Chekhov's Mistress
Aciman on Davis’s translation of Swann’s Way
I hate to get right to the punchline, but due to time constraints of my own, I’ll have to let this passage from the NY Review of Books (Proust’s Way?,
André Aciman, Dec. 1st, 2005) mostly speak for itself:
As I have intimated in these pages [*] Viking Penguin would like nothing better than to have their version of Proust by their six translators become the standard English-language Proust, especially since theirs, like Enright’s, incorporates the most recent changes made in the French Pléiade edition of 1988. And perhaps the elitist, Edwardian accent flitting over Scott Moncrieff’s text may seem dated. The way Virginia Woolf’s and Lytton Strachey’s and Evelyn Waugh’s and E.M. Forster’s and Ruth Bussy’s prose could be regarded as a touch dated as well. We may require an English version of Proust that speaks not to readers who have been sent to British public schools, but to Baby Boomer and Gen-X high schools. Their taste has been partly shaped by post-colonial Anglophonic writers, by writers from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, by magical realism, by minimalist-psycho-jittery realism, and by what every reviewer today regards as the highest form of literary craft: clear, understated prose.
Understated is in. Understated is good.
Perhaps one should be bold enough to make the same claim about Proust’s French as well. If his English version needs updating and dressing down, then in light of the infusion of post-colonial Francophone works, of Verlan, Franglais, anti-Franglais, Beure, and post-deconstructuralist jargon, by the same logic perhaps it is time to update Proust’s French as well. Otherwise the moral couldn’t be simpler: leave well-enough alone.
The article as a whole is well worth reading for its detail. I’ll admit to siding on the conservative side of this argument, but one of the things I love about the idea of translation is the endless squabbling over style and degree and tiny little details.
comments
Thanks for the punchline & kudos to Aciman and to you for siding against needless “updating.” These discussions over what it means to translate, to update, are fascinating. I think about Grossman’s lament (regarding the Quixote, etc.) that to do it well is to be invisible, to do it poorly, to be excoriated. (Incidentally, Vita--the Italian novel my friend translated--is on the top ten list for 2005 at Publisher’s Weekly. It’s the only translation to make the list. Cool, huh?)
– Anne (11/14 at 09:02 PM)
Thanks!
– Andre Aiman (12/10 at 12:12 AM)
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About this Post
- Posted by: Bud Parr
- Date: November 14, 2005
- Filed Under:
Translation
- Comments:2
- Links to this Post: Technorati
