In Search of Lost Time (4 page)

At the end of December 1912, Proust approached another publisher,
Ollendorff. He offered not only to pay the costs but also to share with the
publisher any profits that might derive from it. Ollendorff's rejection
came in February and included the comment: ‘I don't see why a
man should take thirty pages to describe how he turns over in his bed before he goes
to sleep.'

At last Proust submitted the manuscript to Bernard Grasset, offering
to pay the expenses of publishing the book and publicizing it, and Grasset accepted.
By April 1913, Proust was beginning to work on proofs. He said in a letter to a
friend: ‘My corrections so far (I hope this won't continue) are
not corrections. There remains not a single line out of 20 of the original
text… It is crossed out, corrected in every blank part I can find, and I
am pasting papers at the top, at the bottom, to the right, to the left,
etc….' He said that although the resulting text was actually a
bit shorter, it was a ‘hopelessly tangled mess'.

During this time, he made final decisions about titles. Ideally, he
would have preferred simply the general title,
A la recherche du temps
perdu
, followed by ‘Volume I' and ‘Volume
II' with no individual titles for the two volumes. However, his publisher
wanted individual titles for commercial reasons. Proust decided the first volume
would be called
Du côté de chez Swann
and the second
probably
Le Côté de Guermantes
. He explained several
times what these titles meant, that in the country around Combray there were two
directions in which to take a walk, that one asked, for example: ‘Shall we
go in the direction
of M. Rostand's house?'
(His friend Maurice Rostand had in fact suggested the title of the first
volume.)

But the title also had a metaphorical meaning. ‘
Chez
Swann
' means not only ‘Swann's home,
Swann's place,' but also ‘on the part of
Swann', ‘about Swann', i.e. the title refers not just
to where Swann lives but to the person Swann is, to Swann's mind,
opinions, character, nature. And by extension the first volume concerns not just
Swann's manner of living, thinking, but also Swann's world, the
worldly and artistic domain, while
Le Côté de Guermantes
concerns the ancient family of the Guermantes and their world, the domain of the
aristocracy. And it is true that the character of Swann gives the volume its
unity.

Proust's friend Louis de Robert did not like the title, and
Proust mentioned a few others – rather idly, as it turns out, since he was
not really going to change his mind: ‘Charles Swann',
‘Gardens in a Cup of Tea' and ‘The Age of
Names'. He said he had also thought of ‘Springtime'.
But he argued: ‘I still don't understand why the name of that
Combray path which was known as “the way by Swann's”
with its earthy reality, its local truthfulness, does not have just as much poetry
in it as those abstract or flowery titles.'

The work of the printer was finished by November 1913 – an
edition of 1,750 was printed – and the book was in the bookshops on 14
November. Reviews appeared by Lucien Daudet and Jean Cocteau, among others. Not all
the reviews were positive. The publisher submitted the book for the Prix Goncourt,
but the prize was won, instead, by a book called
Le Peuple de la mer
(‘The People of the Sea'), by Marc Elder.

A later edition was published in 1919 by Gallimard with some small
changes. A corrected edition was published by Gallimard in its Bibliothèque
de la Pléiade series in 1954 and another, with further corrections and
additions, in 1987.

Many contemporaries of Proust's insisted that he wrote the
way he spoke, although when
Du côté de chez Swann
appeared in print, they were startled by what they saw as the severity of the page.
Where were the pauses, the inflections? There were not enough empty spaces,
not enough punctuation marks. To them, the sentences did not seem
as long when they were spoken, in his extraordinary hoarse voice, as when they were
read on the page: his voice punctuated them.

The style in which Proust wrote was essentially natural and
unaffected, free from preciosity, archaism and self-conscious elegance, and far
plainer than one might guess from existing English versions. Yet at the same time,
he used a wealth of metaphorical imagery, layer upon layer of comparisons, and had a
tendency to fill a sentence to its utmost capacity. This, according to some, also
reflected the way he spoke when he was with his friends. One of them, perhaps
exaggerating, reported that Proust would arrive late in the evening, waking him up,
begin talking, and deliver one long sentence that did not come to an end until the
middle of the night. The sentence would be full of asides, parentheses,
illuminations, reconsiderations, revisions, addenda, corrections, augmentations,
digressions, qualifications, erasures, deletions and marginal notes. It would, in
other words, attempt to be exhaustive, to capture every nuance of a piece of
reality, to reflect Proust's entire thought. To be exhaustive is, of
course, an infinite task. More can always be inserted: more event, and more nuance;
more commentary on the event, and more nuance within the commentary.

Proust felt that a long sentence contained a whole, complex thought.
The shape of the sentence was the shape of the thought, and every word was necessary
to the thought: ‘I really have to weave these long silks as I spin
them,' he said. ‘If I shortened my sentences, it would make
little pieces of sentences, not sentences.' And yet great length was not
desirable in itself. He categorically rejected sentences that were artificially
amplified, or that were overly abstract, or that groped, arriving at a thought by a
succession of approximations. He despised empty flourishes; when he described Odette
as having a
sourire sour-noise
, or ‘sly smile', the
alliteration was there for a purpose, to tie the two related elements together in
one's mind. As he proceeded from draft to draft, he not only added
material but also condensed. ‘I prefer concentration,' he said,
‘even in length.' And
The Way by Swann's
, in
any case, contains a nice balance: very long sentences – of ten lines or
more – occupy only one quarter of the book.

*

The first English translation of
Du
côté de chez Swann
, C. K. Scott Moncrieff's
Swann's Way
, was done in Proust's lifetime and
published in 1922. Sixty years later, a revision of Moncrieff's
translation by Terence Kilmartin, based on a corrected edition of the French,
brought the translation closer to the original, cutting gratuitous additions and
embellishments and correcting Moncrieff's own misreadings, though it also
introduced the occasional grammatical mistake and mixed metaphor, and employed a
style of writing in English perceptibly less mellifluous than Moncrieff's.
In 1992, after Kilmartin's death and after the publication of the still
more definitive 1987 Pléiade edition, the translation was further revised
by D. J. Enright. The two revisions of Moncrieff's translation retain so
much of his original work that they cannot be called new translations. Thus, there
exists only one other translation of
Du côté de chez
Swann
, and that is
Swann's Way
by James Grieve
(Canberra, 1982). Grieve's approach was not to follow the original French
as closely as possible word by word, but to analyse a sentence for its meaning and
then reshape that meaning into a syntax which might have been that of an author
writing in English. In his translation each sentence is often substantially
reworked. My approach has been closer to Moncrieff's, though the resulting
translations are only in rare short sentences or phrases identical.

My aim in the present translation was to stay as close as possible to
Proust's original in every way, even to match his style as nearly as I
could. To follow the original closely is both harder and easier than allowing
oneself more freedom. Harder because the confines are so tight, but easier for the
same reason – one does not have as many options. I wanted to reproduce as
nearly as possible Proust's word choice, word order, syntax, repetition of
words, punctuation – even, when possible, his handling of sounds, the
rhythms of a sentence and the alliteration and assonance within it.

For Proust is often lavish in his aural effects – witness
the alliteration of this phrase:
faisait refluer ses reflets
; or the ABBA
structure of vowel sounds in this one:
lâcheté qui nous
détourne de toute tâche
; or the cooing of the dove at the
end of this paragraph:
Et son faîte etait toujours couronné du
roucoulement d'une colombe
. Often, especially at the close of a
paragraph or a long sentence, Proust will string together, say,
three adjectives beginning with the letter
p
; if the translation can do
the same, it amounts to a sort of translation bonus.

My intention was to reproduce the French without adding or subtracting
material, or substituting an interpretation for what was on the original page; to be
faithful to the beauty of some passages, the awkwardness or strangeness of others;
to retain parallel structure when it was there, and the lack of parallel structure
when it was missing; wherever possible, to begin a sentence or paragraph with the
same word or words as in the original; and to end a sentence or paragraph the same
way. Preferably the very last word of a sentence should be the same – and
this becomes especially important in those long, complexly structured sentences,
since so often they are designed from the beginning to lead up to a particular
climactic word. It almost goes without saying, although readers still ask
translators to break them up, that the long sentences must be kept intact and must
retain as many elements of their complexity as possible, above all the intricate
architecture of syntax into which Proust inserts his parenthetical remarks and
digressions, delaying the outcome for so long.

One may suppose that a new translation will have a more contemporary
tone or diction than an older one, that it will be more in the idiom of its time.
Yet in the case of Proust, if one sets out to compose a very close translation, one
finds that the very complexity of the syntax requires a certain formality, so that
the diction, with its slightly old-fashioned quality, is somewhat predetermined.
Within this formality, of course, there is a range, though a fairly narrow one, of
choices of more and less formal, and more and less modern vocabulary.

Often, in fact, the closest, most accurate, and even most euphonious
equivalent may be a word more commonly used decades ago than it is now: for
instance, the French
chercher
means both ‘to look for'
and ‘to try', so its perfect equivalent in English is our
‘seek'. Or, for the French
corsage
, the part of a
woman's dress extending from the neck to the hips, also known as the
‘waist' or ‘body' of a woman's
dress, the perfect equivalent is ‘bodice', which in fact means
the same thing. And so these choices, too, may give the translation the tone of an
earlier time. Other wonderfully identical English equivalents have simply receded
too far into the past by now and will be too obscure to
be
understood: Proust's
solitude
, which in French can mean
‘a lonely spot', has that meaning in English too, but will no
longer be understood in that sense. A couple of centuries ago, we would refer, in
English, to a ‘piece of water' just as Proust does to
une
pièce d'eau
and mean, like him, an ornamental pool or
pond.

Of course, translation always involves compromise, and most of the
time not every feature of the Proustian sentence can be retained in English:
sometimes word order has to be sacrificed, sometimes punctuation, sometimes rhythm,
alliteration, etc. The word in translation will be a shade off in meaning from the
original, but part of a nice pattern of alliteration; or the passive voice is used
when the active would have been better so that the images will appear in the same
order; or, whereas Proust's sentence ends with a comma followed by a
single climactic word, the English version must end with a comma followed by two or
three words so that the same rhythmic resolution will be achieved. The only thing
that is never knowingly compromised is the meaning of the original, though perhaps
meaning, too, is lost or diminished when other features of Proust's
sentence are altered.

The present translation has tended to be plainer and more direct than
Moncrieff's, in part because his individual word choices are so often
‘dressier'. For instance, each time Proust uses the word
disait
, I have translated it simply as ‘said',
whereas Moncrieff often introduces a variety not in the original by choosing
instead: ‘remarked', ‘began',
‘murmured', ‘assured them', etc. In many
other cases, too, his tendency is to replace a more neutral word by a more
expressive or loaded one:
regardait
, ‘looked', becomes
‘peered' or ‘peeped';
tenu
,
‘held', becomes ‘squeezed';
‘little' becomes ‘tiny';
‘interest' becomes ‘fascination';
‘emptied' becomes ‘purged'. Introduced
consistently throughout the book, these choices of Moncrieff's result in a
generally more highly coloured text. Similarly, where Proust uses a plain word like
bon
, ‘good', twice in the same paragraph, Moncrieff
instead introduces variation through the use of a synonym such as
‘pleasant' or ‘agreeable'.
Proust's eloquence is sometimes achieved through plainness and bluntness,
from which Moncrieff often shies away.