Reading Proust: Lost in
Translation, Redux
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.
To resume
my discussion of the French literary references upon which so much of the humor
in the Recherche depends, I wanted to provide an example from “The Guermantes
Way” (1920), the volume in which the upper-middle-class narrator makes his
first foray into Parisian high society. As Anka Muhlstein pointed out in her
splendid post yesterday, the members of the aristocratic Guermantes clan “are
convinced that they are still at the apex of [that] society,” and Proust has
great fun showcasing their petty vanities and elitist pretensions.
Marcel
Proust.
In one
such instance, he describes the long-standing antipathy between the family’s
two branches — the Guermantes proper, for the most part based in Paris, and
their largely provincial Courvoisier cousins — and again uses a well-known (to
French readers) literary allusion for laughs. The Courvoisiers, he observes,
are at once appalled and intimidated by their Guermantes relations’
self-proclaimed intellectualism and unrivaled chic; they cannot forgive their
cousins for preferring to hobnob with members of Paris’s flashy, socially
questionable “smart” (in both senses of the term) set, whereas the stodgy
Courvoisiers feel infinitely more at home socializing with fellow countrified
nobles whose background (“who their ‘father and mother’ were”) is no mystery,
even if their company is no fun. And so, while the Courvoisiers can’t resist
attending their glamorous kinsmen’s social gatherings, in so doing they
manifest a mixture of righteous indignation and poorly disguised envy that the
narrator, spotting the charmless Courvoisier matron Mme de Villebon in the
drawing-room of the supremely (and, to said matron, infuriatingly) elegant
Duchesse de Guermantes, clinches by way of an unexpected Victor Hugo quotation:
To encounter
in their cousin’s drawing-room, between five and six o’clock, people with whose
relatives their own relatives did not like to associate back home in the Perche
became for [the Courvoisiers] a source of mounting rage and inexhaustible
denunciations. For example, the moment that the charming Comtesse G*** entered
the salon, Mme de Villebon’s face assumed exactly the expression it ought to
have had if she had been called upon to recite the line.
And if only
one of us remains, that one will be I [Et s’il n’en reste qu’un, je serai
celui-là],
a line that happened to be unknown to her, anyway.
a line that happened to be unknown to her, anyway.
For my
money, this is one of the funniest passages in the Recherche, but in
translation it falls flat for a few reasons, all related to the line of poetry
at the end. First, because non-French readers are almost sure not to know that
line themselves — from Hugo’s “Les Châtiments” [“Castigations”] (1853), an
extended indictment in verse of Emperor Napoleon III’s overthrow of the French
republican government in 1851 — they are unlikely to snicker at Mme de Villebon
for sharing in their ignorance. They are also unlikely to grasp the sheer
over-the-top weirdness of the parallel the narrator draws (a) between a
supercilious killjoy from the Perche (a tiny agricultural region best known for
its purebred draft-horses) and the man revered in Proust’s day as France’s
greatest poet; not to mention (b) between Mme de Villebon’s petty social
hostility toward “the charming Comtesse G***” and Hugo’s lofty, principled
outrage at Napoleon III’s coup d’état. (In the poem Proust cites, Hugo is
directly addressing the emperor, whose coup sent the staunchly republican poet
into exile, and declaring that he will defy Bonapartist authority to the end,
even if he proves “the last man standing.”)
Finally,
no English translation can capture the intensely stylized, emphatically
sonorous grandeur of Hugo’s alexandrine: the twelve-syllable metric form that
is to French classical poetry and drama what iambic pentameter is to English
verse. To the French ear, nothing says “hero” quite like an alexandrine, and
the line Proust quotes here, comprised of four perfect anapests (poetic “feet”
in which two unstressed syllables are followed by a stressed one, as in Lord
Byron’s similarly rousing “Destruction of Sennacherib” [1815]: “and the sheen of theirspears was like stars on the sea”),
is a particularly resonant case in point. And yet there is obviously nothing in
the least bit heroic about Mme de Villebon’s prickly pique when confronted with
a “charming” Parisian socialite, nor about her self-important resolve to remain
“the last man standing” in her fashionable cousin’s salon. By pairing her with
Hugo, Proust thus achieves much the same effect he creates with the
Françoise/Saint-Simon juxtaposition I discussed yesterday. He gives us a
complex, superbly comical portrait of an individual whose all-too-human quirks
are best sought and found [recherché and retrouvé] where
all Proustian treasures ultimately turn out to reside: in literature.
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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