Chekhov’s Mistess

Impressions on Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 2

SCMZZZZZZZ.jpg” style=“float:left; padding-right:4px;”/> I consider it something of a triumph to have finished Volume 2 of In Search of Lost Time because I had put it down earlier in the year, exhausted of its microscopy. At times I felt that Proust was becoming a cliché of himself, never missing an opportunity to delve into a character’s motivations behind a glance or off-hand comment. This of course is Proust’s strength, but by the 469th page – keeping in mind that I had already read the 600 pages of volume 1 – I felt that many of the characters in Balbec, the seaside resort where much of volume 2 takes place, were nothing more than society muckety-mucks and didn’t warrant that sort of depth.

Fortunately, I was encouraged by a couple of Proust veterans that it is well worth pressing forward and I did (also keeping in mind that vol. 1 is one of my favorite books). I wasn’t disappointed. I did something unusual though – the daring reader that I am – I switched translations for the remainder of the book. I had been reading the Modern Library version, those short, fat volumes the size of which annoy me, but whose hardcovers are built to live a long long time. The Modern Library edition is the standard Moncrieff (and Blossom), Kilmartin, Enright translation. I switched to James Grieve’s translation (who only translated volume 2 of the 6 volumes edited by Christopher Prendergast).

The difference between the two is most obvious in their title. Enright left volume 2 with the title that his predecessors gave it: “Within a Budding Grove,” which seems to me to be a mere euphemism for what Grieve gave it, “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower.” French aside, I can say after having read it that the latter of the two is a far better title, being descriptive of the thrust of the book.

There were many places where I was tempted to go back and forth between the two translations. When I started the book earlier in the year (reading the older version) I was checking the new translation from time to time out of curiosity, but now that I was frustrated with the first, I didn’t feel like taking the luxury of ruminating on the differences in translation. One snippet that I think is telling between the two is this: The old translation:

“Life is strewn with these miracles for which people who love can only hope.”

The new:

“Such miracles lie in wait for the lover, who may expect one at any time.”

When I mentioned this passage discussing translation back in 2004, I felt at the time that the older, clearly more beautiful passage would be my choice. Now I’m not so sure. If I could sum up all the articles I’ve read on the new translations it would be something like: The new translations are more true in the literal sense to Proust’s words, but the old translations capture more of the essence of the original (you can see that I’ve couched that a bit with the word “more” on both sides).

After trudging through stories of Balbec’s summer residents, things start to change one afternoon as the narrator eyes some girls romping around the boardwalk. The instant that Albertine is introduced everything changes. We shed our readerly ennui from the aristocratic comings and goings of the Seaside resort and become a part of Proust’s adolescent obsession with romance, or really, sexual love. He becomes acquainted with this gaggle of young girls and from that point on focuses his every thought on which one he shall love: “Loving them all, I was in love with none of them.” The real answer will have to wait for later volumes, but the shadow of young girls in flower is ripe with confusion and angst and that familiar sense of groping for understanding other people’s feelings as well as our own in the face of yearning, where there is no simple truth to be had.

My impression of In Search of Lost Time to this point was that our narrator Marcel (Nabokov warns us not to think of him as Proust himself, but it’s convenient to assign our unnamed narrator with an identity) had an uncanny and preternatural ability to delve into everyone’s psych, including his own. I was wrong. To the extent that the book is about desire as much as memory and time, his failure to penetrate his own feelings as logically explainable creates this humanly fallible character, more like Swann than I would have thought earlier, that I find incredibly endearing (Keep in mind here that I mean the narrator of the book, not Proust).

That idea hit me when Marcel is walking with the artist Elstir, who happens to know these girls whom Marcel has yet to meet. Seeing them approach, Marcel turns his back, pretending to look in a shop window so as not to seem overly anxious. Instead of beckoning Marcel over to be introduced, Elstir chats with the girls and bids them good day without the introduction that Marcel painfully wants:

‘I would have been so happy to meet them,’ I said to Elstir as I came up with him. ‘Well in that case what did you stand miles away for?’ Those were the words he spoke, not because they expressed his own mind, since if he had intended to grant my unspoken wish, it would have been easy for him to call me over; but possibly because they were one of those phrases he had heard, used by vulgar people who think they are in the wrong, and because even great men are like vulgar people in some things, taking their everyday excuses from the same repertoire, as they buy their daily bread from the same baker, or possibly because such words, which must in a sense be read back to front, since the letter of them means the opposite of their truth, are the necessary effect, the negative graph, as it were, of a reflex. ‘Anyway, they were in a hurry.’ I was sure they must have prevented him from introducing someone they saw as dislikable: otherwise he would have been bound to call me over, after all the questions I had asked about them, and the interest he could see I took in them.

This passage of course, is all wrong. Marcel seems to me to be reflecting his own shortcomings back on Elstir. Maybe I’m a dunce for taking hundreds of pages to get a sense of who Marcel is, but we do settle in to characters, like going to the symphony on a Friday night after an arduous workweek, we tend to skim the surface of the first movement, which at the time seems merely a noisy interjection because of the knots of anxiety unwinding in our mind, until we’ve shed our daily concerns like beads of sweat running uncontrollably down the precipice of our forehead and only dry up upon entering a cool room, leaving us noticeably more comfortable than before and able to focus our attention, finally, on the music, the earlier notes of which, like a character’s personality formed early in the book, we wish, hopelessly, to retrieve. [ed. Bud, please assure me this sentence is a joke. right?]

Of course in volume one, our narrator was busy trying to figure out Gilbert, but no where is he so revealing as when he’s pursuing the girls of summer. I don’t think it says anywhere, but I’m guessing he is around 15 or so in volume 2 (if anyone knows better, let me know please) and much more in heat than when he was hoping for Gilbert and her family’s affections.

Like the difference between a newer film with explicit sex scenes and an older film that could only have suggested, cleverly if we’re lucky, of flesh, creativity shows when it’s inappropriate to say everything. Proust’s tool is language instead of images, and that’s why translation matters so much in this book. The entire last 3rd or so of the book is filled with nothing but Albertine, Andrée, Giséle and the other girls and descriptive fleshy language; the word pink comes up often as do other colorful and earthy comparisons in his ruminations on youth.

So I’ll cut this short (?) and say I wasn’t disappointed I came back to the book. Finishing that last page I was tempted to jump right in to volume 3. I decided to put that off at least for a little while, although I do intend to take it up sometime this year. The great thing about In Search of Lost Time is that you never really lose the characters. I read volume 1 several years ago and picking up volume 2 didn’t present a problem in terms of getting back into Proust’s intimate world. My biggest problem will be deciding which translation, once and for all, I should read after previously being so determined to stick with the older.

comments

I read the Moncrieff translation of Swann’s Way several years ago and was exhausted but elated by the end of it. I’ve been meaning to get to vol 2 but haven’t managed it yet. Good to know that I don’t have to re-read vol 1!

I have also been deliberating on the translation. Should I continue with Moncrieff? I already have his vol 2, or should I venture the new translation? Which is more improtant, the style of Proust or the words? I haven’t been able to decide and I am glad I am not the only one

    – Stefanie (01/12  at  09:02 AM)

Your impressions are, I think, very like my own.  I reread Vol. 2 a few months ago, and I was struck by how much the theme of apprenticeship runs through the book.  It’s most explicit in scenes about artistic appreciation (the visit to see Berma, the teachings of Elstir about natural scenes and what is beautiful in them), but is also obviously present in sexual terms (Marcel too is in flower).  I also think, though, that as readers we’re still serving a kind of apprenticeship to Proust’s methods and concerns in this volume.  I can’t remember if it’s in Vol 2 or 3 that he talks about a genius having to educate his public, but I think the impulse is there throughout In The Shadow.  Proust’s method of successively revealing facets of his characters (rather than piling them all into our intial introduction), has to be adjusted to as we read (compare Swann, or Elstir, for instance, between the two first volumes; in other words, it isn’t dense to be introduced to a new facet of Marcel’s character and to recognize it as new).

I’ve got many of these reflections partially written up in an essay on Vol 2 that I hope to post to my site later this weekend.

html doesn’t seem to work in the form, here’s my url:

http://letempsdeproust.blogsome.com/

    – Andrew (01/12  at  10:21 AM)

I’ve read Moncrieff’s translation, too, of “The Sweet Cheat Gone”, and I found it a really fascinating book. Now I will have to take a look at some of the newer translations and compare - I imagine Proust must be one of the most difficult writers to translate? Maybe I should just learn French instead of trying to read him in English.

    – Ella (01/12  at  11:38 AM)

Thank you for reminding me/prodding me that it is a goal of mine to eventually read Proust.  I have managed to read de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life, but that’s as close as this French Literature major has gotten to the actual Proust.

    – Diana (01/12  at  11:56 AM)

Stefanie - don’t know if you saw my post on this last November, but Andre Aciman (who edited an interesting collection of Proust essays, and, by the way, has stopped by this site) wrote quite a good piece on the vol. 1 translation. Very few of the articles I’ve seen talk much about the other vols. much.

Diana - I like Botton’s stuff, but it’s odd in a way, no? You may like my post “Proust Saved my life, but now I have Status Anxiety”

http://www.chekhovsmistress.com/2004/08/roust_changed_m.html

Ah, I’m such a self-promoter.

Ella, I guess you have no choice but to read the Moncrieff, since that’s the Modern Library edition!

Andrew, now I don’t feel so bad - I like what you pulled out there, about educating his public.

    – Bud Parr (01/12  at  10:12 PM)

I’ll definitely go back and read that post, and I just had to come back and mention that while looking for Jane Eyre at my library yesterday (it’s a small branch) and not finding it, believe it or not (I’ll have to reserve it online), Swann’s Way kind of, erm, presented itself to me.  I can’t explain it.  It was just there.

Oh, my to-read stack is long, but I’ll at least dive into it a bit and see if it begs me to move it up the list.

    – Diana (01/13  at  12:02 PM)

Aciman actually did review the new Grieve translation of volume 2, and it was not favorable; he liked it much less than Davis’ translation of volume 1:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18563

Money quote:

But if the intention of the Viking Penguin translation was to give us a Proust that would read well enough in English, then they have certainly succeeded. There is nothing egregiously wrong in Grieve’s volume. Its tone is much more relaxed and far less exacting than Davis’s, and, as far as I could tell, it does not mistranslate anything, certainly not as was the case with Scott Moncrieff before both Kilmartin and Enright came to his rescue.

But well enough is not good enough. Will Grieve’s translation, for instance, serve the scholar who is not entirely at ease with the original French? Absolutely not. If anything, because it does not follow the rhythm of Proust’s sentences, it is a dangerous translation. It fails to see—and, more importantly, to convey—that the drama of discovery and revelation inscribed in each sentence by Proust is indissolubly fused to Proust’s style. If one likes to say that Flaubert’s obsession was the mot juste, with Proust it is the style juste. And perhaps the only writer who knew a few tricks he might have taught Proust about style juste was Joyce. Perhaps. That both also began as aspiring poets should remind us that behind every great prose stylist there is not a creative writing major but a poet more or less resigned to his failure as a poet. That Proust should have started À la recherche in the wake of his efforts as a translator of John Ruskin, England’s greatest stylist of the nineteenth century, should also remind us that every great writer comes by his voice in the most unforeseen and adventitious of ways.

Ruskin too was an inner poet. The job of a great translator is never to forget this inner poet. If he so wishes, the translator may want to give us discreet reminders of the poet hiding in the recesses of his words. Scott Moncrieff attempted such a feat, and those who followed in his steps were all too well aware that if poets nod at times, they never plod, and that, even in prose, they can never afford to plod. That, in the end, is also how Scott Moncrieff, Kilmartin, and Enright came by their voices.

How Grieve’s version came by its voice, however, is beyond reckoning. It does not translate Proust. It rewrites Proust. The spirit is gone. As for the letter, well, it’s there—but not really.

In any other writer than Proust the rewriting would have done well enough. But try rewriting James Joyce or Laurence Sterne or Herman Melville and you have an entirely other writer. To rewrite Proust is to deny that he remains one of the very few writers who knew—and we know he knew it because he said so himself—that style is ultimately vision. Not to understand an author’s style may often be excusable; but not to understand Proust’s style is to miss the vision—and without the vision, unfortunately, all we’re left with is...prose. Just prose. And that’s not good enough.

    – Penman (01/13  at  06:23 PM)

Thanks for that - don’t know how I saw the Davis, but missed the Grieve.

    – Bud Parr (01/13  at  08:03 PM)

Bud, I’m really glad you stuck it out. There’s really no book like it, is there? I also want to second an earlier commenter’s statement, that there’s nothing dense about seeing Marcel(and I do think he’s called Marcel once or twice in the six volumes, though I could be misremembering) in new light. One of Proust’s working titles had something to do with ‘stalagtites of time’, the epochal gathering and reshaping of new selves over old as they take the old shape on, with the variation accretion produces.

(&, I liked the long sentence ed. objected to--Proust in your fingers.)

    – Stuart Greenhouse (01/14  at  11:36 PM)

A propos presque rien…

Have you listened to the BBC3 adaptation of Pinter’s Proust Play? Or heard of it? I have it on tape if you can’t find it on the web.

    – Andy (02/05  at  07:16 AM)

Thanks, Andy. I’ll see if I can find it.

    – Bud Parr (02/06  at  12:22 PM)

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• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: January 12, 2006
• Filed Under:
  Wise Men Fish Here: Literature

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