The Complicated Matter of Translating Proust

A review of the new translation of Proust's Swann's Way by C. K. Scott Moncrieff seems timely--thanks, Boston Review and Leland de la Durantaye. We've just picked up Anne Carson's New Directions pamphlet The Albertine Workout, so Proust is on the poet-mind. And it's nice to see the focus on translation here. "[I]t was thanks to the efforts of translators, including [Walter] Benjamin himself, that [Proust's work] came to reach, and to hold, the global audience it has." For, of course, "[the] international audience has been particularly well served this past year in celebration of the centennial of Swann’s Way." A primary point made here, however, about Yale University Press's new edition of the Moncrieff: "It is surely a strange way to celebrate a birthday to expend so much editorial energy not on the original text but on an outdated, if accomplished, translation." More:

Even under the most favorable circumstances translation is a difficult process, punctuated by moments of stark and alarming impossibility. In Against Sainte-Beuve, the work that grew into In Search of Lost Time, Proust declared that “les beaux livres sont écrits dans une sorte de langue étrangère”—“beautiful books are always written in a sort of foreign language.” Proust did not, of course, have in mind actual foreign languages, nor was he alluding to the exceptionally rare phenomenon of a beautiful book written in another language than the author’s native one (as would be two of the finest novels of the following generation—both inspired by Proust—Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Beckett’s The Unnamable). Instead, the foreign language Proust had in mind was one he was in the process of inventing—the foreign language that is every great artist’s own. Proust experienced that foreignness himself when he translated John Ruskin’s The Bible of Amiens and Sesame and Lilies into French. His sense of the idiosyncrasy of the task was so strong, and his doubt as to whether he had sufficient mastery of the language to accomplish it was so pronounced, that he once remarked, “I don’t claim to know English. I claim to know Ruskin.”

Like Ruskin, Proust has been fortunate in his translators. His first English translator, the Scottish writer Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff, who had already translated Stendhal as well as such different works as Beowulf and The Song of Roland, began work before Proust finished the novel. In 1920 Moncrieff resigned his post at The London Times to dedicate himself entirely to translation of Proust’s work in progress. He would labor on it until his death in 1930, by which point he had translated six of the seven volumes.

The translation Moncrieff produced was a masterpiece. That said, it was not without its share of controversial choices—beginning with the very title. Faced with the formidable challenge of rendering the supple À la recherche du temps perdu, with its final words meaning both lost and wasted time, Moncrieff decided simply to rename the book. The title Remembrance of Things Past was one he took, as more than a few authors of the period were inspired to do, from Shakespeare.

Leland de la Durantaye continues to assess the problems--read it all at Boston Review.