All about the English-language editions of Marcel Proust's great novel, À la recherche du temps perdu, once known as Remembrance of Things Past but now generally accepted as In Search of Lost Time

READING MARCEL PROUST

(In Search of Lost Time in English translation

"I saw Gilberte coming towards me.... I was astonished to see beside her a young girl of about sixteen, whose tall figure was a visible measure of the distance I had not wanted to see. Time, colourless and intangible, had been materialized in her so that I could, so to speak, see it and touch it, it had shaped her into a master-work, while at the same time on me, alas, it had merely done its work. Yet here was Mlle de Saint-Loup, in front of me." (Finding Time Again, p.341, tr. Ian Patterson)

Yale's 'Search' is complete

I was very excited when Yale University Press began to publish William Carter's reworking of the mastery translation by C K Scott Moncrieff. Already at Winchester College when Queen Victoria died, Scott Moncrief fought in the trenches of the First World War, yet his prose tended toward a Victorian purple, which Mr Carter greatly refreshed. The large-format paperbacks cost about $25 each for the first three volumes, but then Yale had a change of heart, publishing the books in a library binding for more than triple the price. I couldn't afford that, and neither apparently could the UNH library downtown. So I gave up.

I did manage to snag a review copy of Time Regained, the sixth and final volume, priced at $85 for the hardcover and (absurdly, it seems to me) $85 for the ebook. I wanted to know how Mr Carter worked around the fact that Scott Moncrieff died before tackling the final volume of what he called Remembrance of Things Past, which led to a disappointing translation from the Englishman Sydney Schiff and a worse one by the American Frederick Blossom. Come to find out, the result is really just a duplicate of the Andreas Mayor translation of 1970, as tweaked by Terence Kilmartin in 1981 and again by D J Enright in 1992 to account for changes in the underlying French text. The only changes I spotted in the earlier books was to substitute the American "that" for the English "which" and the obvious differences in spelling. So I took a page at random (179, it happened to be) and compared it to the Modern Library paperback (pp.229-230). The only differences: Mr Carter deleted the hyphen in "river-bed"; he introduced a new paragraph with the sentence beginning "Poor Marquis"; and he combined two sentences where Mayor & Co. said of St. Loup's mother, "If only she had been able to see him again! But perhaps it's better that she didn't...." This being the case, I have to ask myself why one would pay $85 to obtain a near-duplicate of what Modern Library sells for $17.59!

To be sure, there are the side-notes, which Mr Carter places on the same page as the text, which is convenient -- and sometimes annoying. How many readers of Proust need be told who Homer was? C'mon, man! as our 46th president liked to say. I read The Odyssey as a freshman in high school!

And Oxford has just begun!

And here's some wonderful news: Oxford World Classics has commissioned yet another translation of In Search of Lost Time. Like the Penguin Proust, there are several translators. Three volumes are now in the works: The Swann Way translated by Brian Nelson; In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom by Charlotte Mandell; and The Guermantes Way by Peter Bush, though the third volume hasn't yet been released.

Because À l'ombre de jeunes filles en fleurs has always been my favorite, I ordered the second volume first, and chose the Kindle edition because it was already available on Amazon.com for $10.99, while the paperback ($13.99) won't be released until June 9. (Nota bene those prices, you geniuses at Yale UP!) Mandell's translation is wonderful, though I hasten to add a confession: I tend to be a great fan of whatever I'm reading at the moment. She's especially persuasive when the narrator falls in and out of love with a jeune fille, starting with Gilberte Swann in Paris as the book opens and ending with the love of his life, Albertine Simonet, when the scene moves from Paris to the seaside resort of Balbec. (He also meets the Marquis Robert St Loup en Bray, the handsome scion of the Guermantes clan, who will become a major character in the Search.) I was a bit surprised to discover how little Marcel advanced in his courtship of Albertine by the end of the book. Indeed, when she invited him to visit her room the night before she returns to Paris, he's positive he'll "make love" to her, by which he means kiss her cheek, she foils him by ringing the bell. Like so much of his lovesick fumbling in the novel as a whole, this is a bit more understandable if Albertine were actually Albert, and if Gilberte Swann and "the peasant girl of my desire" were actually young lads.

I also acquired the paperback of The Swann Way because I wondered if the type were large enough to read in comfort. (It is.) Both volumes have a lengthy and scholarly and useful introduction, and both surprised me by calling the original translator Moncrieff, clipping off half of a double-barreled name like that of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. His biographer and great-great-niece (whose mother was a Scott Moncrieff) explains that the double name without a hyphen was a family tradition going back to John Scott and his wife (née Moncrieffe) who bestowed it on their son Robert in 1771 (Chasing Lost Time, p.8). I find Oxford's usage as even more odd than The Swann Way. But I enjoyed the introductions to both books.

How this project began

I peeked into Swann's Way a few times before a pal challenged me to read the entire novel with him. Every Wednesday on his way to the law office where he was an associate attorney, he stopped by my rented room (it had a kitchen and bath but wasn't really an apartment). We drank coffee, smoked(!), and talked about the week's reading. Egging each other on in this fashion, we both finished Remembrance of Things Past before the year was out.

Ten years later, I read it again — and aloud! — to my bride over the course of two winters. (One of the French deconstructionists argued that we can't study a novel by itself, because it's a collaborative venture between author and reader. He cinched his case by saying: "After all, who has read every word of À la recherche du temps perdu?" It pleased me hugely to be able to think, "I did!"

That was the handsome, two-volume Random House edition of the novel, the first six books rendered into English by C K Scott Moncrieff and the seventh by Frederick Blossom. (Scott Moncrieff died before finishing his task, which is probably why Penguin decided to employ seven different translators for its 21st century Proust.) When Terence Kilmartin's reworking came out in the 1990s, I bought that three-volume edition, but read only pieces of it — notably Andreas Mayor's translation of Time Regained, greatly improved over the rather lame Blossom version. Otherwise, Remembrance of Things Past seemed mostly unchanged from Scott Moncrieff's translation.

Then came the Penguin editions, the first four volumes of which were published in the US by Viking. After reading a rave review of vol. 2 — In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower — I decided that I would have to read it. On second thought, I decided to start from the beginning with the new Swann's Way. It was a good decision. Lydia Davis did a wonderful job with the first volume, and by the time I'd lulled Little Marcel to sleep (on page 43 in the Viking edition), I knew that I was once again in for the long haul. I set out to acquire a complete set of hardcover books — not so easy, as matters turned out! I read them in sequence, and I reported on them in what was a sort of blog. And more recently I began to add the elegant Yale University Press editions as they were published, until they became too expensive for me.

And now of course, there's a whole new challenge, from Oxford University Press!

The novel in translation

And for extra credit :)

But why bother?

The French sometimes boast that they have a Shakespeare for every generation, or at least for every century, while we Anglophones must stick with Will’s originals. Well, now we can say the same about Proust! (And indeed it's no longer true for the Bard. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival has commissioned the translation of his 39 plays into modern English, with -- of course! -- more than half the translators being female, and more than half "of color.")

Beyond that, I've seen it argued that literary French has changed little over the past hundred years, while English most certainly has, under the battering of such writers as James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. (Whatever you say about C K Scott Moncrieff, he probably never read Ulysses, and he certainly was unfamiliar with the noisy young journalist who stormed into Paris in 1921.) However that may be, it's nice to have a freshened version of Proust's prose, and one that arguably is closer to the original than the one rendered by Scott Moncrieff in the 1920s.

(Proust, Joyce, and Hemingway! It's pleasant to think that my three favorite writers once breathed the same air in Paris. Indeed, Joyce and Proust apparently met at a party ... and had little or nothing to say to one another.)

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1. Swann's Way | 2. In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower | 3. The Guermantes Way | 4. Sodom and Gomorrah | 5. The Prisoner | 6. The Fugitive | 7. Finding Time Again

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