The Bright Book of Life by Harold Bloom

I FIRST READ Madame Bovary in the wooden translation by Eleanor Marx Aveling, with some revisions supposedly by my late friend Paul de Man. Eleanor Marx was a daughter of Karl Marx and became a socialist activist. She committed suicide at the age of forty-three, when she discovered that her partner, Edward, was a bigamist.

Fortunately, in 1987 I finally read it in French and began the long process of being haunted by it. I have just read the marvelous version by Lydia Davis, which seems to me a touchstone for literary translation. Her Madame Bovary is a kind of miracle, as is her Swann's Way (2004). I am still absorbing her startling short fictions, as they are sui generis.