Read In Search of Lost Time Online
Authors: Marcel Proust
In Search of Lost Time (5 page)
Moncrieff adds elements not in the original French. For instance, for
the difficult word
oubli
, meaning âforgetting',
âforgetfulness', or
âoblivion', Moncrieff offers âwaters of
Lethe' â a mythological reference not in the original (and one
which Kilmartin, in his work of revision, did not remove). For the sake of the
rhythm, Moncrieff also adds words which sometimes redouble the sense (as in
âstrange and haunting') or attenuate it (as with
ârather' or âperhaps'), making the book
verbose or redundant where it was not in the original. A brief and simple phrase
like âfor me so painful' becomes, in Moncrieff's
version, âso exquisitely painful to myself'. Occasionally, he
carries this wordiness to an extreme: a description of chrysanthemums that is most
directly translated as âthese ephemeral stars which light up on grey
days' becomes in his version (unchanged by Kilmartin) âthese
ephemeral stars, which kindle their cold fires in the murky atmosphere of winter
afternoons'.
Moncrieff tends, finally, to be cautious where Proust was bold, not
only deploying an occasional Victorian sort of modesty, but also adopting a more
generally conservative approach to his handling of metaphor. Odette's
âbody', in Proust, becomes her âphysical
charms' in Moncrieff; and whereas in the French original a balcony floats
in the air in front of a house, in Moncrieff's version it merely
âseems' to float.
Much as one may argue with the specifics of Moncrieff's
decisions, however, his monumental work remains the standard by which all succeeding
translations of Proust will be judged. Within the limitations of his approach, which
was in part conditioned by his time and cultural milieu, Moncrieff's
ambition, to remain faithful to the shape of the Proustian sentence and the order in
which it unfolded, and to create a rhythmic, coherent, eloquent text in English, was
impressively fulfilled in
Swann's Way
. His ear was for the most
part sensitive, his handling of the language adroit, his mistakes in interpretation
relatively few, given the sheer numbers of pages he translated.
Attempting to follow Proust's sometimes unconventional
punctuation was the final, and most exciting, exercise in the present translation.
Proust's tendency to underuse the comma is not particularly noticeable at
first; once one becomes aware of it, it is remarkable â again and again,
long strings of phrases which would more conventionally be separated by commas are
not. Occasionally, on the other hand, a
sentence will sometimes
occur in which there seems to be an excessive number of commas â the
reader is halted every few words.
Matching Proust comma for comma in translation, however, is possible
far more often than one would have imagined given the differences in syntax between
French and English. And attempting faithfulness on the level of the comma is not an
empty exercise, for Proust's punctuation does not seem to be as casual as
some have argued it is. The punctuation is light for the same reason the sentences
are long: so as to contain a whole thought without fragmenting it. The punctuation
in part determines the pace and the breath-span of the prose. If a succession of
short phrases separated by commas halts the flow of the sentence, so that the prose
gasps for air, the opposite, the very long sentence relatively unimpeded by stops,
gives the impression of a headlong rush to expel the thought in one exhalation.
One pressing translation problem that persisted until the very end was
the title of this volume. A recurring option, of course, was simply to retain
Moncrieff's:
Swann's Way
has become embedded in the
literary consciousness of generations, and it has a good solid ring to it. And yet,
it is not as close to the French as it could be, and it is confusing to readers who
do not already know the book.
As Proust explained, the primary or literal signification of the
book's title is geographical. â
Du côté de
chez Swann
' answers the question âWhich way shall we go
for our walk today?' âSwann's Way' does not
really answer it as the French does. It would most literally be answered by
âIn the Direction of Swann's', âTowards
Swann's', âBy Swann's', etc. But
Moncrieff's title is also ambivalent. When Proust himself first heard it,
in 1922, not long before his death, he did not like it, believing it to mean
exclusively âSwann's manner'. When he understood that
it could also be interpreted to mean âthe walk by Swann's
house', he said it would be all right with the addition of
âTo' in front of it â âTo Swann's
Way'. Although this title would not work in English, Proust's
desire for greater clarity is worth noting.
The clearer or more explicit translations of the French title,
âTowards Swann's' and âBy
Swann's', sound rather abrupt; like âSwann's
Way' they are much briefer than the six-syllable French title and have
none of its rocking or walking motion; as important, they
omit
the word
côté
, âdirection' or
âway', which figures so prominently for pages and pages of the
book where the two ways or walks are contrasted. One working title which satisfied
many requirements was
By Way of Swann's
: it began with a
preposition, answered the question about the walk and had a graceful rhythm.
However, there was an oddness to it, as a title, that in the end disqualified it in
favour of its close sibling, taken from the body of the novel itself:
The Way by
Swann's
.
Information for the footnotes to this volume was found in the
Pléiade edition of the original and also in the thorough and invaluable
A Proust Dictionary
by Maxine Arnold Vogely.
Information about the history of the writing and publication of the
book was found in Proust's letters and in the Introduction to the
Pléiade edition of
Du côté de chez Swann
by
Pierre-Louis Rey and Jo Yoshida. I have also consulted at various times the
biographies of Proust by William Carter, Jean-Yves Tadié, George Painter
and Edmund White, as well as Roger Shattuck's
The Way of Proust
and Samuel Beckett's
Proust
, among other studies. Most helpful in
illuminating Proust's style and syntax was a book discovered after the
work of translating was well under way. A minute and meticulous analysis of
Proust's sentences, it revealed how complex was his structuring of
language and identified the many metrical and alliterative patterns a translation
could almost never hope to reproduce: this was Jean Milly's
La Phrase
de Proust
.
I would like to thank two readers of the translation: Richard
Sieburth, who saw an early version of the opening pages and made many specific and
general inaugural suggestions; and Robert Kelly, who read the whole translation as I
proceeded, giving companionship, commentary and encouragement. I would also like to
thank Marina Van Zuylen and Odile Chilton for their ready responses to queries about
gates, fences, women like pheasants, trees born on cliffs and other difficulties;
Luke Sandford, who gave a close reading to âCombray' at
a late stage in the work; and especially Alan Cote, who so
consistently helped me to resolve or gain perspective on the many larger questions
that arose along the way.
I am, finally, grateful to The Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund
and The Lannan Foundation for their support during the period in which I worked on
this translation.
Lydia Davis
For Monsieur Gaston Calmette
As a token of profound
and affectionate gratitude.
Marcel Proust
:
Combray
1
For a long time, I went to bed early. Sometimes, my candle scarcely out, my eyes would close so quickly that I did not have time to say to myself: âI'm falling asleep.' And, half an hour later, the thought that it was time to try to sleep would wake me; I wanted to put down the book I thought I still had in my hands and blow out my light; I had not ceased while sleeping to form reflections on what I had just read, but these reflections had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was what the book was talking about: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V. This belief lived on for a few seconds after my waking; it did not shock my reason but lay heavy like scales on my eyes and kept them from realizing that the candlestick was no longer lit. Then it began to grow unintelligible to me, as after metempsychosis do the thoughts of an earlier existence; the subject of the book detached itself from me, I was free to apply myself to it or not; immediately I recovered my sight and I was amazed to find a darkness around me soft and restful for my eyes, but perhaps even more so for my mind, to which it appeared a thing without cause, incomprehensible, a thing truly dark. I would ask myself what time it might be; I could hear the whistling of the trains which, remote or near by, like the singing of a bird in a forest, plotting the distances, described to me the extent of the deserted countryside where the traveller hastens towards the nearest station; and the little road he is following will be engraved on his memory by the excitement he owes to new places, to unaccustomed activities, to the recent conversation and the farewells under the unfamiliar lamp that follow him still through the silence of the night, to the imminent sweetness of his return.
I would rest my cheeks tenderly against the lovely cheeks of the pillow, which, full and fresh, are like the cheeks of our childhood. I would strike a match to look at my watch. Nearly midnight. This is the hour when the sick man who has been obliged to go off on a journey and has had to sleep in an unfamiliar hotel, wakened by an attack, is cheered to see a ray of light under the door. How fortunate, it's already morning! In a moment the servants will be up, he will be able to ring, someone will come to help him. The hope of being relieved gives him the courage to suffer. In fact he thought he heard footsteps; the steps approach, then recede. And the ray of light that was under his door has disappeared. It is midnight; they have just turned off the gas; the last servant has gone and he will have to suffer the whole night through without remedy.
I would go back to sleep, and sometimes afterwards woke only briefly for a moment, long enough to hear the organic creak of the woodwork, open my eyes and stare at the kaleidoscope of the darkness, savour in a momentary glimmer of consciousness the sleep into which were plunged the furniture, the room, that whole of which I was only a small part and whose insensibility I would soon return to share. Or else while sleeping I had effortlessly returned to a for ever vanished period of my early life, rediscovered one of my childish terrors such as that my great-uncle would pull me by my curls, a terror dispelled on the day â the dawn for me of a new era â when they were cut off. I had forgotten that event during my sleep, I recovered its memory as soon as I managed to wake myself up to escape the hands of my great-uncle, but as a precautionary measure I would completely surround my head with my pillow before returning to the world of dreams.
Sometimes, as Eve was born from one of Adam's ribs, a woman was born during my sleep from a cramped position of my thigh. Formed of the pleasure I was on the point of enjoying, she, I imagined, was the one offering it to me. My body, which felt in hers my own warmth, tried to return to itself inside her, I woke up. The rest of humanity seemed very remote compared with this woman I had left scarcely a few moments before; my cheek was still warm from her kiss, my body aching from the weight of hers. If, as sometimes
happened, she had the features of a woman I had known in life, I would devote myself entirely to this end: to finding her again, like those who go off on a journey to see a longed-for city with their own eyes and imagine that one can enjoy in reality the charm of a dream. Little by little the memory of her would fade, I had forgotten the girl of my dream.
A sleeping man holds in a circle around him the sequence of the hours, the order of the years and worlds. He consults them instinctively as he wakes and reads in them in a second the point on the earth he occupies, the time that has elapsed up to his waking; but their ranks can be mixed up, broken. If towards morning, after a bout of insomnia, sleep overcomes him as he is reading, in a position too different from the one in which he usually sleeps, his raised arm alone is enough to stop the sun and make it retreat, and, in the first minute of his waking, he will no longer know what time it is, he will think he has only just gone to bed. If he dozes off in a position still more displaced and divergent, for instance after dinner sitting in an armchair, then the confusion among the disordered worlds will be complete, the magic armchair will send him travelling at top speed through time and space, and, at the moment of opening his eyelids, he will believe he went to bed several months earlier in another country. But it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was deep and allowed my mind to relax entirely; then it would let go of the map of the place where I had fallen asleep and, when I woke in the middle of the night, since I did not know where I was, I did not even understand in the first moment who I was; all I had, in its original simplicity, was the sense of existence as it may quiver in the depths of an animal; I was more bereft than a caveman; but then the memory â not yet of the place where I was, but of several of those where I had lived and where I might have been â would come to me like help from on high to pull me out of the void from which I could not have got out on my own; I passed over centuries of civilization in one second, and the image confusedly glimpsed of oil lamps, then of wing-collar shirts, gradually recomposed my self's original features.
