I never loved this book before (sadly I cannot do serious reading in French), but now I do. Order it here. Reviews — mostly raves — are here. Right now Natasha is enjoying Davis's short fiction and I've ordered some of her other work as well.
Lydia Davis’s translation of *Madame Bovary*
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What do you love about it, Tyler? What does it do well?
her translation of swann's way is very good too.
Lydia Davis is very talented, but imposing one's own style on another writer is the opposite of good translating. She rewrites the books she translates to suit her own sensibility and is perverse in her targets of Flaubert and Proust, who are anything but clipped. A translator shouldn't jusge the material. The great ones – Enright, Pevear, Wimmer – render in English an experience quite close to reading in the orginal language.
I do not know the Lynda Davis but I do not doubt that translating Flaubert, who was so meticulous about his words, phrases, cadences, and the creation of varying moods in "Madame Bovary," is a very difficult test to excel in.
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