Biography of a translation Madame Bovary between Eleanor Marx and Paul de Man

Abstract

Eleanor Marx, the daughter of Karl Marx, published the first major English translation of Madame Bovary in 1886, the same year in which the first volume of Das Kapital would appear in English. This essay explores a number of related themes: the impact of a signature translation on the literary history of a classic; the “Marxist” theory of translation that can be adduced from Eleanor Marx's introduction to the early editions; the situation of the woman translator as a literary “worker”; and the status of a genre of textual history and theory characterized as “biography of a translation.” In 1965 Paul de Man reprised the Eleanor Marx Aveling translation for the American Norton edition and in 2004 the same edition was republished by Norton. The essay examines the curious survival of this early translation despite a long history of criticism, including a famous attack by Nabokov. The story of the translation took a tragic turn when, in a manner reminiscent of Emma Bovary, Eleanor Marx committed suicide with poison procured for her by her maid. Beyond parallels between the lives of Emma and Eleanor, the essay explores the question of a suicide drive in Flaubert's text that may have drawn Eleanor to its most nuanced psychic undercurrents.