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."

Beware of books

The last sentence of chapter five of Madame Bovary is a succinct expression of the engine that propels the story. It deserves to be as famous as the first sentence of Anna Karenina - Все счастливые семьи похожи друг на друга, каждая несчастливая семья несчастлива по-своему - or Tale of Two Cities - "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, ..." and so forth. Flaubert writes:

"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."

Books can be perilous - we know this from Paolo and Francesco in Canto V of Dante's Inferno. It was their reading of the story of Lancelot which was their dangerous path, and when they reached the part where Lancelot kissed the smiling lips of the Queen, they kissed and their fate was sealed. At the end of the canto, Dante faints from pity at this story.

Quando leggemmo il disïato riso
esser basciato da cotanto amante,
questi, che mai da me non fia diviso,
la bocca mi basciò tutto tremante.

Everything is beautiful at the ballet, as Edward Kleban's lyrics in the A Chorus Line song go, and fidelity, passion and rapture are generally "si beaux dans les livers".

Emma and Francesca are each driven by the desire to know and to experience things of which they have read. There is almost something of wanting to apply the scientific method to the world of the emotions which leads us into the world of Freud.  But more simply there is simply the desire to fully live, to experience what there is to be experienced and not let life pass by shut off from the big experiences.

Flaubert's close ups

Flaubert writes cinematically. The following paragraph reminds me of scenes like the opening of Bergman's Cries and Whispers, and of that febrile distortion of focus I remember from lying in bed sick as a child, where the clock on the far wall with a dog's face seemed so close.

"Il arriva un jour vers trois heures; tout le monde était aux champs; il entra dans la cuisine, mais n’aperçut point d’abord Emma; les auvents étaient fermés. Par les fentes du bois, le soleil allongeait sur les pavés de grandes raies minces, qui se brisaient à l’angle des meubles et tremblaient au plafond. Des mouches, sur la table, montaient le long des verres qui avaient servi, et bourdonnaient en se noyant au fond, dans le cidre resté. Le jour qui descendait par la cheminée, veloutant la suie de la plaque, bleuissait un peu les cendres froides. Entre la fenêtre et le foyer, Emma cousait; elle n’avait point de fichu, on voyait sur ses épaules nues de petites gouttes de sueur."

Bovary's hightened sensitivity is clear ... the fine detail, the flies drowning in the cider in the bottom of the glasses, and all this culminating in noticing the small beads of sweat on Emma's shoulders.

Bewailing thir excess

Christopher Ricks (Milton's Grand Style, p.74) makes the link between Adam and Eve 'bewailing thir excess' and lines from The Pardoner's Tale

O, wiste a man how manye maladyes
Folwen of excesse and of glotonyes

Think also here of the sins of incontinence that occupy the early circles of Dante's Inferno.

Late Style's perfunctoriness

Tim Parks writes of his experience of translating the late novels and stories of Alberto Moravia: "I was struck by the almost cavalier perfunctoriness of the late books, combined with a ruthless narrative dispatch."

Adorno speaks of this, echoed by Said etc...

Only nature

"This confirmed me in my resolve to keep to Nature alone in future. Only Nature has inexhaustible riches, and only Nature creates a great artist." - Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (Penguin classic, p.32)

Turner wanting future generations to know nature through his work.

Pollock's somewhat defiant declaration: "I am nature" (made in response to a query if he worked from nature). In the context of Dante's statement that art is the child of nature, and thus the grandchild of God, Pollock seems blasphemous. In the context of the Origin of Species, he seems merely accurate.

Biscuits and cake and the rod

"Daß die Kinder nicht wissen, warum sie wollen, darin sind alle hochgelahrten Schul--und Hofmeister einig; daß aber auch Erwachsene gleich Kindern auf diesem Erdboden herumtaumeln und wie jene nicht wissen, woher sie kommen und wohin sie gehen, ebensowenig nach wahren Zwecken handeln, ebenso durch Biskuit und Kuchen und Birkenreiser regiert werden: das will niemand gern glauben, und mich dünkt, man kann es mit Händen greifen."

"All our learned teachers and educators are agreed that children do not know why they want what they want, but no one is willing to believe that adults too, like children, wander about this earth in a daze and, like children, do not know where they come from or where they are going, act as rarely as they do according to genuine motives, and are as thoroughly governed as they are by biscuits and cake and the rod. And yet it seems palpably clear to me." - Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (p.31, Penguin classic).

There is an interesting language difference between the sturdy Old English monosyllable "rod" (from the Old Norse "rudda" meaning "club") and the Germanic "Birkenreiser" ... "birch twigs".

Giuseppe Mazzotta - in his Yale lectures on Dante - explains that Dante perceives the problem of living to be a problem of the will, rather than the more simplistic classical view that it is a problem of knowledge. It is not enough to know the definition of justice, say; one must have the will to be just. We often know what is good for us, but choose something other. And that is perhaps the idea of sin: sin as error, a missing of the mark, a falling short, a failure of the will.