He is frail and suffers from asthma and insomnia, we know that much, but all his other energies and perceptions are directed, under the pressure of the most exhaustive observation, to the acknowledgment that the human enterprise—in society, in friendship, and in love—is a failure, the source of exhaustion, ruin, and despair.

The other thirty-five? forty? fifty? characters who accompany us through the Search like so many grand and grotesque catastrophes—even Charlus, even the Duchess of Guermantes, even the Narrator’s grandmother whose name we never learn—are relegated to tragedy or to farce with the same dismissive gesture by which Wotan repudiates Hunding in Die Walküre after he has killed Siegmund: with a wave of his hand, the god casts out the mortal who has served his pathetic turn: Geh’!. Geh’!

Only the artist, or rather only what the artist creates, is triumphant, is exemplary, is enduring, is successful. And only such makings can persuade the Narrator to undertake one of his own, a persuasion in which—for three thousand pages or so—we must collude. His language (Proust’s language, of course) surrounds us, penetrates us, so that these makings are not only the Narrator’s redemptive moments but our own.

—

It is my fervent hope that by introducing, with some charity, you new readers to Proust, and by introducing, with an equivalent charity, Proust to his new readers, the parties may proceed some way together. To the emblematic fulfillment of this hope I am somewhat encouraged by the new street signs of Paris boulevards, which, as if they sought to celebrate the Proustian sagesse that asserts “we are like giants plunged in time,” flash a message picked out in little red lights (for danger? for delectation?) to those seeking safe passage to the median strip between opposing directions of traffic, a haven that must be attained before reaching the seemingly inaccessible other side: traversez en deux temps, the red lights direct us, cross over time and time again.

—

RICHARD HOWARD is a poet and translator. He teaches literature in the Writing Division of Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION
(1981)

Terence Kilmartin

C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s version of À la recherche du temps perdu has in the past fifty years earned a reputation as one of the great English translations, almost as a masterpiece in its own right. Why then should it need revision? Why tamper with a work that has been enjoyed and admired, not to say revered, by several generations of readers throughout the English-speaking world?

The answer is that the original French edition from which Scott Moncrieff worked (the “abominable” edition of the Nouvelle Revue Française, as Samuel Beckett described it in a marvellous short study of Proust which he published in 1931) was notoriously imperfect. This was not so much the fault of the publishers and printers as of Proust’s methods of composition. Only the first volume (Du côté de chez Swann) of the novel as originally conceived—and indeed written—was published before the 1914–1918 war. The second volume was set up in type, but publication was delayed, and moreover by that time Proust had already begun to reconsider the scale of the novel; the remaining eight years of his life (1914–1922) were spent in expanding it from its original 500,000 words to more than a million and a quarter. The margins of proofs and typescripts were covered with scribbled corrections and insertions, often overflowing on to additional sheets which were glued to the galleys or to one another to form interminable strips—what Françoise in the novel calls the narrator’s “paperoles.” The unravelling and deciphering of these copious additions cannot have been an enviable task for editors and printers.

Furthermore, the last three sections of the novel (La prisonnière, La fugitive—originally called Albertine disparue—and Le temps retrouvé) had not yet been published at the time of Proust’s death in November 1922 (he was still correcting a typed copy of La prisonnière on his deathbed). Here the original editors had to take it upon themselves to prepare a coherent text from a manuscript littered with sometimes hasty corrections, revisions and afterthoughts and leaving a number of unresolved contradictions, obscurities and chronological inconsistencies. As a result of all this the original editions—even of the volumes published in Proust’s lifetime—pullulate with errors, misreadings and omissions.

In 1954 a revised three-volume edition of À la recherche was published in Gallimard’s Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. The editors, M. Pierre Clarac and M. André Ferré, had been charged by Proust’s heirs with the task of “establishing a text of his novel as faithful as possible to his intentions.” With infinite care and patience they examined all the relevant material—manuscripts, notebooks, typescripts, proofs, as well as the original edition—and produced what is generally agreed to be a virtually impeccable transcription of Proust’s text. They scrupulously avoided the arbitrary emendations, the touchings-up, the wholesale reshufflings of paragraphs in which the original editors indulged, confining themselves to clarifying the text wherever necessary, correcting errors due to haste or inadvertence, eliminating careless repetitions and rationalising the punctuation (an area where Proust was notoriously casual). They justify and explain their editorial decisions in detailed critical notes, occupying some 200 pages over the three volumes, and print all the significant variants as well as a number of passages that Proust did not have time to work into his book.

The Pléiade text differs from that of the original edition, mostly in minor though none the less significant ways, throughout the novel. In the last three sections (the third Pléiade volume) the differences are sometimes considerable. In particular, MM. Clarac and Ferré have included a number of passages, sometimes of a paragraph or two, sometimes of several pages, which the original editors omitted for no good reason.

The present translation is a reworking, on the basis of the Pléiade edition, of Scott Moncrieff’s version of the first six sections of À la recherche—or the first eleven volumes of the twelve-volume English edition. A post-Pléiade version of the final volume, Le temps retrouvé (originally translated by Stephen Hudson after Scott Moncrieff’s death in 1930), was produced by the late Andreas Mayor and published in 1970; with some minor emendations, it is incorporated in this edition. There being no indication in Proust’s manuscript as to where La fugitive should end and Le temps retrouvé begin, I have followed the Pléiade editors in introducing the break some pages earlier than in the previous editions, both French and English—at the beginning of the account of the Tansonville episode.

The need to revise the existing translation in the light of the Pléiade edition has also provided an opportunity of correcting mistakes and misinterpretations in Scott Moncrieff’s version. Translation, almost by definition, is imperfect; there is always “room for improvement,” and it is only too easy for the latecomer to assume the beau rôle. I have refrained from officious tinkering for its own sake, but a translator’s loyalty is to the original author, and in trying to be faithful to Proust’s meaning and tone of voice I have been obliged, here and there, to make extensive alterations.

A general criticism that might be levelled against Scott Moncrieff is that his prose tends to the purple and the precious—or that this is how he interpreted the tone of the original: whereas the truth is that, complicated, dense, overloaded though it often is, Proust’s style is essentially natural and unaffected, quite free of preciosity, archaism or self-conscious elegance. Another pervasive weakness of Scott Moncrieff’s is perhaps the defect of a virtue. Contrary to a widely held view, he stuck very closely to the original (he is seldom guilty of short-cuts, omissions or loose paraphrases), and in his efforts to reproduce the structure of those elaborate sentences with their spiralling subordinate clauses, not only does he sometimes lose the thread but he wrenches his syntax into oddly unEnglish shapes: a whiff of Gallicism clings to some of the longer periods, obscuring the sense and falsifying the tone. A corollary to this is a tendency to translate French idioms and turns of phrase literally, thus making them sound weirder, more outlandish, than they would to a French reader.