"Ah! by Jove! one's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us."
--from MADAME BOVARY by Gustave Flaubert
重讀包法利夫人(之一):bovarysme及其它 2005/10/30
--from MADAME BOVARY by Gustave Flaubert
重讀包法利夫人(之一):bovarysme及其它 2005/10/30
緣起:
2005/10/28 讀「中時人間」林小花(盧昂傳真)的「回應與挑戰---為盧昂人辯」
:「貴刊十月廿三日「三少四壯集」韓良露女士〈盧昂的女人〉一文(下稱「韓文」),提及盧昂城古董文化業與貞德的歷史,或出自作者走馬看花印象式的個人偏見,或囿於對當地地理、歷史背景的認識不足,恐有誤導讀者之虞。…… .」
去找韓良露女士的〈盧昂的女人〉一文,發現作者更多處的粗心大意,譬如說,「 來到了包法利夫人的故事背景的諾曼第古城盧昂( Rouen)的我,走進了……..」當然,真正的『包法利夫人的故事背景』在一小鎮,除非我們採取「大盧昂區」( greater Rouen)的觀念,這想法,我很懷疑。不過,盧昂是Flaubert 的故鄉,所以韓良露女士的〈盧昂的女人〉有一天馬行空的大膽假設,倒是很可以研究:
「如今聖女貞德卻成為盧昂的象徵,盧昂人為紀念她的受難立了大教堂來瞻仰崇敬她,我突然想到福樓拜在寫包法利夫人時,不知是否想過盧昂這個城市所代表的女性受難的本質;貞德是聖女,但包法利卻是罪女,包法利夫人因通姦而自覺有罪,用一死了之來逃避當時的社會倫理的指責,也等於是被迫站在輿論的火堆上被焚。」
近 40年前,我初讀『包法利夫人』(作者Gustave Flaubert. 1821–80),所以現在趁機讀它一下。以前讀,或許只看重故事情節,現在,可以欣賞的很多(本書旨為『外省之風俗民情』,這,對我們的閱讀,無疑是一挑戰……..),譬如說首章學校的拋)帽子,我會想起很久以前胡適先生到學校演講,也會來這一招瀟灑動作,讓聽眾驚豔(後來我讀英文本,知道是 cap,不同於胡適的…….)只根據讀五六章談些感想。
這種名著,英法文有許多論文,不知道大陸有沒做。換句話說,我認為應有學術/學習之版本和通俗版。這兒談的,都是後者。我」知道瑞麟兄(rl)有些版本,就陸續與他通信,談些相關的問題,尤其是所謂「: bovarysme」。
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中文版本:
遠景出版(鍾斯譯)-遠景版譯者沒聽過,似為大陸版本?
大陸有六本以上,(周克希譯本,台灣由貓頭鷹出版重印),包括我有的
李健吾譯(桂冠版為李之舊譯本。遠景似乎也參考它?)
李健吾(收入「福樓拜小說全集」,北京;人民文學,2002。此版本已請人將原先「編輯加工…….可謂代表當前譯文最高水平……」)、
張道真等的(北京;人民文學,1998。)
商周今年出一新本,翻譯無什麼特色。(也許這套強調導論?)
新潮的蕭逢時版本(有插圖)。
中文版的注各有春秋,李可能最好(連「玩房子遊戲」(chapter 2)都注。不過,有些見解可能有問題,譬如說,著名的兩人在馬車內偷情六小時,而要求車夫「隨便(at random)、不停地走下去」的路徑。不過,它們都沒作者玩文字遊戲之注。
我買Oxford World's Classics版本(1981/1998),物美價廉。翻過Penguin和Norton版……。注解都不錯。
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關於: bovarysme 和其他
hc問rl:「法文有Bovarism說法嗎?」
rl:「bovarism = bovarysme
(我的)英漢大辭典解釋作「自負、自誇」,然而法漢詞典直接解釋為「包法利性格」,詞典附帶說明為「指如同法國作家福婁拜爾小說《包法利夫人》中女主人公的對環境不滿、追求個人幸福等的性格」。
HC:「你的英漢bovarism顯然錯誤。這字在英文早有定論【bovarism
(domination by) a romantic or unreal conception of oneself: conceit; hence, bovaristic - conceited [after Madame Bovary] ;bovarize view oneself in romantic or unreal light 】。你可看你有的周本施康強之序。這個字之發明家原文為何?真的是他嗎?我的Short OED 只說,它是20世紀早期之字。
(domination by) a romantic or unreal conception of oneself: conceit; hence, bovaristic - conceited [after Madame Bovary] ;bovarize view oneself in romantic or unreal light 】。你可看你有的周本施康強之序。這個字之發明家原文為何?真的是他嗎?我的Short OED 只說,它是20世紀早期之字。
(『早在上一個世紀,已有論者強調這部小說的心理學和哲學層面。儒勒.德.戈吉耶發明了"包法利主義"這個名詞,把它定義為"人所具有的把自己設想成另一個樣子的能力"。(應該說,"包法利主義"的存在先于包法利夫人,而且是超國界的。中國文學史上有無數"心比天高,命如紙薄"或"始亂終棄"的"紅顏薄命"的故事。它也延伸到當今世界,青年男女對明星、對"大眾情人"的崇拜,其實也是"包法利主義"的一種變體。)』」)
rl:「我認為…….若指"包法利主義"本身的話,我相信是正確的,因為社會寫實小說之產生,必定是在某一現象存在之後;…..從儒勒‧ 德‧ 戈吉耶還原成法文,我相信是指Jules de Gaultier。
我們從其生殁年籍( 1858 — 1942 )與《包法利夫人》發表年分(1856)來推斷,若此字彙為戈吉耶所發明,顯然必定在《包法利夫人》發表之後,請參考其作品Le Bovarysme, la psychologie dans l'œuvre de Flaubert (1892)……剛瀏覽到魯昂大學福婁拜爾中心的相關資料,前面大半是法文,但是關於包法利主義部分特別有英文介紹。」
我們從其生殁年籍( 1858 — 1942 )與《包法利夫人》發表年分(1856)來推斷,若此字彙為戈吉耶所發明,顯然必定在《包法利夫人》發表之後,請參考其作品Le Bovarysme, la psychologie dans l'œuvre de Flaubert (1892)……剛瀏覽到魯昂大學福婁拜爾中心的相關資料,前面大半是法文,但是關於包法利主義部分特別有英文介紹。」
Emma Bovary's bovarism
The notion of bovarism (in French: bovarysme) was coined by the French essayist Jules de Gaultier (1858-1942), who gave it two meanings: 1) special persons' romantic escape from reality, and 2) man's general, and inevitable, faculty to conceive reality other than it actually is. Once one recognises, with Gaultier, that Flaubert's Emma Bovary illustrates both these meanings of the notion to which she has lent her name, she can no longer be considered as just a stupid, alienated country woman. She has become a representative of human beings in general. A more favourable conception of Madame Bovary is that, however inauthentic she is, her search for authenticity is authentic. The tension between inauthenticity and authenticity even lets her be regarded as a tragic character, as Baudelaire, Auerbach and Ross Chambers have suggested.
The notion of bovarism (in French: bovarysme) was coined by the French essayist Jules de Gaultier (1858-1942), who gave it two meanings: 1) special persons' romantic escape from reality, and 2) man's general, and inevitable, faculty to conceive reality other than it actually is. Once one recognises, with Gaultier, that Flaubert's Emma Bovary illustrates both these meanings of the notion to which she has lent her name, she can no longer be considered as just a stupid, alienated country woman. She has become a representative of human beings in general. A more favourable conception of Madame Bovary is that, however inauthentic she is, her search for authenticity is authentic. The tension between inauthenticity and authenticity even lets her be regarded as a tragic character, as Baudelaire, Auerbach and Ross Chambers have suggested.
hc:「施康強先生之序文在網路可找到。他還可以,不過凡碰到ism等等都翻譯愁主義的做法,太粗縣線條…….又,我發現Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms收入 Bovarysme,解釋也更精彩。」
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hc:「謝謝。不知道有沒有MADAME Bovary一書之地圖?我都沒見夠中英文書有。其實,應該有才容易了解。」
「在此之前未曾見過相關之地圖,心想如果有的話,魯昂大學福婁拜爾中心或許會找得到。把該網站各角落點選掃瞄了一遍,無功而返。」
「煩請抄周本第3章最末段;婚禮之翻譯。」
rl:「周克希譯:
愛瑪卻希望婚禮放在半夜裡,點著火把舉行,可魯奧老爹覺得這個想法實在有點匪夷所思。於是到了婚禮那天,來了四十三位賓客,酒宴長達十六個小時,第二天又接著吃,一連熱鬧了好幾天。」
hc:「這段,我原以為以代表Bovarism 。不料,上述Oxford的版本和Penguin版都說,它是當地習俗。譬如說莫伯桑的那位親人採這種方式。可見,憑想像多容易出錯。(我後來發現,李健吾譯本即有此種誤解。)」
這是第20本英譯本嗎?
Desperate Housewife
By KATHRYN HARRISON
Published: September 30, 2010
Poor Emma Bovary. She will never escape the tyranny of her desires, never avoid the anguish into which her romantic conceits deliver her, never claim the oblivion she sought from what is perhaps the most excruciating slow suicide ever written. Her place in the literary canon is assured; she cannot be eclipsed by another tragic heroine. Instead, each day she will be resurrected by countless readers who will agonize over the misery she brings herself and everyone around her and wonder at Flaubert’s ability to, godlike, summon life from words on a page.Thomas Klausman/Samuel Goldwyn Company
MADAME BOVARY
Provincial Ways
By Gustave Flaubert
Translated by Lydia Davis
342 pp. Viking. $27.95
Related
- Excerpt: ‘Madame Bovary’ (penguingroup.com)
As Lydia Davis describes Flaubert’s work habits in the introduction to her translation of the book that “permanently changed the way novels were written thereafter,” Flaubert’s attention to detail was as painstaking as humanly possible. He spent up to 12 hours a day at his desk, for months at a time, discarding far more material than he kept and reporting as little progress as a single page per week. Given the pressure Flaubert applied to each sentence, there is no greater test of a translator’s art than “Madame Bovary.” Faithful to the style of the original, but not to the point of slavishness, Davis’s effort is transparent — the reader never senses her presence. For “Madame Bovary,” hers is the level of mastery required.
Having taken to heart the advice of his best friend, the poet Louis Bouilhet (to whom he dedicated “Madame Bovary”), Flaubert settled on a mundane topic to suppress his admitted “tendency to wax lyrical and effusive in response to exotic materials.” (An early draft of “The Temptation of Saint Anthony” was so purple Bouilhet suggested he burn it.) Adultery, financial ruin: these dramas played out in every social circle, Flaubert’s included. Emma’s fate is borrowed from two real-life cautionary tales, the adultery and suicide of Delphine Delamare, and the heedless extravagance that bankrupted Louise Pradier. If the plot was a simple enough equation, adding one vain, selfish act to another until they collectively resulted in disaster, the demands Flaubert placed on his execution of the narrative were severe and absolute.
Readers cannot like Emma Bovary, and yet they follow her with the kind of attention reserved for car wrecks, whether literal or metaphorical. How can a covetous, small-minded woman, incapable of love and (as she feels no true connection to anyone) terminally bored by her life, fascinate us as she succumbs to one venal impulse after the next? Flaubert commands his audience’s attention by rendering every aspect of Emma’s life — he called his novel “a biography” — with such skill that readers need not willingly suspend disbelief. Whether or not they admire Flaubert’s masterwork, they cannot doubt its trenchant, often uncanny realism.
On the face of it, Emma Bovary’s life assumes the shape of that of another celebrated heroine. Anna Karenina has a repellent husband, embarks on an affair with a man who ultimately betrays her love, and commits suicide. But Anna is sympathetic; her tragedy results as much from her circumstances (a woman who must yield to the conventions of 19th-century Russian society) as from her character. Married to an unfeeling man 20 years her senior, Anna doesn’t smother the passion Vronsky awakes in her. Her innate decency cannot overcome her hunger for love. Readers root for Anna and watch Emma with increasing horror, because Emma forces us to confront the human capacity for existential, and therefore insatiable, emptiness. Fatally self-absorbed, insensible to the suffering of others, Emma can’t see beyond the romantic stereotypes she serves, eternally looking for what she expects will be happiness. Anna remains vulnerable to her husband’s threat to take away the son she loves; when Emma isn’t being actively cruel, she ignores her daughter, motherhood having turned out to be one more reality that didn’t measure up to her fantasy of it.
Emma doesn’t have character flaws so much as she lacks character itself. She’s a vacuum, albeit a sensitive and sensual one, sucking up every ready-made conceit. As a convent student Emma mistakes her “ardent veneration for illustrious or ill-fated women” like Joan of Arc for a religious vocation, dreaming of voluptuous sacrifices perfumed by incense. Contemplating her future with Charles Bovary, she wanted “to be married at midnight, by torchlight,” expecting matrimony to teach her the meaning of “the words ‘bliss,’ ‘passion’ and ‘intoxication,’ which had seemed so beautiful to her in books.” Seduced by Rodolphe, Emma feels her most intense pleasure alone, before a mirror, when she looks at her newest self and repeats over and over: “I have a lover! A lover!”
As for that lover, after taking Emma riding into the woods and ravishing her there, “Rodolphe, a cigar between his teeth, was mending with his penknife one of the bridles, which had broken.” This sentence is worth a day’s work, if that’s what it took Flaubert to assemble the details necessary to illuminate so critical a moment in Emma’s plummet. The dastard’s teeth already sunk in a subsequent gratification of his appetite; the phallic penknife; the broken restraint; the experience of drawing a previously chaste woman into adultery so unaffecting that his attention has already strayed to a routine chore: what more is needed to confirm Rodolphe’s base nature? The seduction accomplished, it’s only a matter of time before he casts Emma aside, before she takes and is disappointed by another lover, before she falls prey to the money-lender Lheureux.
Flaubert’s “scorn for the bourgeoisie,” whose essence he intended Emma to represent, was based, above all, in its tendency to unconsciously appropriate and serve existing sentiments. Because Emma never questions the validity of her fantasies, borrowed from romance novels or inspired by attending an aristocrat’s ball, she embraces the terms of her disappointment over and over again. Turning her back on the real love she is offered, Emma is always waiting for someone or something better, at the very least the next distraction from her restless ennui. Her 19th-century death — after swallowing the one thing to permanently satisfy hunger: poison — might occur in any age, including our own, and summons less grief than gratitude. At last she has solved the problem of herself.
It is a shame Flaubert will never read Davis’s translation of “Madame Bovary.” Even he would have to agree his masterwork has been given the English translation it deserves.