In Search of Lost Time Read Free Page A

aura here is simply being confused with habit (whose
     immobilizing power is one of Proust’s own great themes), and that there is
     consequently merit in accepting the invitation to think again, especially where
     there are grounds for querying the accuracy of Scott Moncrieff’s versions
     (
Swann’s Way
, for example, has little connection with the
     grammar, meaning and rhythm of
Du côté de chez Swann
).
     Idolatrous icons are no substitute for textual fidelity.
    Yet, if on the matter of titles Kilmartin proved
     reluctant to move decisively beyond Scott Moncrieff, there can be no disputing that
     in very many respects the former’s translation threw into relief aspects
     of Proust’s text neglected or unseen by the latter, and this inevitably
     raises the question as to why we might ‘need’ yet another
     translation a mere decade after the publication of the Kilmartin/Enright
     re-revision. To the more sceptically minded, the best answer will presumably be no
     answer at all: reason not the need. Translation is not a zero-sum game, nor is it a
     competitive agon in which sons slay fathers. Henry James described the house of
     fiction as a house with many windows, and there is no reason why the figure of
     speech should not be carried over to the translation of fiction. In general terms,
     what distinguishes the present undertaking from its predecessors is twofold. First,
     it is not a ‘revision’ based on minute attention to the text of
     a prior translation. It is a ‘new’ translation in the strong and
     simple sense of a translation done from scratch. Secondly – this will
     doubtless be its most controversial feature – it is a team-based effort,
     with a different translator for each of the seven volumes.
    Although not without precedent (there are already team-work
     translations in both German and Italian), the disadvantages of such an arrangement
     are obvious. At the deepest level they concern the management of differences arising
     not just from the interpretation of Proust’s text but from philosophical
     conflicts over the nature and purpose of literary translation as such. This,
     broadly, is the conflict between what we might call the naturalizing and the
     foreignizing conceptions. The latter holds that we should never be allowed to forget
     that what we are reading is indeed a translation and that it is therefore both
     duty-bound and condemned to bear within it some trace of the foreignness in which it
     has taken up abode. Reading
A la recherche
in English should not seek to
     mask the fact that it was originally written in French. Conversely, the former
     assumes that the prime task of the translator is to naturalize the host language as
     far as possible into the terms of the guest language, in such a way as to create for
     the reader the sense that he or she is reading a text as if it had been
     ‘originally’ written in the guest language. This appears to have
     been Kilmartin’s working hypothesis. ‘[T]he main problem with
     Scott Moncrieff’sversion 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?”’ Yet, if at first
     glance this looks like a reasonable benchmark, it is in fact demented. Perhaps we
     can make some sense of the notion of what
A la recherche
would have looked
     like had Proust written it in English by recasting it as the question of how a
     roughly contemporaneous English writer might have written it. But this
     counterfactual imagining is also a somewhat murky notion. What, from the history of
     English-language fiction, could serve as a comparable model of literary prose? The
     style of Henry James or Edith Wharton, for example? The analogy, if pressed, would
     quite rapidly reach breaking point.
    Translation by a team inevitably brings these vexed issues out into
     the open, and, at their most