Adam Thorpe, on his new translation of "Madame Bovary"

Flaubert did strange things, such as eliminating any authorial voice or stable moral centre; he used the imperfect as his main tense, giving a single action the sense of being suspended in time; played with varying shades of irony down to the deepest hues of pastiche; slipped between the subjective and the objective viewpoint without a tremor. The first quarter of the book is more about Charles, the dullest of husbands, than about Emma – whose enamel-like eyes are blue, deep blue, brown and black.

In his new essay, author and translator Adam Thorpe calls Flaubert's Madame Bovary "the Everest of translation," and from his description above, it's easy to see why. Yet it is a deceptively simple story, almost boring in numbing detail, that turns even adultery into despair.

It is this precision with the mundane, the expression of nineteenth-century mores at the heart of a soul-crushing, bourgeois marriage, that Flaubert captured so realistically. What Thorpe calls the novel's "shimmering surface" is a treacherous ice-field of meaning, the difference between Flaubert's intent and his author's realism a thin edge that makes the story the first recognizably modern novel, as well as a nearly cinematic one.

Best to go carefully: in attempting this, the 20th translation of Bovary, Thorpe spent three years not only on linguistics but historical research, and comparing earlier drafts of the novel at the University of Rouen. He thought to use an 1853 French dictionary, and even found a first edition of the novel -- as he writes, the copy was only affordable because "oeuvre immorale" ("immoral work") had been scrawled with a quill on the flyleaf, and an anti-royalist page torn out. But Thorpe found even comparing the author's original drafts could be tricky:

For instance, Flaubert bizarrely uses the plural "jours" (normally "days", less usually "chinks", but also "daylight" in the singular) to describe light filtering in through a trellis on the dying Charles: "Des jours passaient par le treillis." Flaubert had included the following in an earlier draft: "All the sorrows of his life returned to him … from the first day to the last."' He cut this, but persisted (if hesitantly) with the awkward "jours"; I was sure that he intended this to be initially misread as the poetic and ambiguous "Days passed by the trellis", suggesting memories and the changing seasons.

For a translator, language and the various meanings of words have to be evaluated in context, their shadings examined as well as the author's intent. Of course it helps to have original notes, if you're lucky, but there are passages in Flaubert that depend on the sound of the language as well as meaning. Here's Thorpe describing Emma's waltz at the chateau:

In the French, the whirling dissolves the words into a streaky, clicking blur of vowels: "Ils tournaient: tout tournaient autour d'eux …" It seemed essential to mimic this mimicry, but how? Previous translations had not even tried: "They turned, and everything turned round them …" (Alan Russell); "They were turning: everything was turning around them …" (both Geoffrey Wall and Davis). I felt the key was to use stretched vowels and to find an equivalent echo between "tout" and "tournaient": "They were reeling round: all reeled round and about them …"

Then there is the fact that Flaubert himself revised the novel on subsequent printings, a translator's ultimate challenge. Thorpe admits that, faced with Flaubert's changes, he may feel just as free to alter his translation in later editions. Ultimately, however, the translator describes Flaubert as the "disappointed romantic" who wrote his realism with a kind of "quasi-scientific exactitude." As he points out, "Flaubert created an autonomous parallel universe: fiction as refuge from an outside world full of pain, peevishness and bourgeois vulgarity."

Even more is at stake when the very genius of the novel lies on the shimmering surface. This is not to do with ornament, but meaning. Flaubert wished to close the gap not just between words and emotional truths, but between words and things: the sound of Hippolyte's wooden leg in the church ("They heard on the flagstones something like the sharp click of an iron-shod pole tapping them with even strokes"); the lumbering sway of cattle; the scoop of a hand in sugar-white arsenic.

Today most readers would recognize Emma Bovary as a contemporary figure, caught in the demands of a culture filled with its own bourgeois vulgarity. That authorial awareness which Thorpe describes as exactitude -- Flaubert's triumph -- eventually became a hallmark of literary realism, familiar to most readers who expect stories these days to present life in some kind of real-life versimilitude. Unfortunately, that more often than not results in much fiction being as dreadful and boring on its own, which makes Flaubert's "shimmering surface" all the more remarkable.

"Crowded by Beauty," a new biography of Philip Whalen

Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen

Here is an excerpt from Crowded by Beauty: A Biography of Poet and Zen Teacher Philip Whalen, by David Schneider, forthcoming from University of California Press. A longer extract is published in the current issue of Trticycle magazine.

Whalen, along with Gary Snyder, was integral in the San Francisco group of poets who read at the Six Gallery in 1955. They were introduced by Kenneth Rexroth, a San Francisco poet of an older generation, who was a kind of literary father-figure for the younger poets and had helped to establish their burgeoning community through personal introductions at his weekly poetry readings. That night, Snyder read "A Berry Feast", and Whalen,"Plus Ca Change."

This excerpt describes Whalen's experience living as Snyder's roommate in 1952. Whalen eventually followed Snyder to become a Forest Service lookout, although as Schneider notes, Whalen "was much given, even then, to the sedentary life."

...Philip might never have found work in the mountains: sitting in that same Telegraph Hill apartment in the hot summer of 1952, Whalen read one of Gary’s regular letters, this one from a Forest Service lookout on Crater Mountain in the North Cascades of Washington State. Provoked by it, and by working (“bad anytime, but especially nasty in summer in the city”), Whalen wrote back to declare, “By God, next summer, I’m going to have a mountain of my own!”

This he did; then got another mountain the following year, and spent a third summer as a forest lookout the year after that, making this by far his steadiest, most satisfying job until many years later, when he became a “professional” man of the cloth—that is, a Zen priest. Whalen would never have read in the historic Six Gallery reading had not Snyder put Philip’s name and poems literally in front of Allen Ginsberg’s face. Philip certainly would have floundered longer with unemployment and flirted more dangerously with outright homelessness had Gary not taken care of him whenever the two were in the same town at the same time.

They roomed together in San Francisco off and on from 1952 to 1954 in a flat on Montgomery Street, above the city’s North Beach district, to which they descended together nearly nightly for beer at Vesuvio and other drinking establishments. Thus Philip and Gary came to know the writers, players, merchants, philosophers, painters, filmmakers, musicians, and scholars circling around the Bay Area in the gestation phase of the San Francisco Renaissance.

During this same period, Snyder and Whalen began going together to the American Academy of Asian Studies (now the California Institute of Integral Studies), where they heard and met Alan Watts, and later also D. T. Suzuki. From among the audiences there, they got to know Claude (Ananda) Dahlenberg, who cofounded the East-West House and later became an ordained Zen priest under Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. And from connections there, they began attending the regular Friday evening literary gatherings held at his home by the poet Kenneth Rexroth.

Snyder, Whalen and Lew Welch

Other Friday evenings found Whalen and Snyder in Berkeley for the study group with Rev. Kanmo Imamura and Jane Imamura at the Berkeley Buddhist Temple. Together the Imamuras were descended from the most important old families of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism, yet they welcomed the young men, going so far in the subsequent years as to turn their little church publication—theBerkeley Bussei—over to the artist Will Petersen for a time. Snyder, Whalen, Ginsberg, and Kerouac all published early poems in its pages. The benevolent Imamura family gave both Snyder and Whalen their first contact with people actually practicing Buddhism instead of purely discussing its philosophies and traditions.

Whalen might have made his way out to the Academy or over to the study group without Snyder’s impetus, but Philip was much given, even then, to the sedentary life. As long as he could, he spent hours each day reading, writing, drawing, playing music, doodling, staring into space—wondering from time to time where and how he could find a job that wouldn’t drive him crazy. He ventured out when he needed to—for cigarettes or food or for fresh air—but he had nothing like the get-up-and-go Gary had. It is, in fact, difficult to think of anyone with the drive and sense of adventure the young Snyder had.

These qualities propelled him up mountains, up trees, down the hole of tankers, out into deserts, back into libraries, into universities, into monasteries, across the country, out of the country, across oceans; they armored him against the many outer and inner obstacles an un-moneyed young man might encounter in such travels; they sustained him as he went where he needed to go, saw what he wanted to see, studied what, and with whom, he needed to study, worked as he had to, and cut loose when he could. ...

Photos: (top) Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen sit outside a temple above the village of Shimoyama in Japan(Brancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley). (bottom) Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Lew Welch before a poerty reading at Longshoreman's Hall (Photograph by Jim Hatch).

Cocteau's "La Belle et la Bête": “The vague land of fairy-tales"

Josette Day as Beauty, and Jean Marais as The Beast,
in Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête.

When weather turns colder and thoughts run to darker recesses of the psyche, the chills of a Halloween season must not be far away. I am wary of the current desire to be scared out of our wits 365 days a year in reading and at the movies -- like much else these days, easy availability of things once reserved for a turn in its own season, like Halloween, makes for duller thrills when the time is right.

Last Halloween, I saw The Exorcist -- for the first time. As my host burst out when I told him I had never seen it, "You've never seen The Exorcist! What the hell have you been watching?" My excuses must have seemed weak and weary: looking back to the early 1970s there was Fellini and Scorsese, Coppola, Altman ...Last Tango in Paris ... so yeah, I skipped on seeing The Exorcist. Meekly I offered Fantastic Planet and he drew a blank. No, he hadn't seen that one. Cue The Exorcist credits.

I'm glad I saw it, but I watched it as a film fan would watch Bela Lugosi in Dracula. It was mildly interesting but thoroughly filled with hoke, and just as theatrically staged for maximum audience chills as "I never drink ... wine" was for an earlier age. I admired Friedkin's craft -- wonderful stuff, absolutely top rate, he can make a bed shake like no other -- but the story -- pffft. As a recovering Catholic, maybe I just have never been scared of the Devil or his minions. Who can say.

There are other movies, though, that continue to send a chill down my spine in a Halloween season. Jean Cocteau's La Belle et la Bete, from 1946, is one. No blood or gore or pea-soup in this black-and-white telling of Beauty and the Beast, but a spectacular and haunting film to this day.

Here's Jonathan Williams, sage of the Jargon Society and Scaly Mountain, North Carolina, describing one of my favorite seasonal films. He begins by roundabout route, with the admission that it’s dangerous, going back to films you adored when you were 18 or 20, and then meanders his way to the subject by way of one film that -- to put it discreetly -- has at least stood the test of passing young Williams's time.



When he gets to the wind-up, it's great to read his words on Cocteau's incomparable visual poetry. Williams writes:

... The thing is, however, La Belle et la Bête, though it creaks a little technically and must have been made with hardly any budget at all, remains as compelling a fairy tale as ever. It is “Once upon a time” from beginning to end, childhood’s open sesame. Cocteau kept a journal of the film and it’s been sitting on the shelf, essentially unread, for 46 years because my French has never developed past knowing the names of foods and drinks. With a dictionary and the investment of 15 minutes of my friend Tom Meyer’s time, we can offer you this paragraph from Cocteau:

“My method is simple: I let the poetry alone; it comes on its own. It can only be called untameable. I’ve tried to build a table for the poetry. And for you, then, to eat there, to talk to it, or build a fire with.”

One would love to see the Beast’s chateau dans le fôret, but Cocteau’s journal makes it unclear to me whether it is named Rochecorbon in the Touraine, or Raray, north of Paris near Senlis. Most of the book appears to be about visits to doctors and dentists between rare moments on the set.

What one remembers with astonishing clarity are some of the great visual moments: the hall of candelabra held by human arms; the living caryatids with fiery eyes and smoke coming from their nostrils; the balustrade of animals in the Beast’s park; the door that tells Beauty that it is hers; the mirror that tells her it is hers alone. I have never forgotten the magic password: “Va ou je vais, le Magnifique, Va—va—va!” And the wonderful scene where Beauty’s wicked sisters, Felicie and Adelaide, hanging up the sheets on the washline, are dressed in great hats that make them silly goose girls. Henri Alekan‘s cinematography is luminous. You can’t hear much of Auric’s music on the soundtrack, but what’s there is very good.

Diana, goddess of the hunt, in La Belle et la Bête

Josette Day is enchanting as Beauty, and Jean Marais convincing as the poor Beast. He is at his best when he reveals to Beauty the secrets of his magic power in truly incantatory fashion: “My horse, my glove, my golden key, my mirror, and my rose!” It’s a real downer when he changes into Prince Charming — so big and butch, straight from the pages of the French equivalent of Physique Pictorial. But, that’s the look Cocteau and Genet liked in those dim days of yore. Treat your imagination to 90 minutes in “ce vague pays des contes de fées.”

Nowadays most everything is available online or on disc, and La Belle et la Bête is as close as a click at Amazon.com. I had the great pleasure of hearing Philip Glass conduct his own score at Atlanta's Fox Theater a few years ago, and the restored film was a glorious black-and-white treat to see on a large screen. A version with the Glass score (on a separate track) is available on DVD.

I only watch my copy once a year. I might not ever make time for The Exorcist again at Halloween, but La Belle et la Bête will forever be on the schedule as one of my favorites. Everything in its season ...