Published in 1877, "Three Tales" is Gustave Flaubert's only short story and his last work before death. Set in the French countryside in the nineteenth century, it tells of the story of the life of an uneducated, upright, "The Simple man". "The biography of St. Julian", a master hunter born the son of a medieval lord of a castle, followed a bizarre fate that led him to become a saint after being convicted of killing his parents. "Herodias", which vividly depicts the intricacies of power and desire surrounding the beheading of John the Baptist, who announced the coming of Christ the Savior. While the short stories, chronologically arranged from near to far back in time, can be enjoyed on their own, by the time the reader has finished reading all three, they can feel the myriad details and developments echoing here and there, despite the differences in time, setting and tone of each.
Compared to Flaubert's best-known works, "Madame Bovary" and "Sentimental Education", "Three Tales" may seem like a smaller work, but it is easier to get to grips with and is a work compact with Flaubert's fictional writing technique. I decided to work on translating this particular piece because I thought it would be a great way to get to know Flaubert, or simply the novel as a whole, and also because I wished there was a Japanese edition of the book readily accessible.
The most difficult part of the translation process was trying to find a balance between my own desire of wanting to make the translation easy to understand, while trying to preserve in Japanese the powerful words of Flaubert, a rare stylist. In order to keep the reader immersed in the story, it was not enough to simply translate the work into clear, "easy to read" Japanese - it was also necessary to keep the level of expression consistent while eliminating vocabulary that could destroy the worldview of the story. I think the process of making this kind of adjustment was the most painful and at the same time very enjoyable, because I was always in a dichotomous state.