Looking inside the cover of Lydia Davis’s eagerly awaited new translation of Madame Bovary, the reader is greeted with a quantity of praise for Davis’s 2004 translation of Proust’s Swann’s Way, a work that not only earned her a MacArthur “genius” grant but also caused her to be named a chevalier of the French Order of Arts and Letters—the official Gallic seal of approval.[1] Among the accolades Viking Penguin has included for Davis’s Proust is one from Dave Eggers: “I think Davis’s is definitive.”
Definitive? Impossible: there is no such thing as a definitive translation. Not of any literary work. For translations—like art forgeries, curiously enough—are always recognizably a product of their period. They may seem neutral at first, but as the years go on, telltale features of the 1920s, say, or the 1980s, will appear. This is a problem even when the period happens to be the same as that of the original work: Victorian English has different speech patterns, different conventions, an entirely different flavor from the stripped-down mid-nineteenth-century French prose Flaubert labored over so painstakingly.
Davis has counted nineteen English Madame Bovary translations prior to her own. Some of them continue to enjoy great acclaim, like that of Eleanor Marx Aveling (daughter of Karl), for instance, written in 1886 and revised by Paul de Man in 1965, or Francis Steegmuller’s 1957 version. And there is Geoffrey Wall’s 1992 Bovary, which has long been available in the Penguin Classics edition but
