✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

Julian Barnes · Writer’s Writer and Writer’s Writer’s Writer: ‘Madame Bovary’

lrb.co.uk · 6,158 words · saved by 1 readers

If you go to the website of the restaurant L’Huîtrière (3, rue des Chats Bossus, Lille) and click on ‘translate’, the zealous automaton you have stirred up will instantly render everything into English, including the address. And it comes out as ‘3 street cats humped’. Translation is clearly too important a task to be left to machines. But what sort of human should it be given to? Imagine that you are about to read a great French novel for the first time, and can only do so in your native English. The book itself is more than 150 years old. What would/ should/do you want? The impossible, of course. But what sort of impossible? For a start, you would probably want it not to read like ‘a translation’. You want it to read as if it had originally been written in English – even if, necessarily, by an author deeply knowledgable about France. You would want it not to clank and whirr as it dutifully renders every single nuance, turning the text into the exposition of a novel rather than a nove

Vol. 32 No. 22 · 18 November 2010 Writer’s Writer and Writer’s Writer’s Writer Julian Barnes Share on Bluesky Share on Facebook Share Email Print 5655 words Madame Bovary: Provincial Ways by Gustave Flaubert and Lydia Davis . Penguin, 342 pp., £20, November 2010, 978 1 84614 104 1 Show More Show More If you go to the website of the restaurant L'Huîtrière (3, rue des Chats Bossus, Lille) and click on 'translate', the zealous automaton you have stirred up will instantly render everything into English, including the address. And it comes out as '3 street cats humped'. Translati

Explore this link on the map →

related reading