Reading Proust: Lost in Translation
By Caroline Weber
Sam
Tanenhaus, Caroline Weber and John Williams are holding a conversation about
“In Search of Lost Time,” and welcome readers to join their discussion by
leaving comments on the right-hand side of the blog. Once again, all
translations in Ms. Weber’s post are her own.
As
far as translations go, John, I’m afraid I’m not the best judge because
whenever I reread the Recherche, I do so in French. That said, curiosity has on
occasion prompted me to dip into the various English renderings of Proust over
the years, from the classic translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff (the first
volume of which appeared in 1922, shortly before Proust died) to the two
subsequent revisions of Moncrieff’s version (by Terence Kilmartin and D.J.
Enright for Random House and the Modern Library, respectively) to, most
recently, the new Penguin edition overseen by Christopher Prendergast (for
which seven different authors have translated each of the novel’s seven
volumes). And all these iterations seem to me to treat Proust’s original with
considerable intelligence and integrity, albeit with striking differences of
tone: Moncrieff is flowery where, say, Lydia Davis — the translator of the Penguin
edition of “Swann’s Way” (2003) — is elegantly spare. While I myself happen to
prefer Ms. Davis's version to the others — to me, her voice sounds the closest
to Proust's somehow — I don't think one can go wrong with any of them.
As,
however, to your question about whether one can fully appreciate the Recherche if one
doesn't read it in French, I have to say that I don't believe one can, for the
simple reason that the original version is so densely saturated with the
colorful tones of other French literary lions — from Racine and Sévigné to
Balzac and the brothers Goncourt — that the Anglophone reader is bound to miss
out on myriad pleasures of specifically literary allusion and nuance, which
Proust often deploys to tremendous comic effect.
To
take the shortest example I can think of (for although Proust may in fact be
the soul of wit, brevity is not his strong suit): in “Within a Budding Grove”
(1919), Françoise, the narrator’s family’s unschooled but fiercely opinionated
cook from the country, uses an antiquated expression of class snobbery, “sorti de la lie du peuple”
[“from the dregs of the populace”], to proclaim the relative social supremacy
of the “young man from a good family” with whom the daughter of the attendant
at the Champs-Élysées’ public bathrooms has recently become engaged. That this
young woman did not choose a fiancé “sorti de la lie du peuple” —
an epithet the great memoirist of Louis XIV’s court, the Duc de Saint-Simon,
notoriously applied to that king’s favorite architect, Mansart — confirms
Françoise in her staunch belief that the mother of the bride-to-be, who
presides over her toilet fiefdom with ludicrous hauteur, is a “marquise.” This
belief, however, is itself patently absurd, as the covert citation from
Saint-Simon ironically underscores. While Françoise proves as poor an arbiter
of class standing as Saint-Simon (whose endless nitpicking about the nuances of
caste hierarchy and protocol made his memoirs an invaluable resource for the
class-obsessed Proust) is a discerning one, the two are united in their
vehement disdain for perceived inferiors. Her use of “sorti de la lie du peuple,”
in other words, is funny because it underlines the ways in which she both is
and isn’t like Versailles’ most famous — and most famously imperious —
chronicler.
But
the joke doesn’t end there. The allusion to Saint-Simon also refers back to one
of the wittier passages in “Swann’s Way” (1913), where the narrator describes
Françoise, at that time in the employ of his elderly, “despotically” demanding
Aunt Léonie, as investing the old woman’s “most negligible utterances and
activities,” her “most insignificant occupations, her waking up [son lever], her lunch, her
rest,” with as much importance as Louis XIV’s noble retinue attached to “what
Saint-Simon called the mechanics [la
mécanique] of life at Versailles.” After this direct evocation of
the Sun King’s memoirist (and of the formal ceremony of the monarch’s daily
waking, his lever), the narrator
concludes:
[S]o it was that…an old lady from the
provinces, simply by giving into her own irresistible eccentricities, and into
a meanness that was born of laziness, could…without ever thinking of Louis
XIV,…believe that her very silences, the slightest hint of a good mood, or of
haughtiness, betrayed in her physiognomy, were, for Françoise, the object of a
commentary as impassioned, as fearful as the one the King’s good mood, or his
haughtiness, inspired in a courtier, or even in a great lord, who had presented
him with a petition, at the divergence of an allée, at Versailles.
Reconsidered
in light of this earlier passage (and indeed, the Recherche encourages nothing
so much as revisiting previous discoveries from a perspective refined by
subsequent experience), Françoise’s quip about a hypothetical, socially unqualified
suitor for a pretentious bathroom attendant’s daughter becomes a leitmotiv,
lending coherence and specificity to the grandiose provincial cook’s
inadvertently hilarious character. And because I promised to be brief, I'll
stop here for now. But tomorrow, I'll post another short piece about Proust's
regrettably untranslatable — but profoundly amusing — literary humor.
Ms. Weber is currently at work on a book titled
“Proust’s Duchess: In Search of the Exquisite in Belle Époque Paris,” to be
published by Knopf in 2014.
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