664
PARTISAN REVIEW
ideas were-hence his unhappiness,
his
wanderings, and his feeble
nostalgia for the youthful days of his first visit to a house of
pros–
titution.
This interpretation is just tenable enough to prevent the
search
for a truer one, and few even of the seekers would begin by consulting
a French dictionary.
If
they did they would find that
sentimental{e)
means simply "of the feelings." FIaubert's title applies not solely
to
his hero but to all his characters; he is saying: "Look!
This
is how
modem life educates the feelings"-the irony resting on the dreadful
word "educates."
As
to this interpretation of the title there can
be
no
doubt: we have Flaubert's word for it. While at work on the novel,
he writes to a friend:
« ]
e veux faire I' histoire morale des hommes de
ma generatio-n-sentimentale serait plus vrai"
(To Mlle. de Chantepie,
Oct. 6, 1864).
The title once changed, we see that Frederic is a failure, not
because of
his
emotions of whatever kind, but because of
his
lack
of them. He is not even that sloppy thing
we
call sentimental; he
is
dry as a bone-and thus only half-brother to Emma Bovary. She
at
least tried to live out her dreams. She took risks, showed courage,
and
partly re-shaped her surroundings. Her faults of judgment, her "un–
realistic" choices are more to be respected than Frederic's caution
and
lack of will. Flaubert could and did say that Emma was himself;
he
never would have owned any kinship, except momentary, to Frederic.
All of which is part of the answer to "What's in a title?"
II
For the translator or would-be translator, FIaubert's
nUs–
rendered adjective deserves to symbolize Nemesis. Sooner or later he
who meddles with foreign texts will succumb to his fate, which
is
traducing. This may seem a strange necessity, for the criteria of a
good translation are few and simple: that it shall be clear to
its
readers and in keeping with their idiom; that it shall sound like
the
original author; and that it shall not mislead in substance or implica–
tion. But the steps to these results are beyond computing, they are
dissimilar in kind, if not contradictory, and they are nowhere codified.
What is easily grasped is that translation requires one to
be
always in two minds. The act of translating does not consist in carry–
ing words across a no-man's-land, but
in
answering the question:
