Everything was before him

Dostoevsky describes General Epanchin's position in life with these shining words: "Но все было впереди, время терпело, время все терпело, и все должно было придти современем и своим чередом." ... "But everything was before him, there was time enough for everything, and everything would come in time and in due course." What a wonderful place to be! No wonder he continues: "Да и летами генерал Епанчин был еще, как говорится, в самом соку, то-есть пятидесяти шести лет и никак не более, что во всяком случае составляет возраст цветущий, возраст, с которого, по-настоящему, начинается истинная жизнь." ... "As for his years, General Epanchin was still, as they say, in the prime of life, that is, fifty-six and not a whit more, which in any case is a flourishing age, the age when true life really begins." (translation, as often, from Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky).

A few pages earlier, in describing Totsky, the man who lives with Nastasya Filippovna, Dostoevsky refers to the mid 50s: "потому совсем, то-есть, лет достиг настоящих, пятидесяти пяти, и жениться на первейшей раскрасавице во всем Петербурге хочет." ... interestingly (and perhaps strangely), Pevear and Volokhonsky add in the phrase "prime of life" here as well ... "because he's reached the prime of life, he's fifty-five, and wants to marry the foremost beauty in all Petersburg." Totsky is fifty-five, he's getting on a bit, now is the time he should be thinking of marrying a beauty, but of course it is plausible that he marry a great beauty, so in this sense perhaps we can take it as the "prime of life", but I am not sure the addition of the phrase in the translation is justified.

[Painting by Фёдор Александрович Васильев]

Imbibing the Reality of Metaphors Made Manifest

I will be Paris and for love of thee,
Instead of Troy shall Wittenberg be sacked.
- Marlowe, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus

Faustus declaims an impassioned identification, invoking a magical fusing of past and present, the fire of his emotion being hot enough to make the metaphor real.

On 7 February 1601, the evening before the abortive Essex Rising, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex and his supporters requested the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to perform a play on the matter of Henry IV, and the "deposing and killing" of Richard II.

We seek out art that "expresses" or makes manifest the swirl of inarticulate emotions within us. This is Aristotle's κάθαρσις - catharsis - the purgation of excessive feelings. But we see with Essex and with Faustus that the imitation is commutative: art represents life, and life would reinforce its patterns by imitating the art it selects. Instead of Richard, Elizabeth; instead of Troy, Wittenberg.

Plato had identified this danger of poetry, see Republic 3.395d ... (here starting back in the middle of 395c): ἐὰν δὲ μιμῶνται, μιμεῖσθαι τὰ τούτοις προσήκοντα εὐθὺς ἐκ παίδων, ἀνδρείους, σώφρονας, ὁσίους, ἐλευθέρους, καὶ τὰ τοιαῦτα πάντα, τὰ δὲ ἀνελεύθερα μήτε ποιεῖν μήτε δεινοὺς εἶναι μιμήσασθαι, μηδὲ ἄλλο μηδὲν τῶν αἰσχρῶν, ἵνα μὴ ἐκ τῆς μιμήσεως τοῦ εἶναι ἀπολαύσωσιν. ἢ οὐκ ᾔσθησαι ὅτι αἱ μιμήσεις, ἐὰν ἐκ νέων πόρρω διατελέσωσιν, εἰς ἔθη τε καὶ φύσιν καθίστανται καὶ κατὰ σῶμα καὶ φωνὰς καὶ κατὰ τὴν διάνοιαν;

"But if they imitate they should from childhood up imitate what is appropriate to them — men, that is, who are brave, sober, pious, free and all things of that kind; but things unbecoming the free man they should neither do nor be clever at imitating, nor yet any other shameful thing, lest from the imitation they imbibe the reality. Or have you not observed that imitations, if continued from youth far into life, settle down into habits and (second) nature in the body, the speech, and the thought?"

The translation here is Paul Shorey's. I think "lest from the imitation they imbibe the reality" is an instance of the translator introducing a new metaphor that isn't in the original ἵνα μὴ ἐκ τῆς μιμήσεως τοῦ εἶναι ἀπολαύσωσιν. As much as I like the florid grandeur of "imbibe the reality", perhaps Benjamin Jowett's older translation is closer to the mark "lest from imitation they should come to be what they imitate."

Jowett's version of this section runs: "if they imitate at all, they should imitate from youth upward only those characters which are suitable to their profession - the courageous, temperate, holy, free, and the like; but they should not depict or be skilful at imitating any kind of illiberality or baseness, lest from imitation they should come to be what they imitate. Did you never observe how imitations, beginning in early youth and continuing far into life, at length grow into habits and become a second nature, affecting body, voice, and mind?"

Félicité, Passion, Ivresse

Returning to that final sentence of Chapter 5 of Part 1 of Madame Bovary

"Et Emma cherchait à savoir ce que l’on entendait au juste dans la vie par les mots de félicité, de passion et d’ivresse, qui lui avaient paru si beaux dans les livres."

In Geoffrey Wall's translation for Penguin Classics it is: "And Emma sought to find out exactly what was meant in real life by the words fidelity, passion, and rapture, which had seemed so fine on the pages of books." "Fidelity" here seems like a mistake.

Lydia Davis' recent translation offers: "And Emma tried to find out just what was meant, in life, by the words "bliss," "passion," and "intoxication," which had seemed so beautiful to her in books."

Frank McConnell explains the range of meanings of these three words in his essay 'Félicité, Passion, Ivresse: The Lexicography of Madame Bovary': "To understand fully the range and importance of the verbal motto félicité, passion, ivresse, it is necessary to examine their potential grammar. All three may be understood as both intransitive and relational terms, depending upon the sense in which we decide to take them. Fklicitk-"bliss, "luck," "joy," or a kind of benign capacity for grace, is either a serenely full good humor or a dynamic equilibrium of circumstance and spirit. Passion is both le grand passion, the English "passion," and also a "passive" suffering, a state of being painfully objective to another person or to the world. And Ivresse is both "ecstasy" and, simply, "drunkenness" or "intoxication": taken most generally, the use of an object-or the objectification of a subject-for the artificial transcendence of one's subjective consciousness." (Novel, Winter 1970, p.158)

In a footnote he also quotes a remark by Wittgenstein: "That is to say, whether a word of the language of our tribe is rightly translated into a word of the English language depends upon the role this word plays in the whole life of the tribe; the occasions on which it is used, the expressions of emotion by which it is generally accompanied, the ideas which it generally awakens or which prompt its saying, etc., etc.," Wittgenstein, The Brown Book (New York, lssue), p. 103.

Inclined towards the tumultuous??

The character sketch of the young Emma in Chapter 6 of Part 1 of Madame Bovary captures some key elements of the restlessness which leads her towards trouble.

"Habituée aux aspects calmes, elle se tournait, au contraire, vers les accidentés. Elle n’aimait la mer qu’à cause de ses tempêtes, et la verdure seulement lorsqu’elle était clairsemée parmi les ruines. Il fallait qu’elle pût retirer des choses une sorte de profit personnel; et elle rejetait comme inutile tout ce qui ne contribuait pas à la consommation immédiate de son coeur, -- étant de tempérament plus sentimentale qu’artiste, cherchant des émotions et non des paysages."

The Penguin Classics translation seems to strike a somewhat different tone ... the first sentence, for example, transposes Flaubert's fairly direct imagery into a different register, almost Miltonic in its abstract grandeur.

"Familiar with the tranquil, she inclined, instead, towards the tumultuous. She loved the sea only for the sake of tempests, the meadow only as a background to some ruined pile. From everything she had to extract some kind of personal profit, and she discarded as useless anything that did not lend itself to her heart's immediate satisfaction - endowed with a temperament more sentimental than artistic, preferring emotions rather than landscapes."

The phrase "ruined pile" hits a strange note - somehow too Gilbert & Sullivan for this context, and the last phrase "cherchant des émotions et non des paysages" loses some of its simplicity.

Lydia Davis' recent translation discards "inclined towards" in favour of the simpler "turned toward" but keeps "tumultuous", and it is good to see no mention of a "ruined pile". Davis sticks closer to the French with "greenery", and her concluding phrase better mirrors the rhetorical balance of the original.

Here is Davis' translation: "Accustomed to the calm aspects of things, she turned, instead, toward the more tumultuous. She loved the sea only for its storms, and greenery only when it grew up here and there among ruins. She needed to derive from things a sort of personal gain; and she rejected as useless everything that did not continue to the immediate gratification of her heart, - being by temperament more sentimental than artistic, in search of emotions and not landscapes."