Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) (21 page)

Before I started reading this novel, a French friend gave me an unexpected warning: ‘There’s a scene where the narrator and his girlfriend and another woman have a threesome in the hammam at the thalassotherapy centre in Dinard. Well, I’ve been there,’ he went on, his tone hardening, ‘and it’s
just not possible
.’ He is not a pedantic man, and his attitude surprised me. But now I quite understand it. Fictional insolence is a high-risk venture: it must, as
Atomised
did, take you by the ear and brain and frog-march you, convince you with the force of its rhetoric and the rigour of its despair. It should allow no time for reactions like, Hang on, that’s not true; or, Surely people aren’t that bad; or even, Actually, I’d like to think this one over.
Platform
, fuelled more by opinions and riffs and moments of provocation than by thorough narrative, allows such questionings to enter the reader’s head far too
often. Is sex like this? Is love like this? Are Muslims like this? Is humanity like this? Is Michel depressed, or is the world depressing? Camus, who began by creating in Meursault one of the most disaffected characters in post-war fiction, ended by writing
The First Man
, in which ordinary lives are depicted with the richest observation and sympathy. It seems less likely that Houellebecq will ever succeed in purging the sin of despair.

I
F YOU GO
to the web page of the restaurant L’Huîtrière (3 rue des Chats Bossus, Lille) and click on ‘translate’, the zealous automaton you have stirred up will instantly render everything into English, including the address. And it comes out as ‘3 street cats humped’. Translation is clearly too important a task to be left to machines. But what sort of human should it be given to?

Imagine that you are about to read a great French novel for the first time, and can only do so in your native English. The book itself is over 150 years old. What would – should – do – you want? The impossible, of course. But what sort of impossible? For a start, you would probably want it not to read like ‘a translation’. You want it to read as if it had originally been written in English – even if, necessarily, by an author deeply knowledgeable about France. You would want it not to clank and whirr as it dutifully renders every single nuance, turning the text into an exposition of the novel rather than the novel itself. You would want it to provoke in you most of the same reactions as it would provoke in a French reader (though you would want some sense of distance, and the pleasure of exploring a different world). But what sort of French reader? One from the late 1850s, or the early 2010s? Would you want the novel to have its original effect, or an effect coloured by the later history of French fiction, including the consequences of this very novel’s existence? Ideally, you would want to understand every period reference – for instance, to Trafalgar pudding, or Ignorantine friars, or
Mathieu Laensberg
– without needing to flick downwards or onwards to footnotes. Finally, if you want the book in ‘English’, what sort of English do you choose? Put simply, on the novel’s first page, do you want the schoolboy Charles Bovary’s trousers to be held up by braces, or do you want his pants to be held up by suspenders? The decisions, and the coloration, are irrevocable.

So we might fantasise the translator of our dreams: someone, naturally, who admires the novel and its author, and who sympathises with its heroine; a woman, perhaps, to help us better navigate the sexual politics of the time; someone with excellent French and better English, perhaps with a little experience of translating in the opposite direction as well. Then we make a key decision: should this translator be ancient or modern? Flaubert’s contemporary, or ours? After a little thought, we might plump for an Englishwoman of Flaubert’s time, whose prose would inevitably be free of anachronism or other style-jarringness. And if she was of the time, then might we not reasonably imagine the author helping her? Let’s push it further: the translator not only knows the author, but lives in his house, able to observe his spoken as well as his written French. They might work side by side on the text for as long as it takes. And now let’s push it to the limit: the female English translator might become the Frenchman’s lover – they always say that the best way to learn a language is through pillow talk.

As it happens, this dream was once a reality. The first known translation of
Madame Bovary
was undertaken from a fair copy of the manuscript by Juliet Herbert, governess to Flaubert’s niece Caroline, in 1856–7. Quite possibly, she was Gustave’s lover; certainly, she gave him English lessons. ‘In six months, I will read Shakespeare like an open book,’ he boasted; and together they translated Byron’s ‘Prisoner of Chillon’ into French. (Back in 1844, Flaubert claimed to his friend Louis de Cormenin that he had translated
Candide
into English.) In May 1857, Flaubert wrote to Michel Lévy, the Parisian publisher
of
Madame Bovary
, that ‘An English translation which
fully
satisfies me is being made under my eyes. If one is going to appear in England, I want it to be this one and not any other one.’ Five years later, he was to call Juliet Herbert’s work ‘a masterpiece’. But by this time it – and she – were beginning to disappear from literary history. Though Flaubert had asked Lévy to fix Juliet up with an English publisher, and believed he had written to Richard Bentley & Sons about the matter, no such letter from Paris survives in the Bentley archives (perhaps because Lévy secretly objected to the idea and declined to act on it). The manuscript was lost, and so – more or less – was Juliet Herbert, until her resurrection in 1980 by Hermia Oliver’s
Flaubert and an English Governess
.

So the British reader had to wait another three decades – until 1886, six years after the author’s death – for the first published translation of
Madame Bovary
. It too was made by a woman, Eleanor Marx-Aveling (Marx’s daughter – a quiet irony, given Flaubert’s caustic views on the Commune), as is the very latest, by the American short-story writer – and Proust translator – Lydia Davis. In between, most of the nineteen or so versions have been made by men. The best-known of them are Francis Steegmuller and Gerard Hopkins; and though Steegmuller did write some fiction – including mysteries under the name of David Keith – it’s a fair bet that Davis is the best fiction writer ever to translate the novel. Which suggests a further question to the opening list: would you rather have your great novel translated by a good writer or a less good one? This is not as idle a question as it seems. That perfect translator must be a writer able to subsume him- or herself into the greater writer’s text and identity. Writer-translators with their own style and world view might become fretful at the necessary self-abnegation; on the other hand, disguising oneself as another writer is an act of the imagination, and perhaps easier for the better writer. So if Rick Moody tells us that Lydia Davis is ‘the best prose stylist in
America’, and Jonathan Franzen that ‘Few writers now working make the words on the page matter more’, does this make her better or worse equipped to render the best prose stylist of nineteenth-century France into twenty-first-century American English? Davis’s stories, typically from two or three lines to two or three pages, are decidedly un-Flaubertian in scope and extent; they vary from the wry episode and rapt reverie to the slightly arch two-liner; and if there is French influence around it is from a later date (thus Davis’s ‘The Race of the Patient Motorcyclists’ seems to owe a debt to Jarry). Her own life is clearly the basis for some of the stories, whereas Flaubert’s aesthetic was famously based on self-exclusion. On the other hand, Davis’s work shares the Flaubertian virtues of compression, irony and an extreme sense of control. And if Flaubert in his monasticism and exemplary pertinacity is a writer’s writer, Davis was described to me recently by an American novelist as a ‘writer’s writer’s writer’. That her translation of
Madame Bovary
was deemed worthy of serialisation by
Playboy
magazine – which puffed it as ‘The most scandalous novel of all time’ on the cover – is a noisier irony of which Flaubert might well have approved. The publicity sheet for the Viking (US) edition calls Emma ‘the original desperate housewife’, which, cheesy though it sounds, isn’t far off the mark.
Madame Bovary
is many things – a perfect piece of fictional machinery, the pinnacle of realism, the slaughterer of Romanticism, a complex study of failure – but it is also the first great shopping-and-fucking novel.

At least none of those nineteen or so translators has needed to recast its title; problems start, rather, with the subtitle, ‘
Moeurs de province
’. You can have ‘Provincial Manners’ (Marx-Aveling), ‘Life in a Country Town’ (Hopkins, 1948), ‘A Tale of Provincial Life’ (Alan Russell, 1950), ‘Provincial Lives’ (Geoffrey Wall, 1992), or ‘Provincial Ways’ (Lydia Davis). No one, as far as I can see, has adopted the cousinly subtitle of
Middlemarch
: ‘A Study of Provincial Life’. Several versions – including, rather
surprisingly, that of Francis Steegmuller (1957) – simply delete it. Subtitles can seem fussy and old-fashioned (thus the current Penguin
Middlemarch
dispenses with Eliot’s five subsidiary words), but omission seems a little perverse. Many translators (or publishers) also omit the next words in the novel – the dedication to Maître Sénard, who got Flaubert off the charge of outraging morality and religion when the novel, still in serial form, was prosecuted. Lydia Davis, an impressive completist, includes both this and the other, and more important, dedicatory page of the first edition, to Flaubert’s partner-in-literature Louis Bouilhet. Though even here the translator enters a world of micro-pedantry, because there is a choice of order: authenticity might favour the first edition, which begins with the Bouilhet dedication (in fact, a printer’s misleaving), while sense will prefer the corrected edition of 1873, which opens with the Sénard tribute.

But then translation involves micro-pedantry as much as the full yet controlled use of the linguistic imagination. The plainest sentence is full of hazard; often the choices available seem to be between different percentages of loss. It’s no surprise that Lydia Davis took three years to translate
Madame Bovary –
some translations need as long as the book itself took to write, a few even longer. John Rutherford’s magisterial version of Leopoldo Alas’s
La Regenta –
a kind of Spanish
Bovary –
used up, according to his calculation, five times as much of his life as it had of the original author’s. ‘Translation is a strange business,’ he noted in his introduction, ‘which sensible people no doubt avoid.’ Take a simple detail from the first pages of Flaubert’s novel. In his early years, Charles Bovary is allowed by his parents to run wild. He follows the ploughmen, throwing clods of earth at the crows; he minds turkeys and does a little bell-ringing. Flaubert awards such activities a paragraph, and then summarises the consequences of this pre-adolescent life in two short sentences which he pointedly sets out as a separate paragraph:

The meaning is quite clear; there are no hidden traps or false friends. If you want to try putting this into English yourself first, then look away now. Here are six attempts from the last 125 years to translate yet not traduce:

All contain the same information, but only the words ‘he’, ‘like’ and ‘strong’ are consistent to all six. Some of the matters these translators would have considered (on a scale from pertinent reflection to gut feel) would include: