French-moi

Flaubert and de Maupassant

mills:

From Irredenta I found this article by Julian Barnes, whom I like very much, on some new translations of Guy de Maupassant and much more; at the outset, he includes an exchange between de Maupassant and literary mentor Gustav Flaubert:

At the age of 27, de Maupassant writes:

‘Fucking women is as monotonous as listening to male wit. I find that the news in the papers is always the same, that the vices are trivial, and that there aren’t enough different ways to compose a sentence.’”

Flaubert replies:

You complain about fucking being ‘monotonous’. There’s a simple remedy: cut it out for a bit. ‘The news in the papers is always the same’? That’s the complaint of a realist – and besides, what do you know about it? You should look at things more carefully … ‘The vices are trivial’? – but everything is trivial. ‘There aren’t enough different ways to compose a sentence’? – seek and ye shall find … You must – do you hear me, my young friend? – you must work harder than you do. I suspect you of being a bit of a loafer. Too many whores! Too much rowing! Too much exercise! A civilised person needs much less locomotion than the doctors claim. You were born to be a poet: be one. Everything else is pointless – starting with your pleasures and your health: get that much into your thick skull. Besides, your health will be all the better if you follow your calling … What you lack are ‘principles’. There’s no getting over it – that’s what you have to have; it’s just a matter of finding out which ones. For an artist there is only one: everything must be sacrificed to Art … To sum up, my dear Guy, you must beware of melancholy: it’s a vice.

The rest of the article is very interesting on questions of translation, literature, and love, and offers what  might be a reason Flaubert would object to some blogging : “[He] thought that for a writer to give the public details of his private life was a bourgeois weakness which should be avoided.”