Product Overview
Jacques Barzun's masterful translation proves that Flaubert's Dictionary of Accepted Ideasan acid catalogue of the clichs of 19th-century Franceis as relevant today as ever.
Throughout his life Flaubert made it a game to eavesdrop for the clich, the platitude, the borrowed and unquestioned idea with which the right thinking swaddle their minds. After his death his little treasury of absurdities, of half-truths and social lies, was published as aDictionnaire des ides reues. Because its devastating humor and irony are often dependent on the phrasing in vernacular French, theDictionnairewas long considered untranslatable. This notion was taken as a challenge by Jacques Barzun. Determined to find the exact English equivalent for each accepted idea Flaubert recorded, he has succeeded in documenting our own inanities. With a satirists wit and a scholars precision, Barzun has produced a very contemporary self-portrait of the middle-class philistine, a species as much alive today as when Flaubert railed against him.
