Some Notes on Translation and on Madame Bovary →
Lydia Davis’ piece in the current Paris Review makes me even more excited to finally read her translation of Madame Bovary, and pleased that my delay means getting the revisions in the paperback edition.
One example she cites of the translator’s difficulty is:
Le bourg était endormi. Les piliers des halles allongeaient de grandes ombres. La terre était toute grise, comme par une nuit d’été.
Which she translates as:
The town was asleep. The pillars in the marketplace cast long shadows. The earth was grey, as on a summer night.
and an earlier translator, Steegmuller, “amplified,” as she says, to:
The town was asleep. The pillars of the market cast long shadows, and the pallor of the road in the moonlight gave the effect of a summer night.
Steegmuller’s seems to me an entirely different spirit, excessively detailed and too obviously trying to be picturesque, ending up as rhythmically clumsy, and introducing a heavy authorial hand by replacing Flaubert’s light, sentence-ending simile with a fussy direction how to interpret the just-given description (the pallor that wasn’t even in the original).
I’m no doubt revealing the narrow limits of my French idiom, but I miss “allongeaient” (“lengthened,” “elongated”) in the English. Breaking it into verb + adj works, but is less active. English, however, has no real equivalent to “grande”; “big” would be too casual, “great” might work but has a lofty sound, and the reflexive implication of “de” (whose shadows? The pillars’) is something we can’t do as deftly:
The town was asleep. The market pillars lengthened [their] long shadows. The earth was all greyed, as by a summer night.
“Par” has so many possible translations. The direction of Flaubert’s thought here seems to me to be imparting volition to inanimate things, but how would that read, coming across it in context? How would you translate it?
