Some are fairly close, but then they’ll add a metaphor that Flaubert doesn’t have.

“But it’s amazing how different they all are. “You’d think, working from one text, that the translations have got to be fairly similar,” Davis says. Davis realized that the style she’d dismissed as unremarkable, all those years ago, wasn’t even really Flaubert’s. Every version she looked at had problems: clichés, errors, awkwardness, embellishments-all revisions that would have horrified Flaubert, one of history’s most obsessive revisers. Her ideal creative rhythm, she’d discovered, was to have some large, stable project anchoring her to her desk so that her own stories could flit impulsively “around the edges.” So she started poking around in Flaubert’s novel and its many English manifestations-there are now about twenty-expecting to find at least one or two good enough to make a new translation unnecessary. She preferred Flaubert’s final novel, Bouvard and Pécuchet.Ī couple of years later, Viking asked Davis again. 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.

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