General Editor: Christopher Prendergast
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Du Côté de chez Swann first published 1913
This translation first published by Allen Lane The Penguin Press 2002
Published in Penguin Classics 2003
Translation and editorial matter copyright © Lydia Davis, 2002
General Editor’s Preface copyright © Christopher Prendergast, 2002
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the translator and editor have been asserted
Cover photograph © Alinari Archives/Getty Images
ISBN: 978-0-141-91415-2
General Editor’s Preface
Translator’s Introduction
Part I: Combray
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Part II: A Love of Swann’s
Part III: Place-names: the Name
Notes
Synopsis
Acknowledgements
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In undertaking a fresh English rendition of A la recherche du temps perdu, it has not been easy to banish entirely from one’s mind the dispiritingly droll New Yorker cartoon which has a peevish Christmas shopper saying to a salesman in a bookstore: ‘I want something to get even with him for that new translation of Proust he gave me last year.’ Yet all the evidence suggests that our discontented shopper is today happily of the minority party. It would seem, from numerous end-of-century stock-takings of our reading habits and preferences, that Proust’s great novel is alive and well in the public imagination, with followers and friends in many places, several of them testimony to a distinctly more democratic dissemination and enjoyment of A la recherche. While some of these have proved to be false friends, intent on packaging and purveying a kind of consumerist postmodern Proust, the extension of his readership has been an altogether welcome development. It has not always been thus. For most of the twentieth century Proust was largely the preserve of the few, often as the cult-object of an elite coterie, for which reading A la recherche has been a kind of sacred rite buttressed by knowing pilgrimages to Illiers (Combray) in search of madeleines and Cabourg (Balbec) in search of young girls in flower. For too long Proust has been ‘Proust’, held in an image bordering on what Proust himself, in his reflections on Ruskin, understood as idolatry. The English reception of Proust has been especially plagued by this tendency to sport acquaintance (often slight) with his work as a badge of distinction, at once social and spiritual, by construing it as a storehouse of exquisite epiphanies laced with a strong dose of class-bound aestheticism. Since Proust’s own text offers the best diagnosis of what is wrong with this construction of him as a purveyor of high-grade cultural narcotics, it is as well to have done with it once and for all, in favour of engaging with what is in fact a far more robustly hewn form of writing.
This naturally has implications for the translation of A la recherche du temps perdu. A test-case might be the spirit in which one approaches the holy of holies, that canonical incipit of early high modernism, namely the notorious opening sentence of the work, with its elliptical temporal adverb, its subject split by a reflexive verb into nominative and accusative and its grammatically peculiar perfect tense: ‘Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.’ There have been many candidates for the rendering of this into English (‘For a long time I used to go to bed early’; ‘For a long time I would go to bed early’; ‘Time was when I went to bed early’; ‘Time and again, I have gone to bed early’). What joy, then, when an invitation (issued on the Penguin Proust website) to take up once more the challenge of the first sentence yielded the wonderfully irreverent: ‘For absolutely bloody ages it was lights out early.’ This, of course, is but affectionately demotic provocation of the rituals of Proust-worship. More seriously, the time has arguably come to do something about such things as the narrator’s ‘Maman’ and the characters’ ‘prénoms’.
In the socio-lingusitics of French ‘Maman’ is not marked for class, whereas English ‘Mamma’ is. ‘Mamma’ makes one wince and transforms Combray into an upper-class Victorian nursery and the dilemmas of the neurasthenic boy-hero into the problems of a simpering little Lord Fauntleroy. (To take an alternative example, could one imagine that great oedipal lover, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who freely addressed Mme de Warens as ‘Maman’, calling her ‘Mamma’?) James Grieve proposed, in his own translation of Du côté de chez Swann, the simple but useful expedient of removing an ‘m’, thus weakening the unwanted play of social connotation. The spelling ‘Mama’ has also been retained in the present translation. Presumably something similar needs to be done about the standard rendering of ‘prénom’ as ‘Christian name’. This might just do for ‘Palamède’, Charlus’s ‘Christian name’ mentioned in connection with ‘this or that podestà or Prince of the Church’. But to represent ‘Odette’ as a ‘Christian name’ when it is Jewish Swann uttering it, or Lady Rufus Israels addressing Swann’s daughter Gilberte by her ‘Christian name’, has nothing to do with Proust’s own text and overlooks exactly the sort of thing that enabled Harold Bloom to describe Proust as ‘our truest modern multiculturalist’. A more informal and ecumenical representation of Proust in English will surely need to Americanize here and thus put us on first-name terms with ‘prénom’.
These are but two examples of how one might break the grip of outdated and misleading social assumptions on the transmission of Proust into English. This should not, however, be taken to mean that the present venture has assigned to itself the mission of ‘modernizing’ Proust, and still less should it be seen as embodying the hubris of the latecomer vis-à-vis the predecessor. Readers of Proust in English translation have been well served, above all by two truly heroic figures: first, C. K. Scott Moncrieff, and subsequently, Terence Kilmartin. In relation to his own predecessor, Kilmartin sensibly remarked that ‘it is all too easy for the latecomer to assume the beau rôle’ and modestly billed his own effort as a ‘revision’ of Scott Moncrieff’s majestic, if in certain respects flawed, production. Revision here meant essentially two things. The first is strictly textual. The history of Proust in English is inseparable from the history of Proust in French. Scott Moncrieff worked from the first Gallimard edition (which, if not actually ‘abominable’, as Samuel Beckett put it, was certainly defective). Kilmartin had the advantage of working from the far more reliable 1954 Pléiade edition. This in turn was succeeded by the curiously monstrous 1987 Pléiade edition, which formed the basis of a further projected revision by Kilmartin, which, owing to ill-health, he passed on to D. J. Enright (Enright calls it a ‘re-revision’).
The present translation is also based on the 1987 Pléiade, although in a manner that avoids fetishizing it as the ‘definitive’ article. Occasionally, where considerations of intelligibility have arisen, the 1954 Pléiade text has been used. More importantly, the 1987 Pléiade has the dubious distinction of effectively drowning Proust’s oceanic text in a vast sea of additional material (by incorporating Proust’s voluminous drafts and sketches). Kilmartin/Enright included samples of this in their re-revision. None of it appears here, on the grounds that the presentation of a classic should not be confused with the making of a scholarly edition (although annotation is supplied in the interests of clarifying local reference and allusion). In addition, we have also dropped the indexes of place-names and proper names that accompany both Pléiade editions and which, in modified form, Kilmartin/Enright also reproduces along with a thematic index. Their declared purpose is to provide a ‘guide to Proust’. The view taken here is that part of the experience of reading Proust’s novel is co-extensive with the experience of his narrator-hero in the novel, namely the repeated pattern of forgetting and remembering, getting lost and refinding one’s way, and that detailed ‘guides’ sit uneasily with this important dimension of the work. Conversely, we have retained the practice of the synoptic summary at the end of each volume.
Finally, in connection with the text itself, there is one respect in which the present translation remains true to the 1987 Pléiade where Kilmartin/Enright does not. This concerns an ambiguity over the beginning of the final volume, Le Temps retrouvé. Scott Moncrieff did not live to complete the final volume, and a translation by Sydney Schiff (under the pseudonym Stephen Hudson) was used. With the appearance of the 1954 Pléiade, Andreas Mayor produced a new version, which Kilmartin adopted for his own translation based on the 1954 Pléiade. The textual tangle arises at this juncture. Proust’s manuscript gives a somewhat uncertain indication of where La Fugitive ends and Le Temps retrouvé begins. The original Gallimard edition and the 1954 Pléiade edition reflect different decisions as to where the respective endings and beginnings are to be located. The 1954 Pléiade takes the beginning of Le Temps retrouvé back several pages. The 1987 Pléiade, however, overrides the 1954 by restoring the status quo ante. This significant alteration is not, however, reflected in Kilmartin/ Enright; Mayor’s version remains intact. Whatever the merits of the literary argument as to where properly to begin and end, one thing is clear: Kilmartin/Enright, in this respect, is not faithful to the 1987 Pléiade, whereas the present translation is.
A serious account of the English translation of Proust does not, however, turn solely on the history of text and publication in France. Kilmartin’s version is offered not just as a series of changes and additions in the light of textual information unavailable to Scott Moncrieff but also as a ‘revision’ of Scott Moncrieff in the sense of correcting errors, inaccuracies and infelicities in the latter’s handling of the same French text. There was indeed much to be corrected in Scott Moncrieff, on a scale from the trivial to the egregious (perhaps the worst howler, in this novel about Time, is the confusion between ‘temps’ and ‘fois’ whereby Swann’s ‘il y a combien de temps?’ in his questioning of Odette about her lesbian past comes out, incredibly, as ‘how many times?’). Yet here Kilmartin’s own lesson about the latecomer needs to be kept firmly in view. No one has monopoly powers over the ‘correct’. For example, Kilmartin criticizes Scott Moncrieff’s way with syntax (‘he wrenches his syntax into oddly unEnglish shapes’). How to manage Proust’s extraordinary syntactic structures in English is a very difficult issue. They are often strange even to French ears, and there may well be a respectable argument to the effect that oddly unEnglish shapes are sometimes the best way of preserving their estranging force. There is also the case of the pot calling the kettle black. On matters of syntax, Kilmartin, too, can slip. Modern English usage (unlike French) permits a certain laxness with the placing of ‘only’, but even the most liberal of readers might object to Kilmartin’s rendering of a sentence that gets it right in one clause and wrong in the next (‘We can only be faithful to what we remember and we remember only what we have known’). Proust’s maxims are not divine script but their assumed authority demands that a certain rhythm and emphasis be respected.
These, however, are points of detail; cataloguing them can go on for ever. Beyond the detail, there is the much larger and intractable question of the kinds of assumptions the translator makes about Proust’s ‘style’ and corresponding judgements as to the sorts of English most appropriate to that style. This is where the Pandora’s box opens wide. In these terms, Kilmartin’s description of his project as a ‘revision’ was excessively modest. It is in fact in very many ways a rewriting based on a quite different conception of the language and style of the novel as a whole. Scott Moncrieff was of his time, above all by virtue of a tendency to shower Proust’s text with cascades of Edwardian purple prose. This partially obscured what Kilmartin sought to highlight: a less ornately garlanded, more direct mode of writing. Yet once again the story is a chequered one. On the one hand, Scott Moncrieff was quite capable of delivering some of those moments of shock and scandal that suddenly erupt from the stately flow of Proustian discourse, while, on the other hand, Kilmartin at times returns us to the language of the Victorian nursery. For example, when the narrator’s mother, in the famous goodnight kiss scene, reads George Sand’s François le Champi to her agitated son, the latter is calmed by the presence in Sand’s text of ‘des expressions tombées en désuétude et redevenues imagées’. The phrase ‘redevenues imagées’ connotes both visual and rhetorical meanings (something like ‘metaphorical colour’). Scott Moncrieff’s translation is uselessly but harmlessly literal (‘returned as imagery’). Kilmartin goes for meaning but in the wrong register, rendering it as ‘quaint and picturesque’ (a bit rich, then, for Enright to accuse Scott Moncrieff of being ‘quaint’). Nor do we really need the lamentably sentimental ‘damsel’ for Proust’s ‘fillette’ designating the Parisian laundry girl the narrator fancies (Scott Moncrieff simply has ‘girl’).
And what of the question of titles? There will always be fans of Scott Moncrieff’s prettily Shakespearean Remembrance of Things Past. But we also know that Proust took vigorous exception to Scott Moncrieff’s title, and for good reason. It removes virtually everything expressed or implied by the original, most notably the double connotations of the adjective ‘perdu’ (which signifies both ‘lost’ and ‘wasted’) and hence the sense of Proust’s narrative as a tale of false turns as well as retrospective ones. ‘Remembrance’ smacks too much of the nostalgia-laden, rarely far from the cakes-and-strawberries version of Proust that, for the English, is the equivalent of the tea-party image of Jane Austen’s world favoured by a certain class of Janeites. It has nothing in common with the more strenuously analytical sense of ‘recherche’, implying the consciously ‘experimental’ in the work of the search. It seems that Kilmartin wanted to use the far more exact In Search of Lost Time for his first revision but was overruled by his publishers. Fortunately, he succeeded in having his way for the subsequent revision and here we have followed in his footsteps.
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.fn1 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.
Holding this expansive and unpredictable structure in one’s head is a taxing business. Proust is an acquired taste, acquired, that is, in the long-haul process of reading him page by page. Many is the reader who falls by the wayside, exhausted or exasperated after fifty pages or so of ‘Combray’, or who, like the narrator in the opening pages, falls asleep but, unlike him, never to wake up. This, for example, was more or less the experience of one of Proust’s first professional readers, Humblot, who read (and rejected) the manuscript of Du côté de chez Swann for the publishing house Ollendorff. In a letter to Proust’s brother Robert, he recorded his first impressions as follows: ‘My dear friend, perhaps I am dense but I just don’t understand why a man should take thirty pages to describe how he turns over in his bed before he goes to sleep. It made my head swim.’ It is easy to laugh at what, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see as Humblot’s colossal lack of judgement (no less a figure than André Gide also blundered, rejecting it for the Nouvelle Revue Française). We can all too easily forget what it must have been like to read Proust through the prism of expectations transmitted from the culture of the nineteenth-century novel. In the priority granted by these opening pages to the night-life of the mind, we find one of Proust’s many reversals of the hierarchies of traditional narrative. Proust takes us where hitherto the novel did not typically go, insisting that what is deemed insignificant by the latter may hold the key to the meaning of a life.
Those who remain alert and persevere tend to end up addicted, hooked by the unimaginable gains of their perseverance, as, enthralled, they follow the rhythms of the mobile Proustian intelligence. It is an intelligence that corrodes the force of that seductive yet mortal enemy, Habit, jolting us out of comfortable sedentarities and taking us on a journey to strange places and points of no return. Thematically, this is enacted as the expulsion of the boy-hero from the paradise of childhood into the perplexing and often perverse world of adult social and sexual relations. In the most famous aphorism of A la recherche Proust issues his tonic warning against false nostalgias: ‘all paradises are lost paradises’, that is, they are definitively lost, with no way back, no possible homecoming. This is a thought which Proust’s book lives to the full and in doing so it becomes more than just a thought. It also implicates a practice of writing, in so far as it defines a position of incurable exile not only for the hero of the narrative but also for the artist (both the artist that the hero will become and the artist Marcel Proust): ‘the artist’, remarks the narrator, ‘is a native of an unknown country.’ Proust also once claimed, in Contre Sainte-Beuve, that the writer inhabits his native tongue as if it too were a foreign country. Since there is an important paradox in Proust making this claim about the mother-tongue in the mother-tongue, the remark needs to be quoted in the original French: ‘Les beaux livres sont écrits dans une sorte de langue étrangère’ (‘Beautiful books are written in a kind of foreign language’). In respect of Proust, this might seem an odd notion, given that his language is inseparable from what Walter Benjamin called his ‘intransigent French spirit’. It is a language drenched in reminiscence of the history of French prose from the seventeenth-century moralistes through the Romantics to the late nineteenth-century Symbolists, disclosing a form of linguistic and cultural at-homeness that can also be felt in Proust’s unrivalled genius for literary pastiche.
What, then, could it have meant for Proust to represent writing in French as writing in a foreign language, and what in turn might this mean for a reader encountering Proust in a foreign language, in translation (bearing in mind also the narrator’s observation in Le Temps retrouvé that ‘the function and task of a writer are those of a translator’)? One of the things this might mean or entail is attending to the sheer strangeness of A la recherche, the sense of a text coming to us from a great distance. While emphatically this-worldly in its insatiable curiosity about the desires, appetites and motives of mankind, it is also powerfully other-worldly. This is to be understood not so much in terms of the received image of Proust’s world as offering us a pseudo-metaphysics of redemption, but rather as the embodiment of a twentieth-century secular misericordia mixing the grief-laden over things irretrievably lost and the stoically detached before what is doomed to decay and death. Of the many voices that compose the Proustian fugue, one is distinctly sepulchral, generating the impression of A la recherche as a kind of latter-day Mémoires d’outre-tombe, written from somewhere beyond the grave. Proust’s way of making-it-strange derives in large measure from looking at the ghostly dance and listening to the spectral concert of the human world as if from a very long way off. This perhaps is the privileged place where, in the strangeness of translation, in the no-man’s land between host and guest languages, we might most productively meet and negotiate his extraordinary novel.
Christopher Prendergast