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Excerpt from Salambo
The present version is important in more ways than one. It makes available to English readers the book which is held by competent judges to be Flaubert's supreme contribution to the art of the novel, and it restores to circulation a very remarkable example of translation which can hold its own in that long sequence of renderings which stretches from Florio to Scott Moncriefi'. Only those who have tried to translate from Flaubert know what difficulties have to be encountered. The work of theconscious Stylist always presents a problem of great intricacy to those who would make an acceptable version of its completeness for foreign readers. But that problem is not wholly insoluble. Proust developed a highly conscious Style, but it has been found not impossible to convey something of its quality to an English public. It is not Flaubert's insistence on the mot juste that most tests the translator's ingenuity. Even for mots justes there should be equivalents. It is those elements in his writing for which nothing Similar can be found in English that bring despair. Proust, in a long and acute essay on Flaubert's style, pointed to certain peculiarities in his use of the imperfect tense. He employed it in a highly personal way, and found it rich in possibilities for the presentation of extended narrative. The imperfect, with its implications of unresolved continuity, could give effects obtainable in no other way. But there is nothing comparable in English, where the use of the imperfect has become less and less idiomatic. That Mr. Powys Mathers managed to produce so fine and faithful a translation without having to his hand a grammatical form upon which Flaubert set such store, is remarkable. Mr. Mathers is, alas, dead. This publication is of his, as of Flaubert's, Salambo. Both men are honoured and commemorated in the monument.
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