In a short story entitled ‘The Walk’, Lydia Davis writes of a translator and a critic who happen to be together in Oxford, having been invited to take part in a conference on translation at the University. There is a certain tension between the two because the critic has previously written negatively about the translator’s work. The translator-narrator, referring to the critic, with whom she goes on a walk around the town, remarks:
He felt that she kept too close to the original text. He preferred the studied cadences of an earlier version and had said so in person and in print. She felt that he admired lyricism and empty rhetorical flourishes at the expense of accuracy and faithfulness to the style of the original, which was far plainer and clearer, she said, than the flowery and obfuscating earlier version.1
Davis is alluding to a review by André Aciman2 of her own translation of Du côté de chez Swann (The Way by Swann’s) for the Penguin edition of Proust, while the ‘earlier version’ is that of C. K. Scott Moncrieff, published between 1922 and 1930, and subsequently revised by Terence Kilmartin and D. J. Enright (see Select Bibliography: Proust in English). I invoke Davis’s story not to adjudicate between her and Aciman, but to bring into focus questions of style that confront anyone attempting to translate Proust. Moreover, I would echo, loudly, the words of Mark Treharne, translator of Le Côté de Guermantes (The Guermantes Way) for the Penguin edition, when he says in his Translator’s Introduction: ‘I have worked very much in the shadow of these previous translators and with much gratitude towards them.’
For fifty years, Moncrieff ’s translation was Proust for English-speaking readers unable to read him in the original. This translation was not simply majestic in its scale but was in many ways admirable in its realization. Moncrieff had an exquisite ear for the cadences of Proust’s prose, and a considerable talent for elegant phraseology. He was prone, however, to tamper with the text, through embellishment or the gratuitous heightening of language; and his translation also contained numerous little errors and misapprehensions and the occasional howler. The reservation most commonly voiced about his translation is that it falsified Proust’s tone. He tended to make Proust sound ‘flowery’ and precious, whereas, as Davis rightly stresses, Proust’s style, though marked by syntactic complexity, is not in the least affected or self-consciously ornate. His prose is rigorous, concentrated, exact. Kilmartin made hundreds of small, deft changes (including occasional syntactic adjustments) to Moncrieff, making his prose overall plainer and more accurate, though his revised edition remains fundamentally Moncrieff ’s. Davis’s translation is impressive in its exactitude; but her determination to stay as close as possible to the original, not only in terms of diction but also in the retention of the precise order of elements in a sentence, runs the risk of compromising her ability to write idiomatic English. ‘Accuracy’ and ‘faithfulness’ are not quite the same.
The aim of the present edition is to introduce Proust to a new and wider audience by offering, in a manageable compass, a well-crafted example of his key themes and signature style. That Proustian style is largely identified with his famously long sentences, with their ‘coiling elaboration’.3 As they uncoil, the sentences express the rhythms of a sensibility, the directions and indirections of desire, the complication and conflicts of a mind — Swann’s — in the grip of doubts and uncertainties, obsessions and fantasies. I have tried to capture the intricate harmonies of those sentences, which combine syntactic complexity with complete clarity. Grand rhythm and aphoristic concentration often work together. Proust’s sentences are elaborately constructed, but they have a beautiful precision and rhythmic balance: a musicality that becomes particularly apparent when the text is read aloud.
I have tried to maintain the full range of Proust’s tones and registers, and the shifts between them; and to catch as much as possible of his humour. Proust is not only a great prose stylist but also a great comic writer. His comedy is various: the out-and-out comedy of characters like the buffoon Cottard (with the consequent need to catch such characters’ particular idioms of speech — to mimic Proust’s mimicry, so to speak); the high comedy of the great set-scenes; the narrator’s wry wit; and the irony that informs the portrayal of Swann’s tormented feelings as well as the social pretensions of his circle. It is important to capture the ‘double-think’ subtleties of Swann’s interior monologue expressed in free indirect style: to capture, as one of the anonymous readers of an early sample translation nicely put it, ‘the veneer of genteel intellectualism over Swann’s frustrated lust, and the algebra of sentiments and calculated motives [which comes across] as representing the way the character is thinking (rather than, in reality, the way the narrator is constructing his thoughts with his omniscience and literary artifice)’.
Style is vision. In general terms, I would characterize the art of translation as a particular, and particularly intense, form of critical reading and creative writing, involving a multiplicity of exact choices about voice, tone, register, rhythm, syntax, echoes, sounds, connotations — the colour, texture, and music of words: all those factors that make up ‘style’ and reflect the marriage between style and meaning. I agree very much with Christopher Prendergast’s statement that ‘the kinds of judgments and decisions bound up with literary translation make it one of the higher forms of criticism’.4
I wish to record my gratitude to a number of friends and colleagues who, very generously, read my translation and offered useful comments: Valerie Minogue, Adam Watt, Judith Luna, Alexandre Pateau, and Guillaume Gourdon. My thanks, too, to the Fondation Ledig-Rowohlt for granting me a residency at its wonderful writers’ colony in Lavigny, Switzerland, where I had a book-lined (not cork-lined) room in which to complete this translation. Finally, I would like to dedicate my translation to the memory of my mother, Ida Nelson, who taught me more about language and its uses than she ever knew.
B.N.