FORGETTANCE OF TIME WASTED:

Reviving the dread deity: Paul Davis finds a multitude of voices in a new translation of Marcel Proust's masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time (Paul Davis, November 2, 2002, The Guardian)

[I]f the measure of this new translation is to be its success in prising Proust from the clutches of the affected and the effete, I suspect it will go down as a missed opportunity. It's no easy task, of course: in the photograph reproduced on the spines of the Penguin volumes Proust looks every languid inch what the volumes themselves set out to prove he isn't - a "purveyor of high-grade cultural narcotics". But the majority of the Penguin translators have made the task harder for themselves by choosing to tackle it with one hand tied behind their backs. For all Prendergast's talk of smashing "Proust-worship", many of them perpetuate it in one crucial respect; by treating the Proustian sentence as a sacred cow. Proust's sentences are, of course, exotic and magnificent beasts which translators massacre at their peril. A positively Proustian amount of critical comment exists about the contribution which the idiosyncrasies of the novel's syntax make to the larger progress of its philosophical investigations into time as a dimension of human being. Nevertheless, the fact must be faced that aiming to replicate every twist and turn of Proust's sentences puts an unbearable strain on a translator, and may lead to an unreadably strained translation.

Prendergast suggests that, since Proust's "extraordinary syntactic structures" are themselves "often strange even to French ears", "there may well be a respectable argument to the effect that oddly unEnglish shapes are sometimes the best way of preserving their estranging force". But, respectable or not, that argument smells strongly of academe. Beyond a certain point, the effect of "oddly unEnglish shapes" on general readers of a translation tends to be estranging and forceful, in the sense of making it sound strange and so forcing them to stop reading it.

People we quite like and respect find Proust to be a wonder. Alain de Botton even got a reasonably entertaining book out of pondering him. But, as mentioned previously, we side with Thomas M. Disch:

A Bookmark

Four years ago I started reading Proust.
Although I'm past the halfway point, I still
Have seven hundred pages of reduced
Type left before I reach the end. I will
Slog through. It can't get much more dull than what
Is happening now: he's buying crepe-de-chine
Wraps and a real, well-documented hat
For his imaginary Albertine.
Oh, what a slimy sort he must have been-
So weak, so sweetly poisonous, so fey!
Four years ago, by God!-and even then
How I was looking forward to the day
I would be able to forgive, at last,
And to forget Remembrance of Things Past.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 4, 2002 10:27 PM