IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME. Marcel Proust. Edited by Christopher Prendergast.
Volume One: The Way by Swann's. Translated by Lydia Davis. Volume Two: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower.
Translated by James Grieve. Volume Three: The Guermantes Way. Translated by Mark Treharne. Volume Four: Sodom and Gomorrah. Translated by John Sturrock.
Volume Five: The Prisoner. Translated by Carol Clark.
The Fugitive. Translated by Peter Collier. Volume Six: Finding Time Again.
Translated by Ian Patterson. 3,254pp. Allen Lane The Penguin Press. Pounds
14.99 each or Pounds 75 the set. 0 14 091000 X.
The idea of entrusting one of the supreme French stylists to seven different English sensibilities is a strategy of desperation, but arguably an understandable one. For three-quarters of a century, C. K. Scott Moncrieff's translation of Proust's vast novel has been the only integral English version.
It is not generally recalled that even he did not live long enough to do the final volume, which was completed by different translators in England and in America.
Scott Moncrieff, it must be said, had a splendid if somewhat effusive sense of English style, and his sheer persistence in this monumental task was heroic.
Problems, however, notoriously abound in his translation. For Proust's elegantly architectonic prose, with its peculiar combination of lyric density and surgical precision, Scott Moncrieff substituted a kind of post-Victorian gingerbread, and he repeatedly was unable to resist the temptation to "improve" Proust -even in the titles he chose for the whole novel and for some of the individual volumes (the Shakespearian Remembrance of Things Past for In Search of Lost Time, the Swinburnian The Sweet Cheat Gone for The Fugitive, Cities of the Plain for Sodom and Gomorrah). He also misconstrued the French at far too many points, and, given the state of flux of Proust's text (the author, a compulsive reviser, did not survive to see the last three volumes into print), the first French edition from which Scott Moncrieff worked was riven with errors and has long been superseded by the 1954 Pleiade edition, and then in some respects by the debated 1987-9 Pleiade edition (the latter is the chief but not exclusive basis for the Penguin volumes).
What has happened since 1981 is an attempt to fill in potholes and resurface cracks without paving new roads. First Terence Kilmartin undertook a revision of Scott Moncrieff, correcting misconstructions and bringing the translation in line with the 1954 Pleiade text, but also leaving the gingerbread structure substantially in place. Then, in failing health, he passed on the project to D.
J. Enright, who brought out a 1992 version that described itself as a translation by Scott Moncrieff and Kilmartin revised by Enright. This version took into consideration many of the textual proposals of the 1987-9 Pleiade, but again did not fundamentally modify Moncrieff's general stylistic bent. At around the same time, it was announced with great fanfare in the American press that a new translation of the entire novel had been undertaken by the eminent translator, Richard Howard. He appears to have abandoned the project, and, instead, in the late 1990s, he completed a new English version of Stendhal's Chartreuse de Parme (replacing, as a matter of fact, one by Scott Moncrieff).
Given these circumstances, and given the rather ominous fact that no single person, living or dead, had succeeded in translating Proust into English all the way through, one can see why Christopher Prendergast should have decided to line up his team of seven. They are all experienced translators of French literature, though, inevitably, they do not all reflect the same level of excellence. By and large, the sensible strategy of all seven is to respect the period quality of Proust's early twentieth-century French, its poised decorousness, to reproduce most of the convolutions of his famous long serpentine sentences, and, within the limits of English idiomatic usage, to hew more closely to the literal contours of the French than do Scott Moncrieff and his revisers. Here, for example, is a moment from Lydia Davis's fine translation of The Way by Swann's (arguably a more accurate rendering of the title Du Cote de chez Swann than the familiar and compact Swann's Way, but rather ungainly). The narrator is describing the experience of waking up in the middle of the night:
. . . 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 -not of the place where I was, but of several of those where I had lived and where I might have been -would come to me like help from on high to pull me out of the void . . . .
Compare this with Scott Moncrieff-Kilmartin as revised by Enright:
I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal's consciousness; I was more destitute than the cave-dweller; but then the memory -not yet of the place in which I was, but of various other places where I had lived and might now possibly be -would come down like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of non-being . . . .
The Scott Moncrieff, which has scarcely been rescued from its own stylistic vices in two successive revisions, is full of small, cumulatively compromising embellishments. There is no "rudimentary" in the French, no "lurk", no "consciousness" (the French simply says, with concise directness, "au fond d'un animal"), and, most egregiously, there is no rope dangling from heaven (the French is merely "comme un secours d'en haut", as Lydia Davis's version properly registers), and "du neant", "out of the void", sports no abyss in the French.
All seven of the new translators firmly reject the Moncrieffian seduction to elevate or hyperbolize Proust. Thus, "la sonorite mordoree du nom" is "the bronze sonority of the name" (Davis) and not, as in Scott Moncrieff, "the old-gold sonorous name"; in a theatre scene in Volume Three, pourpre is "purple", not "hyacinthine", sombre is dark, not "sombre", and, sensibly, clair-obscur is "half-light" and not the fussier Italianate cognate, "chiaroscuro". The instance of sombre and clair-obscur points to another virtue shared by the sundry members of the Penguin team: they are all aware that translation through cognate is often a trap, at least in terms of linguistic register and often in regard to meaning. It is surely preferable, for example, to translate ossature as "skeleton" rather than as "ossature", or ripolin as "enamel-painted" rather than "ripolin" (which is not, as far as I can tell, a recognizable English word).
All seven translators, then, try to be faithful to the semantic contours of Proust's word-choices, and five of them do a rather good job of conveying his rich lyricism in dignified literary English that does not sound pretentious or overblown. They are also quite deft in reproducing the astringent sharpness of the satiric passages and in representing the various lively colloquial registers of the dialogues without making them sound like twenty-first-century English. The best five volumes come close to being exemplary translations of Proust that actually exhibit a surprising degree of stylistic consonance with each other. This makes it all the more regrettable that a whole series of correctable lapses was left untouched.
In his otherwise admirably judicious editor's preface, Christopher Prendergast seeks to justify employing seven different translators on the grounds of "the shifting array of modes and registers across the individual volumes" in the French. Because there is, in his view, no unitary Proustian style, it is an actual advantage to have the job done by many hands: "A single translator, however flexible, is more likely to be constrained by the conscious or unconscious operation of a particular parti pris."
This claim is either disingenuous or simply foolish. Of course, Proust switches registers as he goes -there is tart colloquialism alongside high literary language, pithy aphorism alongside the grand periodic sentences -and there are changes in mood and themes from volume to volume. None of this, however, suggests that there is no underlying stylistic substratum running through all the registers, and anyone reading through the seven volumes in French comes to sense a unifying Proustian sensibility in the prose even as it shifts gear according to the exigencies of the particular narrative moment. Prendergast's assertion to the contrary looks suspiciously like an excuse for having made no editorial effort to bring the sundry volumes into full stylistic consonance with each other, and this inaction in certain ways compromises the project as a whole.
It is particularly unfortunate that the weakest link in the chain appears in the second volume in the sequence, James Grieve's translation of A L'Ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. The innocent English reader may be led to infer that Proust, like a tennis player whose serve suddenly abandons him in the second set, has somehow lost his grip. The beautiful long sentences, so poised in the first volume, become syntactically muddy and hard to follow. Here is a sample of the same phenomenon in a short sentence: "His being related to Mme Bontemps had already restricted these marvellous hypotheses, by blocking off one of the channels via which they might have proliferated." The effect of this kind of prose in sentences that run on for half a page or more can be altogether numbing. Grieve's volume abounds in awkward turns of phrase and actual solecisms: "the straightforwardness and the light-heartedness", "the microscopic insignificance of myself", "a realer world", "desolidified". Most egregiously, he has entirely banished the subjunctive from Proust (to cite one instance out of many dozens, in his version, M Norpois speaks of literature "as though it was a charming dowager").
Now, the speculative scrutiny of conditions contrary to fact and the fictiveness of figurative comparisons used as vehicles for thought experiments are essential to Proust's imagination of the world, and he scrupulously employs the subjunctive wherever formal French usage requires. In an English equivalent of his prose, the distinction between narrative facts and conditions contrary to fact cries out to be marked formally. Grieve is an Australian, and perhaps the subjunctive has been abolished in his native land, but Lydia Davis punctiliously observes it in the first volume, as do Mark Traherne and the translators who follow him in the line-up. It is a mystery why there was no editorial intervention to rectify so glaring an inconsistency, and one so thoroughly out of keeping with Proust's own stylistic practice.
Grieve, it should be said, is also guilty of the most wrong-headed judgement in his translator's introduction, which stands in sharp contrast to the generally intelligent and helpful introductions to the other volumes. Astonishingly, he claims that Proust "deals . . . hardly at all" with the Dreyfus Affair, which we are invited to think has very little importance in the novel. This is rather like saying that references to the American Civil War in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! are entirely marginal, for it is a statistically demonstrable fact that there are repeated, prominent invocations of the Dreyfus Affair through the later volumes, and the realignments within society effected by divisions over the Affair enable significant elements of the plot.
Perhaps the oddest inconsistency that the editor has let stand is the translation of the narrator's reiterated term for Albertine, "mon amie". It is a tricky word because it can mean girlfriend or mistress (as in "petite amie") or simply female friend. John Sturrock chooses to get around this with a circumlocution that seems tonally off, "the one I loved". In the immediately following volume, Carol Clark represents the same term as "my friend", which could well confuse readers. Has the relationship shifted to a relationship between buddies, and, if so, why is Albertine living with the narrator and offering him nightly, as he tells us at the beginning, the enrapturing gift of her open mouth and tongue? When Albertine crops up again in the final volume, translated by Ian Patterson, she is once more transmogrified -this time, into "my lover", which strikes me as too egalitarian and contemporary a term for a female sexual partner in the belle epoque.
Patterson, though he exhibits in many respects a reasonable degree of competence, is the translator most likely to stumble, after Grieve. It is perplexing that he represents Le Temps retrouve as Finding Time Again (as in "finding time to read the paper"?) instead of as Time Regained, which is in fact what Peter Collier calls it in his translator's introduction to The Fugitive. (Even here the general editor refuses to impose consistency.) It is altogether comical that he should render "cette raffinee mangeaille" with a Yiddishism, "this superb nosh", regrettable that he should introduce an English verb, "brainwash", coined only at the time of the Korean War, lamentable that he should treat "as" as though it were a preposition ("Victims of the same mirage as me"). A scrupulous editor would not have allowed Collier to use "engineer" and "contact" as verbs in an English style aspiring to simulate the formal propriety of Proust's early twentieth-century French. Attentive copy-editing would have saved a generally apt translator such as John Sturrock from lapses into awkwardness ("the same question seemed to be being posed"), from loss of idiom ("I would shortly stop . . . from seeing her"), and from downright incoherence ("Although it was after nine o'clock, the daylight it was still which, on the place de la Concorde, had given the Luxor obelisk an appearance of pink nougat").
It is painful to contemplate all these local annoyances because the sundry volumes exhibit a great deal of sustained good prose, and skilled revision could have made this a truly fine English version of Proust. As a small illustration of the fineness one does encounter, let me quote a brief sentence from the beginning of The Prisoner in Carol Clark's translation: "I could tell (the weather) from the first street noises, whether they reached me muffled and distorted by dampness or twanging like arrows in the empty, resonant space of a wide-open morning, icy and pure." This is at once elegant and vigorous, with the same lyric concision as the French (Scott Moncrieff et al are a bit flaccid by comparison). "Twanging like arrows" for "vibrants comme des fleches" is a brilliant touch that taps an indigenous resource of English while honouring the French, and the concluding phrase, in contrast to the rhythmic flatness and the slight inaccuracy evident in Scott Moncrieff's "of a spacious, frosty, and pure morning", beautifully reproduces the cadence of the French, "d'un matin spacieux, glacial, et pur". For long stretches, the new Penguin Proust offers English readers a stylistic experience that is a far better equivalent of the original than what they have had till now. One must be grateful for that achievement, even though the wonderful pirouettes are sometimes followed by pratfalls, and even though the team of seven is a little less than all-star.
