The Triangle of Representation

This passage is likely to astonish us for a number of reasons, but principally for showing us a writer, famed for his advocacy of the aesthetic solution to the problem of living, so relaxed about the rules of the relevant literary language game. For who on earth is speaking here? Strictly speaking it is the fictional narrator; in fact it is of course Marcel Proust. But this opens on to an impossibility: if the Larivières are the only real people in the book and none of the others is “a real person in disguise,” then how can Françoise the fictional character have relatives in real life? The confusion here between fiction and life is both casual and radical (it is moreover compounded by the fact that the name Larivière is not only very French but also very literary, the name of one of the most decent characters in the history of the French novel, Dr. Larivière of Madame Bovary).

This confusion of levels or identities also occurs elsewhere in the novel. The best-known instance is the moment when Albertine calls the narrator by his first name (one of only two occasions on which this happens): “Then she would find her tongue and say: ‘My-’ or ‘My darling-’ followed by my Christian name, which, if we give the narrator the same name as the author of this book, would be ‘My Marcel,’ or ‘My darling Marcel.’” In this spectacle of the narrator stepping outside the confines of the fictional world to speak of his own author, confusion in the mind of the reader becomes a veritable spin. And then what are we to make of the narrator’s curious references to himself as the teller of Swann’s story? First, there is the apostrophe, in The Captive, to the dead Swann: “My dear Charles Swann. … It is because he whom you must have regarded as a young idiot has made you the hero of one of his novels that people are beginning to speak of you again.” Second, there is the even stranger moment (again from The Captive) of Françoise stumbling on the “manuscript” sketch of a “story” about Swann among the narrator’s papers: “On one occasion I found Françoise, armed with a huge pair of spectacles, rummaging through my papers and replacing among them a sheet on which I had jotted down a story about Swann and his inability to do without Odette.” If this is an allusion to Swann in Love, then in what “story” do we find ourselves; what here is “fact” and what “fiction”? The whole business finally collapses into pure playful disingenuousness, when, in Sodom and Gomorrah, the reader is imagined addressing the narrator (but logically it must in fact be the author): “It is a pity that, young as you were (or as your hero was if he isn’t you).”

All this suggests that the passage about the Larivières raises at least two of the questions that must greatly preoccupy and perplex the translator of Proust. First, Proust’s patriotism, the emphasis on “my country” (in counterpoint to the themes of exile and homelessness that recur throughout the whole of A la recherche), engages the nature of his prose as well as his sentiments; as Walter Benjamin said, in one of the finest essays ever written on A la recherche, Proust’s language is inseparable from his “intransigent French spirit.” It is a language with roots reaching deep into the history of French prose from Montaigne through Saint-Simon and La Rochefoucauld to Chateaubriand (there is, for instance, scarcely a Proustian maxim that one can read without hearing the tone and rhythm of the seventeenth-century moralistes). This feature of the writing, the sense of the text as gaining sustenance from the rich soil of the French literary past, is intimately connected to the conservative side of Proust’s imagination, its “vegetative” aspect (if Proust famously compared his book to a cathedral, he also compared it to a tree). The soil often does not readily permit cross-Channel transplants. In more ideological register, it can also create certain other difficulties. While Proust, the Jew and passionate Dreyfusard, had no truck with the crude blood-and-soil slogans of the contemporary nationalists, he did write some remarkably silly and at times disturbing pages on the subject of heredity (in this weird concoction of cultural and biological determinism, we are all programmed to revert to “type,” such that the Marquis de Saint-Loup on the battlefield atavistically incarnates the “memory of his race,” while the appearance of “avarice” in the middle-aged Gilberte de Saint-Loup, née Swann, prompts the alarmingly fatuous observation “what Jewish strain influenced Gilberte in this?”).

The second question raised by the Larivière passage is initially quite different but in fact overlaps with the first. However strong the commitments behind Proust’s conservatively French manner, his world remains nevertheless chronically unstable, notably around questions of identity (indeed the French literary tradition in Proust may be in part a stylistic defense mechanism for dealing with that instability). The fluid relations among hero, narrator, and author, fiction and reality, narrative and narration, past and present, reveal a subject in a state of flux and raise from the word go an issue for the translator. The question of how to translate the peculiarly constructed opening sentence of A la recherche (“Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure”) has of course become something of a party game. To my knowledge, there are now five versions currently on offer in English. Scott Moncrieff renders it as “For a long time I used to go to bed early.” Kilmartin reproduced this in his revised translation, but Enright, in his revision of Kilmartin, altered “used to go” to “would go.” In addition, James Grieve’s Swann’s Way offers the refreshingly simple “Time was when I always went to bed early,” while Richard Howard proposes going into print with “Time and again, I have gone to bed early.”

One can argue the toss indefinitely over the respective strengths of these different renderings. Grieve’s “Time was” and Howard’s “Time and again” have the merit of beginning with the capitalized word on which the novel also ends, thus tracing a textual circle that mirrors the circular character so often assumed by Proustian time. On the other hand, “Time was” is a bit too colloquial for this notoriously indeterminate narrative beginning, while “Time and again” carries an unwarranted implication of the compulsive. Similarly, while “used to go” and “would go” correspond rather to a French imperfect, Howard’s boldly literal “have gone” takes on board the implied imbrication of past narrated and present speaking of Proust’s perfect tense; on the other hand, in French (but not in English) the perfect tense is also routinely the spoken representation of what in written narrative takes the preterite.

This grammatical difference already suggests certain incommensurabilities between the systems of French and English. There is, however, a further detail of the opening sentence that none of the five versions captures and that is directly related to the texts’s restless shuttling between identities. The movement of Proust’s novel can be described as the attempt to close the gap between hero and narrator, to join the two, like the two ways, Swann’s Way and the Guermantes Way, which are discovered by the narrator in later life to connect up. The novel is based on a subject internally split and dispersed through time. It is therefore significant that its opening sentence should turn not on a transitive or an intransitive verb, but on a reflexive (“je/me”). Proust’s grammar thus gives us a subject split into nominative and accusative, both speaker and spoken, and the book this sentence inaugurates is a many-thousand-page detour through that gap. Unsurprisingly, none of the English versions tries to do anything with this (“I took myself to bed” might just do, especially in connection with the semi-invalid side of the narrator’s condition, but it has connotations that the French reflexive does not have).

Here we encounter the translator’s problem at the outer limits of the representable (grammatical differences would be joined at this limit by paranomasia, where inevitably Proust’s wordplay, or rather that of his characters, for the most part produces defeat, the translator forced to include the original French in parentheses). Within these limits, however, there is a wide range of more local and contingent constraints. The most elementary concern the varying editions of the French text the translators have worked with, the publishing history of the original being in turn bound up with the story of Proust’s own working practices in the cork-lined room, which produced that notoriously tangled because constantly expanded web of manuscript, typescript, and proof (in the wonderful German film Celeste the notebooks with their endlessly intercalated pages are shown as opening out like a fan or concertina).The original version ran to about half a million words; the final version to around a million and a quarter.

The work of the scholars (research on the Recherche, incidentally one of the senses of the title that, like the double meaning of “perdu”—“lost” and “wasted”—is also untranslatable) on Proust’s additions to manuscript, typescript, and proof governs the history of French editions and relatedly that of English translations. Scott Moncrieff worked from the first Gallimard edition (which, with some exaggeration, Samuel Beckett described in his early essay on Proust as “abominable”); Terence Kilmartin worked from the far more reliable Pléiade edition of 1954, while D. J. Enright, taking over from Kilmartin (prevented by illness from undertaking his projected revision of his own revision of Scott Moncrieff), worked from the recently issued second Pléiade edition. The latter, however, though of great importance to Proust scholars, will not make much difference for the general reader where the main text is concerned. By far and away the bulk of new material incorporated by the second Pléiade consists of selections, placed in appendixes, from Proust’s sketches. Some of this material is reproduced in the Enright edition, and some of it is good to have; for example, in the addenda for The Guermantes Way, we find a marvelous parody of one of Proust’s great themes in the improbable mouth of Oriane de Guermantes: “That is why life is so horrible, since nobody can understand anybody else.”

Yet a serious account of English translations of Proust will not turn decisively on the history of text and publication in France. One must emphasize this, principally because it is easy to fall prey to a Whig theory of the fortunes of Proust translation. This is a theory also encouraged to some extent by the translators themselves. Kilmartin offers his version 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 and improving aspects of the latter’s translation of the same French text, while Enright’s endeavors are billed as a “re-revision.” In many respects this is an entirely proper description of what is on offer (though Enright’s changes to Kilmartin’s English, while often felicitous, are not that extensive, encouraging the suspicion that this supposedly new Proust is as much a publisher’s wheeze as anything else). There was of course much to be corrected in Scott Moncrieff, notably the egregious howlers. The most famous example was Albertine’s me faire casser le pot: Scott Moncrieff translated it literally and thus meaninglessly but also bizarrely since from the context he must have understood its reference to a sexual practice. But there are far more basic errors in Scott Moncrieff; perhaps the worst, 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, unbelievably, as “how many times?”

On the other hand, while paying tribute to Scott Moncrieff (after all the true hero of the story), both Kilmartin and Enright can also be a little condescending toward him, as if he were some kind of dated Edwardian old duffer. Certainly if it is a matter of simply correcting errors, then this cuts more than one way. For example, Kilmartin criticizes Scott Moncrieff’s grip on Proust’s syntax, but this can be a case of the pot calling the kettle black. If Scott Moncrieff “wrenches his syntax into oddly unEnglish shapes,” at least he doesn’t put a plural subject with a singular verb as Kilmartin does (“the coldness and rudeness of their children has passed unnoticed”). Or take the saga, more or less endless, of the misplaced “only.” Perhaps Kilmartin took the view that modern English usage renders such considerations merely pedantic. But if so, there can surely be little excuse for getting your syntactic knickers in a twist around a sentence that gets it wrong in one clause and right in the next (“We can only be faithful to what we remember and we remember only what we have known”) and no excuse at all for the laxness with one of Proust’s most famous maxims: “One only loves that in which one pursues the inaccessible, one only loves what one does not possess”; rhythm and emphasis here imperatively require the placing of “only” after “loves.”

This kind of accounting exercise could go on indefinitely. More importantly, simply entering debits and credits in the accuracy ledger bypasses the deeper and more interesting questions of Proust in English. These require us to address the body of English translations as a whole in terms of the kinds of assumptions made about the nature of Proust’s style and the sort of English most appropriate to that style. A starting point here is Kilmartin’s preface. Kilmartin describes Proust’s style as basically “natural” and “unaffected.” This must be the oddest view of Proust’s style ever. While stripping out some of Scott Moncrieff’s period purple was obviously desirable in order to restore more of Proust’s unrelenting lucidity, the notion that Proust’s vastly elaborated figurative and syntactic structures are aptly described as “natural” gives hostages to fortune too numerous to mention. In any case, there is no such thing as a Proust style; there are many styles and many voices, just as behind the narrating “je” there are multiple selves.

Kilmartin’s view of Proust’s style (or what he sometimes calls “tone”) is of course related to the issue of how best Proust might travel into English. In this connection he proposes the following hypothesis as the basis of a working model: “The 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?’” If this is the determining question, we are unlikely to be staying for an answer. Although at first glance the hypothesis looks like a reasonable benchmark, it is in fact quite demented. Perhaps we can make some sense of the notion of what Proust would have written had he written in English by translating it into how an English writer, of roughly the same period, background, and outlook, might have written. But this also is a somewhat murky notion, and in any case, if this is the rule of thumb, Kilmartin’s own practice as translator often breaches, sometimes happily, sometimes disastrously, precisely that rule. The plot thickens considerably when we turn to Enright. For if Kilmartin rounds on Scott Moncrieff for translating literally where “English equivalents” should have been used, Enright takes him to task for exactly the opposite, objecting, for example, to translating a character’s use of the idiom “partir à l’anglaise” as “taking French leave” on the grounds that it is absurd to have French speakers speak to one another of “French leave.” Indeed it is, unless of course they happen to be speaking English.

It will be clear that the further one goes into this question, the more one finds that behind the murkiness there lurks a potential madness (the kind of lunacy that all translators must at times feel close to). It will also be clear that the relevant assumptions about translation also involve cultural choices and values, such that the issue is not simply the representation of Proust in English but the production of an English Proust. In this regard, the story once again begins with Scott Moncrieff, not just as translator but as initiator of a volume of essays on the occasion of Proust’s death, Marcel Proust: An English Tribute. As a case study in the production of an English Proust, this is a fascinating document in the cultural history of early-twentieth-century English literary taste. It is also somewhat discouraging, at times so lowering as to take the temperature down to minus. In the first place, the guest list of contributors is conspicuous by those who declined Scott Moncrieff’s invitation (they include “Mrs Virginia Woolf, Miss Rebecca West … Mr Aldous Huxley, and that most reluctant writer, Mr. E.M. Forster”).This may have been in part because, as one contributor notes, Proust “has an outlook on life which is bound to be unsympathetic to a good many Englishmen.” Another contributor—Arnold Bennett—encourages such a view, remarking on the “effrontery” of Proust not having “given himself the trouble of learning to ‘write’ in the large sense.” For the rest—apart from a small number of often brilliant pieces, notably an essay by Catherine Carswell on Proust’s women as always presented in terms of “the effect they have upon the men that love them”—we have the all-too-familiar Proust of cakes, lime-blossom tea, and hawthorns (“when I met him as a reader [he] filled my plate with one delicious fruit and sweet and cake after another”).

English Proust comes out of this discourse (a summarizing marker might be the recurrence in these essays of the word “charm”). Kilmartin’s claim is, in certain respects rightly, that Scott Moncrieff’s translation is complicit with this and that sharpening the edge of the prose requires wiping it clean of the detritus of the English teatime. On the other hand, just how clean is something of an open question. Take the vexed issue of the title. Rarely can the question of a title have stirred such a hornets’ nest (or created, so to speak, such a storm in a teacup). As reported in the New York press, there was some kerfuffle between publishers over who originally thought of using In Search of Lost Time to replace Scott Moncrieff’s pretty but useless Shakespeare quote, Remembrance of Things Past. Richard Howard signaled his intention long ago to use the new title for the scheduled Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux translation. Kilmartin informed us that he wanted to use In Search of Lost Time for the 1981 Chatto publication but was overruled. This little quarrel proves only that the spirit of capitalism is alive and well in corporate publishing. The truly intriguing element of the story, at least as reported in the New York Post, is that, according to his wife, Enright actually wanted to retain the Scott Moncrieff title when Chatto this time decided to respect Kilmartin’s original wishes: “It was a grand phrase, and it’s what it’s known as. That’s my husband’s position as an English reader and as an Englishman for whom Shakespeare is quite important.”

If this report is true, it would seem that a certain kind of English nostalgia is also alive and well. While being in or on the verge of sleep (“Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written while yawning”) is one of the privileged states of A la recherche du temps perdu, it is doubtful that Proust would have relished association with the prolonged English postimperial trance (as is well known, he took vigorous exception to Scott Moncrieff’s title). Among other things, the English Proust of the nostalgia market is a class Proust, and the relevant assumptions in part social assumptions. Proust’s own social vision is itself a problematical affair, starting with the meanings of the words “social” and “society” in his text: they are generally restricted to life in the aristocratic salon and dining room. Within the restricted definition, Proust supplies a merciless anatomy of a dying world, not just as, in the familiar emphasis, dissection of snobbery but in making the crucial connection between the manners of the snob and, in Benjamin’s words, the symptoms of a “class everywhere pledged to camouflage its material basis.” Proust deepens the convention of the novel of manners by placing the obsession with the petty rituals of rank and etiquette in the distinctively modern context of the abstracted, sterile world of consumption severed from production. This is one reason why we hardly ever see the world of the working class, other than as immediate appendages to the upper classes (domestic servants, hotel staff, casino operators, and shop girls, the latter as use value for sexually deprived men of means, including the narrator). If we do not see the world of industrial work, that is because its invisibility is part of the point. On the other hand, Proust’s fastidiousness can degenerate into fussiness and fascination, and after some of the more extended stretches of prose chez les Guermantes it may well be with a sigh of relief that we find even the narrator himself giving up: “I should never get to the end of it if I began to describe all the different types of drawing room.”

A translation must of course respect the assumptions of the original. But there can be no brief for making matters worse. English Proust often does just that from Scott Moncrieff through to Enright. Consider the case of Maman (where after all Proust’s narrative in many ways both begins and ends). In the sociolinguistics of French, Maman is not marked for class. English “Mamma,” however, is very strongly marked for class, especially the pronunciation implied by the double mm (James Grieve, in his translation of Du côté de chez Swann at least tried to weaken this with the spelling “Mama”). “Mamma” makes one wince and transforms Combray into a Laura-Ashleyfied English nursery and the dilemmas of the neurasthenically oedipal boy into the problems of a little Lord Fauntleroy, best dealt with by a vigorous spanking at a suitably brutal public school (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”?). If revision is the name of the game, why did neither Kilmartin nor Enright do something about this?

One reason appears to be that their attachment to cute Proust is occasionally even stronger than Scott Moncrieff’s. For example, the question of mother is also related to the question of George Sand. When Maman, in the famous good-night–kiss scene, reads 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.” Scott Moncrieff’s translation of “redevenues imagées” is uselessly but harmlessly literal (“returned as imagery”). The phrase of course connotes both visual and rhetorical meanings (something like “metaphorical color”). Kilmartin and Enright render it as “quaint and picturesque” (a bit rich then for Enright to accuse Scott Moncrieff of being “quaint”). This is cakes-and-strawberries Proust to surplus requirement; we do not need it. Nor do we need the lamentably sentimental “damsel” for Proust’s fillette designating the Parisian laundry girl whom the narrator fancies (Scott Moncrieff simply has “girl”).

What we need—and indeed at their best what we get from all three translators—is Proust out of the nursery and on the wild side. For example, he is one of the great explorers not only of the multiplicities of human sexuality but also of the complex and shifting relation between sexuality and speech. There are many challenges here to the translator, above all perhaps in capturing the manic rhythms of the discourse of Charlus at once concealing and revealing his homosexuality in the polite society of the salon. Charlus’s speech is an extraordinary mix of the exquisite, the demotic, and the camp. How one stays faithful to this in English is by no means obvious. Scott Moncrieff was on the whole very successful here. Kilmartin interestingly throws caution to the winds, abandoning his hypothesis about what Proust might have written had he been writing in English in favor of a series of hit-and-run, though sometimes hit-and-miss, raids on late-twentieth-century slang. When this goes wrong, it can go badly wrong. Charlus, for instance, bids farewell in the street to the narrator with the colloquial “à la revoyure”; the point of the expression is that it is both popular and precious (as is much of the speech of Françoise). Kilmartin renders it as “so long,” which suggests that Charlus has wandered into a Damon Runyon story and is exiting from a Manhattan dive (something like “tood-a-loo” might do, with its connotations of both popular usage and upper-class affectation).

The problem becomes even more acute in connection with Charlus’s use of sexual demotic. It is surely inconsistent with Kilmartin’s hypothesis concerning what Proust himself might have written in English to translate petits truqueurs (male prostitutes who engage in blackmail) as “rent boys”; the latter is certainly an “English equivalent” but nearly a hundred years too late for Proust, thus raising questions as to what model of linguistic and cultural relevance Kilmartin had in mind in advancing his hypothesis (there is consequently an unintended irony in the narrator’s remark: “I did not know the meaning of this slang expression ‘rent boys’”). As for mômes coming out as “a bit of brown,” this really does miss the point of Charlus’s tortured verbal behavior. This is not just a lapse of literary judgment but a category mistake. Even as Charlus’s incredible tirades shift into semi-delirious overdrive, “a bit of brown” is wrong for Charlus in the Guermantes or even the Verdurin salon, not so much because it is anachronistic but because it is excessive; it would be to go too far in his high-wire act of slumming it with socially unavowable desires while lording it with his social self-image: Charlus skates on ice dangerously but also skillfully, though beneath the ice madness always threatens. But if anachronistic camping of the text can produce misreadings, all is forgiven when, on leaving the Verdurins, Charlus is to be found eyeing young soldiers on the train. “Ce n’est plus un chemin de fer ou nous sommes,” remarks the sculptor, Ski, in a hideous pun, “c’est un funiculeur.” Scott Moncrieff does not appear to have noticed the obscene deformation of funiculaire, though perhaps he thought the more attentive reader might have caught cul in “funicular.” Kilmartin comes up with another anachronism, but one so brilliantly inventive and appropriate to both occasion and character that all other considerations evaporate: “This isn’t a puffer-train, it’s a poofter-train.”

This is emphatically translation joining original on the wilder side. It is of course no accident that it should be in connection with the languages of sexuality. Desire is Proust’s greatest theme and the most active motor of his text. In terms of his characters’ fate, it is also the motor of catastrophe. All Proust’s lovers are psychopaths, teleologically as well as psychologically; the “way the psychopathological universe is constructed,” muses the narrator in connection with his love for Albertine, is “disastrous,” because whatever you do is destined to go wrong, not just routinely yet contingently, but invariably. However you play it, the outcome is necessarily and absolutely awful. In this most non-Aristotelian of novels, the narrative of Proustian love is to some extent rigorously Aristotelian in that if its beginning is arbitrary and its middle wayward, its end is wholly preordained. One of the main achievements of Proust’s translators is to have caught the mix of intolerable suffering, monstrous egocentricity, and high comedy in this baleful view of human intimacy. Albertine casually, inadvertently reveals the truth behind the lies: “I felt as though I were in a town that had been razed to the ground, where not a house remained standing, where the bare soil was merely heaped with rubble.” The extended metaphor is to be read at various levels, appropriately powerful for the intensity of subjective disorder but also sufficiently detached to reveal it as self-indulgently theatrical and not a little comical. It is of a piece with the whole final sequence of Sodom and Gomorrah, where the emotional disaster visited on the narrator by Albertine’s disclosure of her previous friendship with Mlle Vinteuil is both extraordinarily poignant and hilariously funny.

It is perhaps no surprise that it is in this area that Kilmartin in particular excels, since he himself stresses the importance of Proust’s humor, in particular his fabulous gift for mimicry, pastiche, and parody. What also needs stressing is the extent to which the comedy is self-referential and the parody self-parody. Many of the grand structuring themes and devices of A la recherche are seen through this magnifying lens. Brichot’s endlessly tedious etymologies mirror the narrator’s obsession with the “magic” of names. Albertine’s occasionally breathless syntax leaves the narrator struggling with her sentences in a manner not dissimilar to the way the narrator leaves the reader with his: “Awaiting the conclusion, I found it hard to remember the beginning.” There is a marvelous moment in one of the Doncières sequences when Saint-Loup and the narrator get lost in the fog on their way to a restaurant. In context, the detour before “finding our way and reaching safe haven” serves as a miniallegory of Proust’s book itself, as the tale of a prolonged fog-bound detour on the road to the discovery of the artistic vocation, for a few pages earlier we find the narrator musing on the great topic of Le temps retrouvé (the “detour of many wasted years”), with the hint of an imminent illumination beyond the waste. But as the text trembles on the verge of epiphany, the whole episode is then ironically placed when, some pages later in the restaurant, the fatuous prince de Foix makes polite conversation with a stranger who has also lost his way: “Losing your way isn’t so bad; the trouble is in finding it again.” Losing and refinding one’s way (within the narrative, within the sentence) are exactly the drama of reading A la recherche. Could it then be that the absurd prince de Foix is the novel’s best critic?

Above all there are those gems of ironic mise en abîme refracting back a skeptical view of what one would have thought to be untouchable in Proust: metaphor. Metaphor is not only Proust’s principal literary device for rescuing experience from the ravages of time; it is also thematized and discussed, notably in Le Temps retrouvé, with a reverence at times close to mystic awe. But the reflexive register can also take a quite different forms, when, for example, it is displaced onto the ridiculous Cottard and his “insatiable” passion for “figures of speech” or when M. de Guermantes attacks the narrator’s article in Le Figaro for its “turgid metaphors as in the antiquated prose of Chateaubriand.” Or take the self-effacingly downbeat conclusion to the narrator’s extended analogy between living with Albertine and living with a madman: “But all this is only a comparison” (my italics). Coming from Proust, that “only” give many hostages to fortune. Above all perhaps, there is Albertine’s outrageously baroque speech on the subject of ice cream: “Those mountains of ice at the Ritz sometimes suggest Monte Rosa, and indeed, if it’s a lemon ice, I don’t object to its not having a monumental shape, it being irregular, abrupt, like one of Elstir’s mountains.” Try as the narrator might to distinguish Albertine’s ludicrous speech from the use of figures in his own writing (“her eagerness to employ in speech images … which seemed to me to be reserved for another, more sacred use”), with the injection of Elstir into the discourse and thus of the narrator’s typical analogical movement from nature to art and back again, the dividing line has been compromised; like both ice cream and language in Albertine’s mouth, there is here a sense of structures melting, collapsing.

This may have some relation with one of the novel’s very last metaphors, where the theme of a life in time is dizzily spatialized: the narrator, “perched on its giddy summit,” is seized with a “feeling of vertigo.” In the next paragraph—the final one of the book—this image of heights is transferred to the aged and tottering duc de Guermantes, figured as walking on “living stilts” from which one must inevitably “fall.” The clownish metaphor of stilts is a comic transformation of the metaphor of altitude (so highly prized by the narrator in connection with Stendhal). But it is arguably also a parody of metaphor tout court, the prop, the crux of Proust’s work, what holds the whole thing up.

The novel thus ends with a stress on frailty and fragility, not only of the human body but of all human enterprises, including perhaps that which this finale otherwise celebrates, the great work of metaphorical art the hero-narrator will undertake. These last sentences combine exhilaration and comedy with the melancholy contemplation of decay and death and implicate both Proust and us as, coming to the end, we look back over a work of writing and reading (Proust himself calls the writing a form of “translation”: “The function and task of a writer are those of a translator”). In his foreword, Enright speaks of the “melancholy” nature of his own task as translator. He is referring of course to the sad circumstances in which he took over from Kilmartin. There is more, however, to the relation between melancholy and translation. Benjamin links melancholy to the modern condition of exile and homelessness. Proust belongs here; if all paradises are paradises lost, there can be no homecoming. For all his talk of “my country,” he knows, as does his narrator, that “the artist is a native of an unknown country” and that, for all his corresponding talk of buildings, cathedrals, and foundations, his book is like those of Bergotte, irritably described by that superpatriot Norpois as having “no foundation” (and as “altogether lacking in virility”). Benjamin also links the condition of melancholy and exile to the displacement of the symbol by allegory: the symbol is the prelapsarian, paradisiac mode of expression; allegory is on the side of the sign and its endless interpretability. For some entirely incomprehensible reason Kilmartin and Enright translate signes in the famous passage about the work of art as the deciphering of a “livre intérieur de signes inconnus” as “symbols.” Although Proust does use the term symbole elsewhere, it is crucial to translate as “sign” here, precisely because of Proust’s own emphasis on art as “translation.”

Melancholy, however, is not the end of the story. Melancholy can become mourning, and mourning is accorded an altogether upbeat metaphorical value by Proust, specifically in connection with his own literary medium: “Certain novels are like great but temporary bereavements, abolishing habit, bringing us back into contact with the reality of life.” This joins with the more active senses that Proust gives to both desire and suffering. They enable as well as disable, above all as powerful generators of text. The narrator writes that “to seek happiness in the satisfaction of a desire of the mind was as naive as to attempt to reach the horizon by walking straight ahead.” If this is a formulation of the futility of desire, it is also the case that the writing of desire in Proust remains productively true to this insight, moving sideways, laterally, either as the vibrant intellectual curiosity of the tentacular speculative sentence, with its proliferating interpretive hypotheses, or as the restless pleasure of polymorphous metaphorical elaboration traveling, for example, across the collective body of the “jeunes filles en fleurs,” gleefully scattering predicates and identities with transgressive abandon.

We have also to remember that, if mourning and desire go together as creative forces, the habit-abolishing “bereavement” that novels give us is only “temporary,” just as elsewhere we are told of “the almost hypnotic suggestion of a good book which, like all such influences, has very transient effects.” Habit reasserts itself, dulls the wits, consigns to oblivion. The process has to be started over again; even after we fall off the stilts, we must keep on the move. This too has implications for translation, not only in the banal sense of requiring new ones from time to time but also in the deeper sense of what it means to make and remake an English Proust. The prospects are encouraging. There is, for example, a remarkable text by the poet, Tom Raworth. It is best to read this text after reading the last paragraph of A la recherche. As, with the duc de Guermantes, we totter through that last long sentence landing for the last time on the word “Time,” we would do well to proceed immediately to Raworth, where we can start again not only by going from end to beginning but also from bottom to top. The text is called “Proust from the Bottom Up,” in a collection of poems with the apposite title Tottering State. It takes the key passage from Le Temps retrouvé about literature as deciphering of the “book of unknown signs” and rewrites it, irreverently and literally, from bottom to top, while at the same time redistributing its elements in willful disregard of normal syntax and sense (it begins with “not traced by us is the only book that really belongs to us” and ends with “if i tried to read them no-one could help me with”).

We make of this splintered Proust what we will, but, within the extended sense of the term, it is entirely reasonable to see it as a form of translation, as creative translation around the Proustian themes of interpretation and decipherability, forgetting and remembering, losing one’s way and refinding it (though what negotiable way is opened up here remains moot). The more general point is that English Proust can mean many things. It also of course means, for the time being, Irish Proust (for example, Beckett making hay with the hawthorns in Molloy or being impeccably Irish in the early essay on Proust with the truly memorable line, “Proust had a bad memory”) and American Proust. Where the latter is concerned, we still eagerly await the new Richard Howard translation. It promises to be a more freewheeling affair altogether. This is very good news, for it is especially in the United States that a certain English cult of Proust is treated with the contempt it deserves. It is probably only in The New Yorker that we would find a cartoon depicting a woman addressing a salesman in a bookstore with the caption: “I want something to get even for that new translation of Proust he gave me last year.”

This points the way to the happy end of the madeleine as cultural fetish and to other kinds of alignment, for example, since I have spoken of stilts and falling, with Bob Dylan’s view of the artist: “She’s nobody’s child, the law can’t touch her at all / she never stumbles, she got no place to fall” (Elstir, who paints the sea as land and the land as sea, would have liked her: “She can take the dark out of the night-time and paint the day time black”). And while I’m at it, I hope Howard won’t think it excessively presumptuous of me to ask that he begin with the great Proustian theme of names by doing something about the persistence, historically understandable in Scott Moncrieff but inexcusable in Kilmartin and Enright, of “Christian name” for prénom. This might just do for “Palamède,” Charlus’s “Christian name” mentioned in connection with “this or that Podestà or Prince of the Church.” But having Jewish Swann describe “Odette” as a “Christian name,” or Lady Rufus Israels address Swann’s daughter, Gilberte, “by her Christian name” not only has nothing to do with Proust’s French but also implies that the Church of England has had a hand in the translation. A more informal and ecumenical Proust in English will need to put us on first-name terms with prénom. For if—to return yet again to a point of departure—the complexities of the fictional language game render the narrator somewhat coy over his own first name, it is unthinkable that Proust the author would have approved of Marcel’s being represented as his “Christian name.” If this, in an all-too-familiar view of translation as representation, is to count as an English equivalent, the one thing it is not is an equivalent in any way remotely adequate to the work of the writer whom Harold Bloom has described, provocatively but rightly, as “our truest modern multiculturalist.”