From the Way by Swann's: A Passage about Bergotte

Abstract

Translator's note: The following passage, about the young narrator's love of the writer Bergotte, occurs about one hundred pages into The Way by Swann's (pp.92-95 in the Pleiade edition of Du cote de chez Swann). The character Bergotte, and his style of writing, are said to have been modeled at least in part by Proust on a writer much admired by him, John Ruskin, the nineteenth-century master stylist who wrote on art, architecture, and economic and social issues, and two of whose best known works are Modern Painters and The Stones of Venice. Proust himself, working with his mother, Jeanne Proust, and a young English artist, Marie Nordlinger, translated Ruskin's The Bible of Amiens and Sesame and Lilies into French. My procedure in translating Proust was to follow the original very closely, even word byword when possible, to reproduce the shape of its sentences, even including their punctuation when possible, and to avoid adding to the text, subtracting from it, or substituting my interpretations for the original. In my second and third drafts I compared my work closely with the major existing translation, C.K. Scott Moncrieff's Swann's Way. Despite the many good qualities of this translation, which has been the standard for decades, and despite the often positive effects of the revisions carried out on it by Terence Kilmartin and D.J. Enright, a close examination--which is what I gave it as I worked with it--reveals several features that point to the need for a new translation. There is a natural tendency, in translation, to inflate and overwrite, for a simple reason: you want to make a rhythmically pleasing sentence in English; often an easy way to improve the rhythm in English is by adding to or subtracting from the original; you will usually decide to add because a worse crime would be to subtract material from the original; and then if you add, you will usually choose to double or reinforce the meaning of the original rather than add new material of your own. Thus does your translation become redundant or repetitious--"his own" instead of "his' "he himself" instead of "he," "strange and haunting" instead of simply "strange." Although on its own terms, the Scott Moncrieff translation is quite successful and, because of the sheer size of the book, an astounding achievement, it does suffer consistently from over-interpretation and inflation. In the following passage, for instance, where Proust describes the narrator's remarks as "uninteresting," Moncrieff translates this more emphatically as "quite without interest": "without interest" is a good exact equivalent for sans interet, but here Moncrieff intensifies it by "quite?' In a more significant amplification, where Proust has "the writer's page" Moncrieff adds a concrete image, producing "his printed page?' Adding again, Moncrieff turns "confidence" into "newfound confidence": here he is taking what he has learned from the context (that the narrator was not confident before but is now confident) and adding it to the unadorned word that Proust actually wrote. French readers of the original will add their own understanding to the word; readers of the translation will be "helped?' Lastly, this time substituting, Moncrieff replaces pre retrouve--"father found again"--by "long-lost father?' Moncrieff is inferring that the father was lost from what Proust says--that the father was found again. This is legitimate enough if it is done silently by the reader--it is what readers do. But he is going farther when, as translator, he substitutes what he inferred for what Proust actually said. The replacement of Proust's choice, "lost:' by Moncrieff's, "found," is a significant one. (Think of the titles of the books: the general title, In Search of Lost Time, and the title of the last volume, Time Found Again.) And then he is also adding "long," a less justifiable inference. Most likely the father was "long-lost" but Proust chose not to specify. …