“At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon. She did not know what this chance would be, what wind would bring it her, towards what shore it would drive her, if it would be a shallop or a three-decker, laden with anguish or full of bliss to the portholes. But each morning, as she awoke, she hoped it would come that day; she listened to every sound, sprang up with a start, wondered that it did not come; then at sunset, always more saddened, she longed for the morrow.”
―from MADAME BOVARY
"And they talked about the mediocrity of provincial life, so suffocating, so fatal to all noble dreams."
―from MADAME BOVARY (1857)
讀胡品清翻譯的Bovary夫人 末章，因為沙特小孩時， 讀不懂末幾頁，提出一些問題 (見他的【文字生涯】)。其實，問得不錯。 推理上合理。可他熟讀原法文，而我們讀的是馬馬虎虎的中文。
"Madame Bovary" was published on April 12th 1857. It provoked one of the most famous literary trials in history—Flaubert was accused of degrading public morals with his tale of adultery and female lasciviousness
When Gustave Flaubert's MADAME BOVARY was first serialized in "La Revue de Paris" in late 1856, French public prosecutors attacked the novel for obscenity. The resulting trial in January 1857 made the story notorious. After Flaubert's acquittal on February 1857, MADAME BOVARY became a bestseller when it was published as a single volume on this day in 1857...
"And all this time she was torn by wild desires, by rage, by hatred. The trim folds of her dress hid a heart in turmoil, and her reticent lips told nothing of the storm. She was in love with Léon, and she sought the solitude that allowed her to revel undisturbed in his image."
--from MADAME BOVARY
--from MADAME BOVARY
For daring to peer into the heart of an adulteress and enumerate its contents with profound dispassion, the author of Madame Bovary was tried for "offenses against morality and religion." What shocks us today about Flaubert's devastatingly realized tale of a young woman destroyed by the reckless pursuit of her romantic dreams is its pure artistry: the poise of its narrative structure, the opulence of its prose (marvelously captured in the English translation of Francis Steegmuller), and its creation of a world whose minor figures are as vital as its doomed heroine. In reading Madame Bovary, one experiences a work that remains genuinely revolutionary almost a century and a half after its creation. READ an excerpt here:http://knopfdoubleday.com/book/50248/madame-bovary/
