A steady course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows

Arthur Waley said that he preferred to read Dickens in Chinese translation (Dickens’s first Chinese translator was indeed an exquisite writer). I wonder if Balzac does not also belong to the category of writers who actually benefit from being translated. I suspect that his visionary imagination would remain unaffected by the transposition into another language, whereas it would be relatively easy for tactful translators to soften the jarring notes and straighten the blunders that, in the original, frequently jolt the reader or threaten, at the most dramatic moments, to set off anticlimactic laughter.
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In our own time, two comments that summarise, with cruel wit, the critical ambivalence that still persists towards Hugo would fit Balzac much better. On being asked who was the greatest French poet, André Gide replied: “Victor Hugo—alas!” And Jean Cocteau added: “Victor Hugo was a madman who believed he was Victor Hugo.” Both in greatness and in lunacy, Balzac certainly scaled heights that were at least as spectacular.
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In Balzac’s novels, Baudelaire observed, even doorkeepers have genius, and Oscar Wilde added:

A steady course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and our acquaintances to the shadows of shades. His characters have a kind of fervent, fiery coloured existence. They dominate us and defy scepticism . . . Balzac is no more a realist than Holbein was. He created life, he did not copy it.
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In his hugely entertaining new biography of Balzac (certainly the best of all those I have read), Graham Robb does not directly address the central paradox of Balzac’s prodigious achievement: How was it possible that the greatest monument of European fiction was built by a man singularly devoid of literary taste?
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Balzac’s first mistress, who considerably contributed to the refinement of his sensibility, was a few years older than his mother, and subsequently all the women who mattered in his life were, to some extent, substitute mothers. In an early letter, he wrote: “I have only two passions: love and glory”—and the purpose of the latter was to secure the former. He confessed that the primary motivation of his writing was to win the love of women, and in this he succeeded remarkably well: after his death, more than 10,000 letters from female admirers were found among his papers.

Countess Hanska was to become his last and greatest love—greatest, because it was essentially imaginary and literary, and was conducted for sixteen years mostly by correspondence. When they finally succeeded in getting back together and marrying, Balzac was a dying man. She had first entered Balzac’s life as an anonymous correspondent; her passion was originally aroused simply by reading his novels in the backwoods of the Ukraine.

The seduction exerted by the great novelist’s prose was so powerful that it could work even by proxy: it was once rumoured that “several men had obtained the favours of respectable women at the Opera ball by pretending to be Balzac.” This might have seemed fairly easy, since he was short and fat, with common and vulgar looks, like a Daumier shopkeeper or butcher. But it would also have been difficult: his enormous head, beautiful and blazing eyes, generous laughter and boisterous spirits set him apart from the crowd. Perhaps Rodin caught best his paradoxical appearance: a sort of gigantic dwarf, a coiled-up spring of pure energy. By a cruel contradiction, however, if he wrote novels to win women, he also had to forsake women in order to write novels: he firmly believed that every man had at birth a finite store of vital fluid and that the secret of creative life was to hoard one’s energy. Sperm was for him an emission of pure cerebral substance—once, having spent the night with an enchanting creature, he turned up at the house of a friend, crying: “I just lost a book!”

Simon Leys
The Hall of Uselessness