MADAME BOVARY (2)

“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

Gustave Flaubert: one of the defining figures of modern literature

"Madame Bovary" was published on this day in 1857

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Everyman's Library

On this day in 1857, Gustave Flaubert's MADAME BOVARY was first published as a book.

"What exasperated her was Charles's total unawareness of her ordeal. His conviction that he was making her happy she took as a stupid insult: such self-righteousness could only mean that he didn't appreciate her."
--from MADAME BOVARY

Emma, a passionate dreamer raised in the French countryside, is ready for her life to take off when she marries the decent, dull Dr. Charles Bovary. Marriage, however, fails to live up to her expectations, which are fueled by sentimental novels, and she turns disastrously to love affairs. The story of Emma’s adultery scandalized France when Madame Bovary was first published. Today, the heartbreaking story of Emma’s financial ruin remains just as compelling. In Madame Bovary, his story of a shallow, deluded, unfaithful, but consistently compelling woman living in the provinces of nineteenth-century France, Gustave Flaubert invented not only the modern novel but also a modern attitude toward human character and human experience that remains with us to this day. One of the rare works of art that it would be fair to call perfect, Madame Bovary has had an incalculable influence on the literary culture that followed it. This translation, by Francis Steegmuller, is acknowledged by common consensus as the definitive English rendition of Flaubert’s text. READ an excerpt here:http://knopfdoubleday.com/…/50…/madame-bovary/9780679420316/

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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

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/