417 Echols Street Vienna, Virginia, 22180 August 24, 1997

Dear Mary Ann,

Once again, I thank you for the collector’s edition of Madame Bovary. As promised in my email, I am sending you one of my little “studies” in comparative translation. What you see is no great literary feat. I simply cut and pasted the different translations from my vast collection into a Microsoft Word 5.1 chart for MAC. I have written some of my own thoughts, colored, to be sure, by my readings of the secondary literature. Your professional interest in English, your knowledge of French and your study of the creative process should make this little exercise all the more interesting.

You might pretend you are giving a course in creative writing to 14 students. First you read the French. That is the “thought” which your 14 students had to express in English. How well did each succeed in conveying that thought. Now returning to the original, you can behold the combination of form and content as the maitre would express it. You can now behold this combination, knowing that at best the translations capture one part. Each captures a bit of the form, each captures a bit of the content. But none capture all of both. What each or all fail to capture might be said to be “art.” Since you know both languages you can be in touch with that art. So now you have another reason to be glad you took French.

You can skip my own little essay on the passage and just peruse the translations. They are sort of fun in this bizarre setting. (Flaubert is probably spinning in his grave at the thought of his language being thus copied.)

I originally picked this passage to study because I found the French difficult to grasp. This is one of those passages where one reads a bunch of words; and though the each word is familiar, and so gives one the feel that one has understood, on further reflection one realizes one needs to read it again. Fixing the meaning of the sentences illusive. As you