Word: bouvard
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When Flaubert died in 1880, he left Bouvard and Pecuchet, his "kind of encyclopedia made into a farce," unfinished and unedited. In scope, it was to be Flaubert's masterpiece: a satiric work compounded of his life-long scorn of the bourgeoisie, their morals, their intellectual giddiness, their thoughtless generalizations...
Flaubert's style, however, seems to deny effective translation. Writing in the idiom of the French middle class, using accepted cliches, and punning occasionally, he writes French that is very difficult to render into another language. Especially in the case of Bouvard and Pecuchet, many translations have lacked the spirit, even the satiric subtlety of the original. But this most recent attempt, published by New Directions and jointly translated by T. W. Earp and G. W. Stonier, accurately reveals the artistry of Flaubert to an English-reading audience...
After they renounce their lives as Paris copy clerks and move to the country, Bouvard and Pecuchet hop from one intellectual endeavor to the other. Their failure at preserving vegetables leads them to chemistry, and each successive disappointment leads to a new venture: geology, biology, medicine, verse, politics, literary criticism. Each new "study" leaves them uncertain and confused, but they feel sure that with one more book, one more discovery, a certain subject will become entirely clear to them...
Undaunted, Bouvard and Pécuchet go on to more ambitious studies-chemistry, physiology, geology, archeology, history, politics, literature, esthetics, philosophy, religion. The cultural scenery of the times flashes by as they careen along the road to knowledge. They are a little ashamed on discovering that "their own organism contained phosphorous like matches, albumen like the whites of eggs, hydrogen like gas lamps," but delighted to learn that "the tongue is the seat of taste, and the feeling of hunger resides in the stomach." Not complete imbeciles, they become suspicious of historians on reading that the Loire during the French...
...English, as in French, Flaubert's catalogue of follies is well short of hilarious. He believed that if he made his story "concise and light, it would be a fantasy-more or less witty, but without weight or plausibility." But his text tends to prove that in writing Bouvard, Flaubert spent eight years with the wrong idea...