Lost in Translation

Proust, Marcel. In Search of Lost Time. 6 vols. London: Penguin, 2003. £45.00 (paper).

Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu is considered by many to be the greatest novel of the twentieth century. Given its complex nature and unprecedented length Proust knew that he was taking a huge gamble by deciding to put everything he had to say about his own experience and his observations about the human condition into one enormous novel. Prior to publication, he explained to a fellow writer, awed by Proust's talent but fearful that the unprecedented length would discourage readers, that the work had to be long because he was intent on "showing the effects of time on a group of characters."¹

Proust's big gamble paid off, validating his own notion that powerful, original works create their own posterity. Part of the reason for the book's success is C. K. Scott Moncrieff's extraordinarily fine English translation of the first six parts. In a 1939 letter to his daughter, F. Scott Fitzgerald gave his opinion: "Scott Moncrieff's Proust is a masterpiece in itself."² The 1992 Modern Library edition replaced Scott Moncrieff's original title Remembrance of Things Past with In Search of Lost Time, as close as one can get to the original. What's still missing is the double entendre of temps perdu, which in French means both lost time and wasted time. This richness of meaning is important to the novel's main themes. Remembrance of Things Past, from Shakespeare's sonnet 30, is a beautiful line but conveys an idea that is really the opposite of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. His theory of memory, which forms one of the novel's main themes, rejects the notion that to recall and relive the past all we have to do is sit quietly and remember days gone by at will, through our ordinary memory process that he called voluntary memory. Proust's title suggests a number of things, all made explicit in the novel: the Narrator's search (recherche means both search and research in French) is an active, arduous quest in which the past must be rediscovered—partly through what Proust called involuntary memory, a phenomenon described in the madeleine scene—then analyzed and understood, and finally, if your ambition is to preserve it in writing, by mastering the craft that will allow you to transpose and record it in a book.

The new English translation under the general editorship of Christopher Prendergast owes its birth to the fact that A la recherche du temps perdu came into public domain in the late 1980s. I have only the highest respect for the skills and knowledge that Christopher Prendergast and his team of translators have brought to this enormous task of translating one of the richest and most complex narratives in literature. Like Proust's own titles of things lost and found, any large-scale undertaking such as this one, even by a team of learned and distinguished translators, was bound, while correcting and improving the original English version, to create new problems in the process. Translating Proust requires not only maintaining the thematic integrity of his vast book but an ability to understand and render as closely as possible his tone, rhythm, and structure.

The translators are to be congratulated for having, on the whole, acquitted themselves very well indeed. Christopher Prendergast rightly anticipated that the most controversial aspect of this ambitious enterprise would be assigning a different translator to each of the novel's seven parts. I find not entirely convincing his justification for the advantage of a team of translators: "A single translator, however flexible, is more likely to be constrained by the conscious or unconscious operation of a particular parti pris" (xvii). Yes, but seven of them only multiplies the possibility of such partis pris. Furthermore, Prendergast writes that, "While it makes sense to speak of a distinctly Proustian 'tone...