In Search of Lost Time (2 page)

But there is also the question of the titles of the individual
volumes. Kilmartin finally jettisoned Scott Moncrieff's coyly biblical
Cities of
the Plain
(for
Sodome et Gomorrhe
) and the
impossibly saccharine
The Sweet Cheat Gone
(for
La Fugitive
or
Albertine disparue
) in favour of a more literal match with
Proust's own choices. We have done likewise:
Sodom and Gomorrah
,
The Fugitive
. But in respect of
Du côté de chez
Swann
,
A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs
,
Le
Côté de Guermantes
,
La Prisonnière
and
Le Temps retrouvé
, Kilmartin reproduced what he inherited from
Scott Moncrieff. Of these we have retained only
The Guermantes Way
, in the
belief that it is important to preserve the echo of the title of the first volume,
notwithstanding the fact that the topographical symbolism of the two
‘ways' along which the narrator and his family take their walks
in Combray is of little relevance to the actual narrative of
Le
Côté de Guermantes
(whose
‘Guermantes' sequence is set in Paris). There are, however,
several problems, some acute, with Scott Moncrieff's translations of the
remaining four titles, and here new versions have been provided.
*
Some readers may
take offence at this titular tampering, especially those for whom the titles are
like iconic signatures, part of our very image of both the writer and his work; this
is perhaps most compellingly the case with the given titles of the opening and
closing volumes,
Swann's Way
and
Time Regained
. It may
well be, however, that aura here is simply being confused with habit (whose
immobilizing power is one of Proust's own great themes), and that there is
consequently merit in accepting the invitation to think again, especially where
there are grounds for querying the accuracy of Scott Moncrieff's versions
(
Swann's Way
, for example, has little connection with the
grammar, meaning and rhythm of
Du côté de chez Swann
).
Idolatrous icons are no substitute for textual fidelity.

Yet, if on the matter of titles Kilmartin proved
reluctant to move decisively beyond Scott Moncrieff, there can be no disputing that
in very many respects the former's translation threw into relief aspects
of Proust's text neglected or unseen by the latter, and this inevitably
raises the question as to why we might ‘need' yet another
translation a mere decade after the publication of the Kilmartin/Enright
re-revision. To the more sceptically minded, the best answer will presumably be no
answer at all: reason not the need. Translation is not a zero-sum game, nor is it a
competitive agon in which sons slay fathers. Henry James described the house of
fiction as a house with many windows, and there is no reason why the figure of
speech should not be carried over to the translation of fiction. In general terms,
what distinguishes the present undertaking from its predecessors is twofold. First,
it is not a ‘revision' based on minute attention to the text of
a prior translation. It is a ‘new' translation in the strong and
simple sense of a translation done from scratch. Secondly – this will
doubtless be its most controversial feature – it is a team-based effort,
with a different translator for each of the seven volumes.

Although not without precedent (there are already team-work
translations in both German and Italian), the disadvantages of such an arrangement
are obvious. At the deepest level they concern the management of differences arising
not just from the interpretation of Proust's text but from philosophical
conflicts over the nature and purpose of literary translation as such. This,
broadly, is the conflict between what we might call the naturalizing and the
foreignizing conceptions. The latter holds that we should never be allowed to forget
that what we are reading is indeed a translation and that it is therefore both
duty-bound and condemned to bear within it some trace of the foreignness in which it
has taken up abode. Reading
A la recherche
in English should not seek to
mask the fact that it was originally written in French. Conversely, the former
assumes that the prime task of the translator is to naturalize the host language as
far as possible into the terms of the guest language, in such a way as to create for
the reader the sense that he or she is reading a text as if it had been
‘originally' written in the guest language. This appears to have
been Kilmartin's working hypothesis. ‘[T]he main problem with
Scott Moncrieff's
version is a matter of tone. A
translator ought constantly to be asking himself: “How would the author
put this if he were writing in English?”' Yet, if at first
glance this looks like a reasonable benchmark, it is in fact demented. Perhaps we
can make some sense of the notion of what
A la recherche
would have looked
like had Proust written it in English by recasting it as the question of how a
roughly contemporaneous English writer might have written it. But this
counterfactual imagining is also a somewhat murky notion. What, from the history of
English-language fiction, could serve as a comparable model of literary prose? The
style of Henry James or Edith Wharton, for example? The analogy, if pressed, would
quite rapidly reach breaking point.

Translation by a team inevitably brings these vexed issues out into
the open, and, at their most intractable, there is no way in which they can be
readily adjudicated or resolved. Arising from this more general theoretical
question, there are, however, a number of practical matters on which, for reasons of
consistency, adjudication has been essential (the unenviable yet unavoidable task of
the general editor). They include: place-names; personal titles; quotations;
dialogue. For the most part, the foreignizing conception has prevailed. In the case
of place names, we have retained the standard French forms (e.g. rue de Rivoli,
place de la Concorde, etc.). Personal titles, especially aristocratic ones, are
trickier for two reasons. First, the respective French and English systems of rank
are not strictly commensurable; translating ‘
duc
' as
‘duke' (or ‘Duke'),
‘
duchesse
' as ‘duchess' (or
‘Duchess') and so on is not quite right. Secondly, personal
titles often serve more as proper names of characters than as indicators of rank. We
have accordingly adopted a series of compromises. Notwithstanding the
incommensurabilities, we have translated (in lower case) where the sense is generic
(‘he was a duke'), but we have kept the French in all other
cases, including the many abbreviations from, for example, ‘
duc de
Guermantes
' to ‘
duc
'
(‘
le duc disait
'). In this case, however, we have
converted from lower to upper case (‘The Duc de Guermantes',
‘the Duc said…'), partly on the grounds that this
seemed more appropriate for an English reader when the sense in question was
effectively that of a proper name.

Where quotations from French literary sources are concerned, a
policy of wholesale translation into English would in principle
be desirable. In the case of free-standing verse quotation, however, this runs
immediately into severe difficulties, above all in connection with the most
abundantly quoted author in
A la recherche
, Racine. Attempts to find or
forge satisfactory English forms, across the very different metrical and rhetorical
conventions of French and English regular verse, defeated us. This is no mere
technical point. There is a very real risk that one ends up with either flatly
prosaic representations of the original French or artificial pastiches of English
verse forms. Neither of these outcomes is desirable in so far as neither would be
true to the spirit of Proust. The Racine quotations are often playful, but they are
not just a joke. They also perform a complex and provocative literary move: by
quoting the highly formal verse of Racine in the context of the themes of incest and
homosexuality, Proust is wresting Racine from the neoclassical orthodoxies of his
age and aligning him with the more modern image of the
poète
maudit
(in one of his letters Proust claimed that Racine was more
‘immoral' than Baudelaire). Attempting to translate the
quotations into English could easily wreck this move; we have accordingly quoted in
French, while supplying an English version in the notes.

Lastly, there is the question of the way Proust both disposes and
marks dialogue. His practice here varies. Sometimes he ventilates speech, with
separate paragraphs for each individual speaker. Sometimes, he embeds dialogue in
the same paragraph, often further cemented with surrounding narrative and discursive
material. The latter procedure is particularly noticeable in the later volumes and
is apparently to be explained on the purely material grounds of his
publisher's worry about space. The ‘naturalizing'
model of translation might well be tempted to ventilate some of this, in the name of
a more accessible English version. An unintended consequence of Proust's
method of embedding, however, is a tendency to dissolve individuated speech into the
flow of the Proustian monologue, an effect that seems worth preserving. Proust is a
wonderful mimic of different speech styles but philosophically he consistently
devalues dialogue, the social arts of conversational exchange (what he calls
‘
causerie
'), as worthless alongside the abundance
of the interior life. In any case, whatever its
practical or
literary motivations, we have reproduced Proust's varying use of the
ventilated and the embedded. We have also retained his practice of punctuating
embedded dialogue, normally with quotation marks opening and closing a given
sequence, the transition from one speaker to another within the sequence effected by
the use of the dash (or ‘
tiret
'). This too can make for
a degree of confusion as to the identities of speakers, but, since – at
least in its embedded form – it is hardly less alien to a French reader
than it is to an English one, we have resisted Kilmartin's importation of
quotation marks for each instance of separate speech within a sequence. There seems
to be no good reason for making English Proust more
‘reader-friendly' than French Proust.

If these are some of the issues on which, in the interests of
consistency, editorial intervention has been necessary to cut the Gordian knot of
passionately held differences of philosophical outlook, there are other areas in
which the intrinsically heterogeneous nature of a team-translation has been allowed
to express itself more freely. While it makes sense to speak of a distinctively
Proustian ‘tone', it is a mistake to think of
A la
recherche
as governed by a single homogeneous style. The intellectual
bedrock of
A la recherche
is a commitment to the mobile and the multiple,
starting with the ‘I' which articulates this commitment over and
over again. The self and the world in Proust are not self-identical either through
time or at any one moment in time; they are systematically disaggregated into a
plurality of selves and worlds. And this grand Proustian theme is mirrored in and
enacted by Proust's language, both at the macro-level of the novel as a
whole and at the micro-level of the individual sentence. It is also reflected in the
shifting array of modes and registers across the individual volumes, from, say,
Proust's version of the bucolic (in
A l'ombre des jeunes
filles en fleurs
) to his version of the apocalyptic (in
Sodome et
Gomorrhe
). One of the benefits of the division of labour entailed by a
collective translation is that it arguably heightens the chances of bringing into
focus the stylistic variety we encounter as we move from one volume to the next. A
single translator, however flexible, is more likely to be constrained by the
conscious or unconscious operation of a particular
parti pris
.

Multiple selves, multiple worlds, multiple styles:
this, paradoxically, is the quintessence of Proust. His narrator-hero has been aptly
described (in witty counter-allusion to the title of Musil's novel
A
Man Without Qualities
) as ‘a man with too many
qualities'. Inquisitive, naive, kind, lazy, anxious, cruel, irresolute,
self-deceiving, jealous, indifferent, he comes to us, along with Joyce's
Bloom, Eliot's Prufrock, Pound's Mauberly and Kafka's
Joseph K, as a modern everyman, but with one unusual quality: his possession of a
scintillatingly restless intelligence. This is not to be confused with the Proust of
the maxim, which has led some to think of
A la recherche
as a source-book
for the good and wise life. The form of the intelligence that matters here is
speculative rather than apodictic, geared to the energies of hypothetical inquiry.
No sentence-type is more typically Proustian than the spiralling structure which
contains half a dozen possible answers to a simple question. This is why the
intelligence is peculiarly suited to fiction. The novel is pre-eminently the
literary mode of hypothesis, adventure and quest (the search of
‘
recherche
'). At one level, Proust's
novel recapitulates the shape of the classic European
Bildungsroman
, as the
story of a questing hero making his way in the world. In these terms, it is a
straight-line narrative describing a trajectory from childhood in Combray to middle
age, culminating in that spectacle of observed decay and mortality in the
‘
bal des têtes
' section of
Le temps
retrouvé
. As such, it conforms to the traditional type as a story
of discovery and initiation. But, along with its linear forwards movement,
A la
recherche
is also a vast exercise in imaginative retrospection, on a scale
not seen in European literature since Wordsworth's
Prelude
and
Goethe's
Dichtung und Wahrheit
. The past constantly enters the
present, in an interaction whereby each is made subject to a process of
theoretically infinite revision. Moreover, not only does the novel look back as it
thrusts forwards, it also moves sideways, in a complex set of lateral shifts and
swerves, deploying a technique of digression so systematic as to empty the notion of
‘digression' of its normal meanings. Much of Proust's
originality lies in these local disruptions to the linear form of narrative and is
closely related to his text's ability to deliver surprise and
disturbance.