Readers cannot like Emma Bovary, and yet they follow her with the kind of attention reserved for car wrecks, whether literal or metaphorical. For “Madame Bovary,” hers is the level of mastery required. Given the pressure Flaubert applied to each sentence, there is no greater test of a translator’s art than “Madame Bovary.” Faithful to the style of the original, but not to the point of slavishness, Davis’s effort is transparent - the reader never senses her presence. He spent up to 12 hours a day at his desk, for months at a time, discarding far more material than he kept and reporting as little progress as a single page per week. “A good sentence in prose,” he wrote, “should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable.”Īs Lydia Davis describes Flaubert’s work habits in the introduction to her translation of the book that “permanently changed the way novels were written thereafter,” Flaubert’s attention to detail was as painstaking as humanly possible. “Madame Bovary” advanced slowly, as slowly as it would have to have, given an author who held himself accountable to each word, that it be the right word, of which there could be only one. Not his talent to do so - that would not have been enough - but his determination, which he never relaxed. The power of “Madame Bovary” stems from Flaubert’s determination to render each object of his scrutiny exactly as it looks, or sounds or smells or feels or tastes. Instead, each day she will be resurrected by countless readers who will agonize over the misery she brings herself and everyone around her and wonder at Flaubert’s ability to, godlike, summon life from words on a page. Her place in the literary canon is assured she cannot be eclipsed by another tragic heroine. She will never escape the tyranny of her desires, never avoid the anguish into which her romantic conceits deliver her, never claim the oblivion she sought from what is perhaps the most excruciating slow suicide ever written.
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