Any reader of the English-speaking world’s literary press is accustomed to such displays of knowledge and sensibility. This level of thoroughness and appreciation of subtlety is not, however, exclusive to the two great reviewers mentioned. For Barnes, in the end, the American writer’s translation was “a more than acceptable version” and, for Raban, with his characteristic fatalism, “like most of its forebears, it opens some fresh windows into the novel while leaving others shuttered.” because, clearly, faced with this job of exquisite surgery, not even she, so competent and acclaimed, emerged from the undertaking without some scars. Such engaging erudition and so much sensitivity to the dangers of a task that seems almost superhuman end up turning, as one might have foreseen, rather against poor Lydia Davis. But what sort of human should it be given to?” (Barnes) “Like surgery, translation requires judgment, precision, and experience” (Raban) Barnes reminds us that, whereas Lydia Davis needed three years to translate Madame Bovary, John Rutherford’s “magisterial version of Leopoldo Alas’s La Regenta-a kind of Spanish Bovary-cost him, according to his calculation, five times as many hours to translate as Alas had taken to write” Raban emphasized that defenseless English readers are doomed, for “we know that we’ll never hear in our own ears the niceties of pitch, tone, inflection, and nuance in Flaubert’s infinitely supple narrative voice as we can hear them in, say, Jane Austen’s.” The two critics, almost above all, spoke extensively and pugnaciously of the general difficulties and enigmas of all translation: “Translation is clearly too important a task to be left to machines. Il acquit de fortes mains, de belles couleurs” for Barnes-which each presented in multiple versions, minutely examined and exposed to the excellent judgment of the reader. In one seven-page passage, he laboriously counted twenty-one uses of the imperfect tense in one of the translations, twenty-five in another, thirty-four in a third, and, in Lydia Davis’s, 123, which led him to conclude that her version “may be unfaultable in its accuracy to the tense of Flaubert’s verbs, but it turns Emma’s precious Thursdays into something like the plight of Bill Murray in Groundhog Day.” Both reviewers singled out phrases-“ des fourmis le long du corps” for Raban “ Aussi poussa-t-il comme un chêne. Raban, when comparing the various translations he looked at, paid special attention to Flaubert’s use of the imparfait, a verb tense not always easy to resolve in English. Raban and Barnes both displayed expert knowledge of previous English translations of the novel-the former mentioned four, the latter, fifteen (and, just so we see the level we’re operating on here, in the December 16 issue of the LRB a reader took him to task for having forgotten one)-and both set out succulent and entertaining comparisons, furnishing examples and considering dilemmas. In October of that year Jonathan Raban’s three-page review of the event came out in the New York Review of Books, and in November Julian Barnes devoted a whole bunch more pages to it in the London Review of Books, making full use of that praiseworthy and often thrilling length the literary press in the English-speaking world occasionally allows and that, here in Spain, some of us long for. The convergence of so much acclaim did not, of course, go unnoticed. In 2010 the acclaimed American writer Lydia Davis published a new English translation of Gustave Flaubert’s acclaimed novel Madame Bovary.
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