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Tonight at 92nd Street Y: Lydia Davis & 'Madame Bovary'

Filed under: On the Spot Tagged: 92nd St. Y, events, Gustave Flaubert, Jonathan Taylor, Lydia Davis, Madame Bovary, Rumpus, translation

Jonathan Taylor writes:

Tonight in New York City at 8:00, 92 Street Y hosts Lydia Davis for "An Evening of Madame Bovary."

Kathryn Harrison's Times review of Davis's new translation of Madame Bovary makes a great case for (re)reading the novel, but doesn't really flesh out why Harrison finds Davis's translation choices so convincing. "Faithful to the style of the original, but not to the point of slavishness, Davis's effort is transparent," she writes, but that only raises questions of the sort the translator herself will probably address tonight.

Davis is not only a translator of Flaubert, but a fellow novelist (something often overlooked in the attention to her distinctive short fiction), who, within her essential novel The End of the Story, writes about the process of constructing a novel with the something like the meticulousness of Flaubert's that Harrison describes. A good recent interview by the Rumpus does justice to The End of the Story.

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Hello! We're a small band of culture writers, editors, and artists based in New York and Los Angeles. Emdashes, which spent its formative years as a New Yorker fan blog, is our collection of conversations—mostly civilized—about magazines, movies, design, punctuation, and other things that stir us.

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Dashes, some say, “are particularly useful in a sentence that is long and complex.” Emdashes—like an em dash itself—provides a thoughtful pause amid the hubbub.

Emdashes, founded in 2004, is written and drawn by Emily Gordon, Martin Schneider, Pollux, Jonathan Taylor, and Benjamin Chambers, as well as occasional guest contributors. All posts before October 2008 are by Emily Gordon.

The site was designed by House of Pretty with illustrations by Jesse R. Ewing.

Additional drawings are by Carolita Johnson and Pollux (author of our web comic, "The Wavy Rule"). The Emdashes pencil logo is by Jennifer Hadley, based on a 1943 Dorothy Gray ad.

Other writing by Emily Gordon

Reviews: theater writing (for Time Out Chicago)
Profile: Valerie Casey, Designers Accord founder, is spearheading the design of sustainability (for SXSW World)
Feature: Rea Irvin: visionary art director, bon vivant, New Yorker founding father (for Print)
Slide show: the Coney Island Mermaid Parade (for NYCgo.com)
Feature: Muslim immigration iconography in the Netherlands, and an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali (for Print)
Review: King's Gambit: A Son, a Father, and the World's Most Dangerous Game by Paul Hoffman (for Newsday)
Homage: Celebrating lindy-hop legend Frankie Manning (for NYCgo.com)
Inquiry: Does a New Republic redesign mean a change of tune? (for Print)
Interview: James Surowiecki on what's next for the wisdom of crowds (for Assignment Zero)
Interviews: four up-and-coming designers under 30 (for Print)
Profile: novelist and dance critic Laura Jacobs (for Newsday)