In Search of Lost Time Read Free

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     of Proustian discourse, while, on the other hand, Kilmartin at times returns us to
     the language of the Victorian nursery. For example, when the narrator’s
     mother, in the famous goodnight kiss scene, reads George Sand’s
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
’. The phrase ‘
redevenues
     imagées
’ connotes both visual and rhetorical meanings
     (something like ‘metaphorical colour’). Scott
     Moncrieff’s translation is uselessly but harmlessly literal
     (‘returned as imagery’). Kilmartin goes for meaning but in the
     wrong register, rendering it as ‘quaint and picturesque’ (a bit
     rich, then, for Enright to accuse Scott Moncrieff of being
     ‘quaint’). Nor do we really need the lamentably sentimental
     ‘damsel’ for Proust’s
     ‘
fillette
’ designating the Parisian laundry girl the
     narrator fancies (Scott Moncrieff simply has ‘girl’).
    And what of the question of titles? There will always be fans of Scott
     Moncrieff’s prettily Shakespearean
Remembrance of Things Past
.
     But we also know that Proust took vigorous exception to Scott Moncrieff’s
     title, and for good reason. It removes virtually everything expressed or implied by
     the original, most notably the double connotations of the adjective
     ‘
perdu
’ (which signifies both
     ‘lost’ and ‘wasted’) and hence the sense of
     Proust’s narrative as a tale of false turns as well as retrospective ones.
     ‘Remembrance’ smacks too much of the nostalgia-laden, rarely far
     from the cakes-and-strawberries version of Proust that, for the English, is the
     equivalent of the tea-party image of Jane Austen’s world favoured by a
     certain class of Janeites. It has nothing in common with the more strenuously
     analytical sense of ‘
recherche
’, implying the
     consciously ‘experimental’ in the work of the search. It seems
     that Kilmartin wanted to use the far more exact
In Search of Lost Time
for
     his first revision but was overruled by his publishers. Fortunately, he succeeded in
     having his way for the subsequent revision and here we have followed in his
     footsteps.
    But there is also the question of the titles of the individual
     volumes. Kilmartin finally jettisoned Scott Moncrieff’s coyly biblical
Cities of
the Plain
(for
Sodome et Gomorrhe
) and the
     impossibly saccharine
The Sweet Cheat Gone
(for
La Fugitive
or
Albertine disparue
) in favour of a more literal match with
     Proust’s own choices. We have done likewise:
Sodom and Gomorrah
,
The Fugitive
. But in respect of
Du côté de chez
     Swann
,
A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs
,
Le
     Côté de Guermantes
,
La Prisonnière
and
Le Temps retrouvé
, Kilmartin reproduced what he inherited from
     Scott Moncrieff. Of these we have retained only
The Guermantes Way
, in the
     belief that it is important to preserve the echo of the title of the first volume,
     notwithstanding the fact that the topographical symbolism of the two
     ‘ways’ along which the narrator and his family take their walks
     in Combray is of little relevance to the actual narrative of
Le
     Côté de Guermantes
(whose
     ‘Guermantes’ sequence is set in Paris). There are, however,
     several problems, some acute, with Scott Moncrieff’s translations of the
     remaining four titles, and here new versions have been provided. * Some readers may
     take offence at this titular tampering, especially those for whom the titles are
     like iconic signatures, part of our very image of both the writer and his work; this
     is perhaps most compellingly the case with the given titles of the opening and
     closing volumes,
Swann’s Way
and
Time Regained
. It may
     well be, however, that