PROUST: For the new Penguin translation, the general editor, Christopher Prendergast, has made a radical decision in choosing a team of translators. It is a formidable team, and a formidable book writes Frank Wynne
There are many reasons not to read this book. Statistically, few reading this review will attempt it, fewer still complete it. It is a daunting work of some 3,000 pages (more than 1.5 million words), and its style - its sentences sprawl across pages, adding detail of minutely observed detail - may dishearten you before you get very far. It is, as all reviews now concur, a masterpiece - but it is a recent consensus: Evelyn Waugh thought it incomprehensible, Joseph Conrad found it cold and emotionless, Arnold Bennett lamented the "clumsy centipedalian crawling of the interminable sentences"; and as late as 1971, the New York Times Book Review described Proust's style as "a careless, self-indulgent prose".
But, ah . . .
Proust's novel is a supremely rewarding work. Through the salons and the thoroughfares, the beaches and the brothels of the Belle Époque, Proust recounts the sentimental education of a sickly child and his apprenticeship as a writer through a hundred characters whose lives differ from the mayfly only in that they converse and they deceive. Their lives and loves mirror one another: they are obsessive, jealous, manipulative, faithless and hopeful. In all, Proust has little faith in man but much in art. Throughout these volumes, via a precarious equilibrium of sentences which spiral into sub-clauses of ever more nuanced metaphors, Proust weaves a web of meditations, disquisitions and memories in an attempt to bring the past to life - not as memory, but like Lazarus from the tomb.
In English, the novel is still commonly known as Remembrance of Things Past, the title C.K. Scott Moncrieff gave his celebrated translation; though for more than 10 years it has been published under its true title, In Search of Lost Time. This anomaly is the tip of an iceberg of problems: Proust died in 1922, leaving the final three volumes of the novel half-filled with revisions, additions and copious corrections from which his executors patched together an edition which, Samuel Beckett wrote, "cannot be said to have transmitted the writings of Proust, but to have betrayed a tendency in that direction". It was from this version that Moncrieff worked, inevitably translating the bad with the good. He, too, died before completing his work and the final volume was translated by Andreas Mayor. (There are in fact three translations, but Mayor's is the standard.)
In the 70 years since, the French edition has twice been extensively revised, as has Moncrieff's translation (by Terence Kilmartin and later D.J. Enright). Despite these revisions the edition published by Random House is still very much that of Scott Moncrieff, of which the TLS wrote in 1922: "There are times when the French simply cannot be conveyed in English . . . but where mortal can extract the essence this translator has done so."
Though Moncrieff's work has long been considered a paradigm of what Wittgenstein called "the exact art" or translation, even his admirers acknowledge his limitations. Moncrieff gave Proust's "singularly light and translucid work" a quasi-Victorian literary style; both he and Mayor expanded Proust's ellipses, extrapolated his metaphors and Moncrieff prudishly tiptoed around the novel's sexual candour, preferring the euphemistic to the direct.
"Translators," in George Steiner's words, "are men groping towards each other in a common mist." No translation can hope to be perfect. And so every generation produces its translations of great works. Far from being a redundant task, this is as vital and necessary to language and to fiction as are our reinterpretations of Shakespeare or of Greek tragedy. Viewing a work afresh, a new translator may bring a vitality to a book which has lain mothballed in a workmanlike edition; sometimes, when the style of the translator obscures the author's voice or simply fails it, a new translator may rediscover it (as in James Woods's translations of Thomas Mann), for translation does not merely tell us new stories, it imprints itself on language itself, just as versions of the styles of Dostoevsky, of Kafka or of Proust have changed the way English is written. Proust keenly realised this: "The duty and the task of a writer," he wrote, "are those of translator."
For the new Penguin version the general editor, Christopher Prendergast, has made a radical decision in choosing a team of translators. It is a formidable team, which includes John Sturrock, (whose exceptional translations of Le Rouge et le Noir, and Proust's Contre Saint-Beuve are Penguin classics) and translators who are senior academics or authors and poets in their own right. It is a decision which clearly tempers the sheer scale of the task, but is clearly fraught with problems. However talented the team, they cannot write with a single voice, nor easily do justice to a narrator and an author whose shifts of tone through age and disillusionment are crucial to the novel. The shifts in voice are subtle but discernible, and Prendergast's decision to allow each translator to introduce his or her volume inevitably colours one's reading of the work.
In his introduction, for example, James Grieve poignantly captures the sense of loss, of bereavement which informs the novel as a whole, but digresses to dissent vehemently from the notion of Proust as a social critic, calling him "a cosseted Parisian whose Right Bank world was narrow, who preferred to live in the past, in bed, in a cork-lined room, who rarely travelled and never did a day's work".
This seems superfluous: moreover, it seems misguided. Proust's social canvas is as great as that of Tolstoy (another cosseted layabout) and dwarfs Proust's much-loved George Eliot. Proust was deeply conservative, but he was hardly unworldly: before he took to his cork-lined room he trained as a lawyer, took a degree in literature, was an active supporter of Dreyfus and - more obviously - a much sought-after socialite; his work was the novel which would in time provide work for Grieve himself.
Prendergast as general editor arrogates to himself the translator's role of adjudicating questions of style and voice. In doing so, he dismisses the belief that "a translator ought constantly to be asking himself: 'How would the author put this if he were writing in English?'" as a "murky notion", an analogy which "if pressed, would quite rapidly reach breaking point". And it is true that neither Henry James, nor Edith Wharton, nor indeed any of Proust's contemporaries, could directly serve as a model for his style. Nonetheless, a voice fitting to his time must be found: Prendergast himself suggests no alternative. In failing to find one, the translation sometimes strays into a modern idiom which rankles, and occasionally descends into bathetic anachronisms: Gilberte's "Well, I dunno, do I?" (Volume II, page 86); "tante" (nancy, sissy) translated as "queer" - a word laden with moral connotations alien to Proust; Jupien's endearment "mon bébé" translated as "baby boy" (Vol IV, p41), a sweet nothing more appropriate to Queer as Folk; Morel's intention to "piss off out of it"(Vol V, p177) and the narrator's "panic attacks" (Vol V, p398). These, doubtless, are intended to give the translation an immediacy and urgency, but they simply make the reader stumble as they read.
A second decision further hinders the reader. Proust's numerous quotations from other authors are left in the French. Prendergast makes an eloquent case for the difficulties of translating Racine (Ted Hughes, John Cairncross and others have dared make the attempt) but, in the event, everything from Françoise's crude folk wisdom to quotes from Baudelaire, Hugo and others are in French, leaving the ordinary reader to refer to prose translations in the endnotes. This is especially unfortunate as Proust's quotations - especially in Sodom and Gomorrah - do not stand alone but are an important counterpoint to the discussion of homosexuality.
If it is invidious to compare the new translation with the old, it is impossible not to; like a new recording of a favourite piece of music, one cannot help but marvel at new harmonies, or feel disappointed at passages which seem dissonant or flat. What soars in this new version is the simplicity of language, and fidelity to the curious cambers of Proust's prose. Lydia Davis takes The Way by Swann's; setting out the paths in Combray where, as a boy, the narrator first encounters Gilberte and Madame Swann, first becomes aware of his nascent sexuality and first truly sees the hawthorn blossoms:
"How naïve and folksy by comparison the wild roses which, in a few weeks, would also clamber up in full sun in the same country lane, in the smooth silk of their blushing bodices undone by a breath." (Penguin Vol I, p139)
If a sort of series of chapels feels inelegant, Davis's translation is otherwise pure, limpid and exact, avoiding the unnecessary extrapolations of Moncrieff, who translates the "qu'un souffle défait" as "that dissolve in the first breath of wind" (RH Vol. I, p 165), which cannot compare with Davis's magnificent, precise "undone by a breath".
John Sturrock is pitch-perfect in Sodom and Gomorrah, equally at home with its intimacies and its bitter comedy, exquisitely detailing the monstrous Baron Charlus's machinations, his jealousies and victories, as he circles Morel and the parallel devices of the narrator as he circles Albertine; but he is poetic, even transcendent in the central section, 'Intermittences of the Heart': "The self that I was then and which had vanished all that time ago was once again so close to me that I seemed to hear still the words that had come immediately before, yet which were no more than a dream, just as a man not properly awake thinks he can perceive close beside him the sounds of his receding dream."
In Finding Time Again (Proust's title, Le Temps Retrouvé, is categorical, the English oddly tentative), Ian Patterson's account of the Bal des têtes is masterful: droll, melancholy and cruel, as the narrator becomes reconciled to old age: "The patches of white in beards hitherto entirely black rendered the human landscape of the party somewhat melancholy, like the first yellow leaves on the trees when one is still thinking one can count on a long summer, when before one has started to enjoy it one sees that it has already turned to autumn."
These are random examples of new harmonies. It would take a work half as long as Proust's own to adequately compare the new against the old and both against the recalcitrant French which will not be definitively said. This is a translation with passages of great brilliance, one which restores the simple, sometimes awkward style of Proust and faithfully hugs the shoreline of his wide meanders.
Frank Wynne is a freelance journalist and translator. His most recent translations, Platform by Michel Houellebecq and In the Absence of Men by Philippe Besson, were published earlier this year by William Heinemann
In Search of Lost Time (A la recherche du temps perdu). By Marcel Proust. The Way by Swann's (trans. Lydia Davis); In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (James Grieve); The Guermantes Way (Mark Treharne); Sodom and Gomorrah (John Sturrock); The Captive (Carol Clark); The Fugitive (Peter Collier), and Finding Time Again (Ian Patterson). General Editor: Christopher Prendergast. Penguin/Allen Lane, 3,300pp. £75 (six-volume boxed set)