![]() Emma Bovary, the housewife doomed by fantasies of a better life, struck the young Davis as a weak heroine, and Flaubert’s allegedly revolutionary realism-the prose style that launched Proust, Joyce, Stein, Kafka, Faulkner, and Conrad on their adventures in twentieth-century consciousness-seemed unremarkable. All she knows is that she was unimpressed. ![]() Davis, who is now 63, hadn’t read Bovary since her first encounter with the book, in English, as a young woman-she can’t remember exactly when she read it, or even which translation. ![]() She had recently finished the massive job of translating Proust’s Swann’s Way-the first entirely new version in 80 years, and one that was widely celebrated as an improvement-and she was eager to focus again on her own creative work: the stream of meticulously unorthodox short fiction that culminated, last year, in the publication of the 733-page Collected Stories of Lydia Davis. When Viking asked Lydia Davis to translate Madame Bovary, back in 2006, she said no. ![]() Davis in her upstate office, where she keeps many copies of Madame Bovary and almost as many well-worn dictionaries. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |