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Proust’s newest translator speaks on triumphs and tribulations of her work
By Jessica Ullian
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Lydia Davis discussed her new translation of Proust’s Swann’s Way on February 11. The process, she said, led her to some intriguing discoveries in etymology. Photo by Vernon Doucette |
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Reading Marcel Proust’s famous novel À la recherche du temps perdu is such a daunting task — the book consists of multiple volumes and typically has up to 3,000 pages — that the Mercantile Library of New York used to reward members who accomplished the feat with a lapel pin.
Translating the work from French into English is a monumental task, said writer Lydia Davis, who published the most recent translation of the first volume, Swann’s Way, in 2003. Making it beyond the title page takes some Herculean effort, she said, and “hours and hours of agitation” — the original title, Du côté de chez Swann, can also be translated as The Way by Swann’s and By Way of Swann’s, among others.
“An entire, if short, essay could be devoted to the problem of how to translate the title,” she said.
Davis discussed this and other issues that translators face on February 11, when she spoke at Boston University as part of the University Professors Program Literary Translation Seminar Series. The event regularly showcases some of the top contemporary translators in various genres, making Davis, the winner of Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships and an associate professor and writer-in-residence at SUNY-Albany, an appropriate choice, according to UNI Professor Rosanna Warren, the University’s Emma Ann MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities. “She trails honors and prizes behind her like a comet,” Warren said. “It would singe the tongue and burn the eyelashes to recite them all.”
The series generally focuses on each person’s experience with a particular work, and the challenges presented by the author or style — and with Swann’s Way, Davis faced some unique hurdles. The most famous translation was completed by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and encompasses all of À la recherche du temps perdu, giving it its commonly accepted English title, Remembrance of Things Past. Two later partial revisions found that Moncrieff had taken some unusual liberties with the title (a more accurate translation is In Search of Lost Time) and the text. “It’s Proust,” Davis said, “seen through the distorting lens of Moncrieff.”
The more recent translations, however, were simply not as well written as either the original or Moncrieff’s version, Davis said. Consequently, she made several decisions that she felt would help her stay faithful to both Proust’s story and his style: she would not read the text before beginning her translation, preferring to approach it “blind”; she would not conduct any research into Proust’s life, history, or other work; and she would, at least in the first draft, translate the text as closely as possible, trying to find words that matched the original meaning, structure, and sound.
“A close translation is both harder and easier,” she explained. “Harder, because the confines are so tight, but easier for the same reason — you don’t have to make as many choices.”
Davis’ decisions ultimately launched an exciting academic journey, in which she pored over the text and spent hours, or even days, exploring word origins, etymological history, and sentence structure. Each sentence was “a little puzzle,” she said, and her research led to a series of triumphs and discoveries. A particularly joyous moment, she said, involved translating the phrase catastrophe deluve. An obvious replacement was “catastrophic deluge,” but Davis felt the words did not capture enough of Proust’s form and poetry. Searching for another way to convey the meaning, she thought of the word “antediluvian,” meaning “before the flood,” and decided to translate the phrase as “diluvian catastrophe.”
Other words gave her new insight into world history — the French hélas, for example, is almost always translated simply as “alas.” Davis, in seeking its root, explored the link between Old French and Latin, and found that “alas” stems from a phrase meaning “O misfortune!” When looking “minutely” at a word, she said, “you enter some large place, some area of history or culture, where you had never been before.”
Throughout the process, she also found that her method of approaching Swann’s Way with limited knowledge of the work helped create a more accurate and direct translation. Moncrieff, she said, continually changed Proust’s words in a way that hints at the context — where Proust might have actually written “said,” Moncrieff’s knowledge of the relationship between the characters and the events that are about to transpire inspired him to make it “murmured.” Davis called the process “upping,” and said it ultimately leads to a very changed text, in which every action is slightly altered to fit the translator’s viewpoint.
She concluded her talk with some of her own rules of translating — which include retaining word repetitions, beginning and ending sentences with the same words as the original text, and reproducing the play of sounds and assonance as much as possible — and related her struggle with a particularly troublesome word. In one passage, Proust’s narrator speaks fondly of something he calls a boule, which literally means a ball but was commonly used to mean a loaf of bread or a hot-water bottle. Davis’ research into the word led her to friends, restaurants, a baker, and at least one French student, before she selected “hot-water bottle.”
“As you explore all possibilities,” she said, “you go a considerable distance before ending up not far from where you started, but much better informed.”
18
February 2005
Boston University
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