![]() ![]() ![]() Sartre professes perplexity, but his insight is perhaps the key to why Davis's translation is fresh, dynamic and riveting: She is a woman pretending to be a man who is pretending to be a woman, thereby erasing all but the external markers of gender and getting right to the heart of Emma Bovary's complex and fascinating humanity. But nestled in there, after DeMan's attempt, is an amusing observation about Flaubert by Jean-Paul Sartre, "His physicians dubbed him a nervous old woman and he felt vaguely flattered", followed somewhat later by a question, "Why did it so value as an admirable character portrayal of a woman … what was at bottom only a poor disguised man?" The last translation I read was by Paul DeMan, the official Norton translation, a translation that reads like an academic exercise. ![]() It is, after all, about a provincial French woman of the early 19th century who is beautiful, selfish and forever immature, a man's idea of a woman, you might say, and not that illuminating to actual women, notwithstanding its place in the pantheon (right there next toĪnna Karenina, another man's idea of a woman). Madame Bovary four times now, and until this one, by Lydia Davis, I always appreciated Gustave Flaubert's novel with a somewhat removed feeling - stamped it as "great" and went on, not terribly moved. ![]()
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