madame Bovary, which used the then scandalous subject of female adultery as a way to evoke the cruel lot of all humanity, cursed with dreams and fantasies in a world that cannot fulfil them. Flaubert was fundamental to the great modernists – Joyce, Proust, Woolf, James – but Madame Bovaryalso laid the ground for the modern realistic psychological novel, a genre that we take for granted today; Tóibín's Brooklyn can be read as a quiet, brilliant response to the novel.

Madame Bovary, which introduced a refined but brutal form of realism to the European novel, presents almost insurmountable and unusually high-stakes challenges for a translator. The world it offers the reader is painstakingly rendered in all its detail, but it is populated almost entirely by deluded or cruel fools. In the social universe it depicts, wisdom, passion and energy are all wantonly wasted; there is no respite from meanness, pomposity and injustice. The only counterweight offered to this unflinchingly bleak vision comes in the style of the prose, which is scrupulous, measured and judicious, devoid of pretension and cliche, elegant without ever indulging itself or engaging in flights of self-important fantasy – everything, in other words, that the characters in the book are not.

Flaubert rewrote, refined and, especially, cut his sentences to an almost unbelievable degree: there are 4,500 draft manuscript pages for this 300-page novel. Each word is the result of an exhaustive process of selection by Flaubert, not only for its meaning but for its tone, register, rhythm and sound.

The meaning of the novel, as Flaubert himself wrote, resides in its style, but most translators have sidestepped the impossible challenge of reproducing it and contented themselves with giving us the plot of the novel in an English of their own. In this translation, however – recently excerpted in Playboymagazine as "the most scandalous novel of all time" – Lydia Davis has produced a version of Madame Bovarythat is as close to Flaubert's style as it is possible for English prose to be.

Her extraordinarily precise text manages to accomplish a variety of apparently contradictory goals: it cleaves almost perfectly to Flaubert’s language and style, but the English is readable, natural and real; it feels fresh and immediate yet somehow still looks and sounds like a French 19th-century novel.

As Flaubert's genius resides in the pared-down, understated nature of his prose, other translators, aware they have a classic in their hands but anxious their readers will not recognise it as such, have given in to the temptation to add ornaments of their own or make the style more grandiloquent. A good example is one of the most famous lines in the novel, which delivers a devastating account of human communication: " La parole humaine est comme un chaudron fêlé où nous battons des mélodies à faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les étoiles." In the translation by Paul de Man, he cannot resist replacing these simple French words, which are devoid of repetition, redundancy or showy literariness, with a flowery and portentous English sentence: "The human tongue is like a cracked cauldron on which we beat out tunes to set a bear dancing when we would make the stars weep with our melodies."

The power of Flaubert’s sentence is in its unadorned straightforwardness, lost now in the pomposity of “to set a bear dancing”, a sentence that announces its philosophical importance like a sermon. Davis’s version, on the other hand, is much simpler, but much harder to arrive at, and replicates the effect of the original: “Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to move the stars to pity.”

This is an obvious example, but the real genius of Davis’s translation is in imperceptible details, in the subtle ways she finds to reproduce the inimitable rhythm and tone of Flaubert’s sentences, both simple and strange, and key to the feeling of the book.

Her achievement, indeed, is obscured by the self-effacing nature of the project – her aim is to make herself disappear so that Flaubert’s French can shine through the English prose – and especially by the microscopic nature of the decisions involved. She has been extraordinarily attentive to the importance of the tiny decisions – filler words, slightly off-register vocabulary, apparently insignificant tinkering with sentence structure – that individually pass unnoticed but cumulatively give translations an inauthentic ring and distort the style and tone of the original.

In Madame Bovarythe selfish, irresponsible and pushy are rewarded at the cost of ordinary people, who are too stupid to notice or protect themselves. It is either just the right or just the wrong time to read this book, but, one way or another, Lydia Davis's superb achievement means that the full, unflinching experience is now available to English-speaking readers.

Barry McCrea is associate professor of comparative literature at Yale University and the author of the novel The First Verse. His next book, In the Company of Strangersis published by Columbia University Press in May