In Search of Lost Time Read Free Page B

intractable, there is no way in which they can be
     readily adjudicated or resolved. Arising from this more general theoretical
     question, there are, however, a number of practical matters on which, for reasons of
     consistency, adjudication has been essential (the unenviable yet unavoidable task of
     the general editor). They include: place-names; personal titles; quotations;
     dialogue. For the most part, the foreignizing conception has prevailed. In the case
     of place names, we have retained the standard French forms (e.g. rue de Rivoli,
     place de la Concorde, etc.). Personal titles, especially aristocratic ones, are
     trickier for two reasons. First, the respective French and English systems of rank
     are not strictly commensurable; translating ‘
duc
’ as
     ‘duke’ (or ‘Duke’),
     ‘
duchesse
’ as ‘duchess’ (or
     ‘Duchess’) and so on is not quite right. Secondly, personal
     titles often serve more as proper names of characters than as indicators of rank. We
     have accordingly adopted a series of compromises. Notwithstanding the
     incommensurabilities, we have translated (in lower case) where the sense is generic
     (‘he was a duke’), but we have kept the French in all other
     cases, including the many abbreviations from, for example, ‘
duc de
     Guermantes
’ to ‘
duc
’
     (‘
le duc disait
’). In this case, however, we have
     converted from lower to upper case (‘The Duc de Guermantes’,
     ‘the Duc said…’), partly on the grounds that this
     seemed more appropriate for an English reader when the sense in question was
     effectively that of a proper name.
    Where quotations from French literary sources are concerned, apolicy of wholesale translation into English would in principle
     be desirable. In the case of free-standing verse quotation, however, this runs
     immediately into severe difficulties, above all in connection with the most
     abundantly quoted author in
A la recherche
, Racine. Attempts to find or
     forge satisfactory English forms, across the very different metrical and rhetorical
     conventions of French and English regular verse, defeated us. This is no mere
     technical point. There is a very real risk that one ends up with either flatly
     prosaic representations of the original French or artificial pastiches of English
     verse forms. Neither of these outcomes is desirable in so far as neither would be
     true to the spirit of Proust. The Racine quotations are often playful, but they are
     not just a joke. They also perform a complex and provocative literary move: by
     quoting the highly formal verse of Racine in the context of the themes of incest and
     homosexuality, Proust is wresting Racine from the neoclassical orthodoxies of his
     age and aligning him with the more modern image of the
poète
     maudit
(in one of his letters Proust claimed that Racine was more
     ‘immoral’ than Baudelaire). Attempting to translate the
     quotations into English could easily wreck this move; we have accordingly quoted in
     French, while supplying an English version in the notes.
    Lastly, there is the question of the way Proust both disposes and
     marks dialogue. His practice here varies. Sometimes he ventilates speech, with
     separate paragraphs for each individual speaker. Sometimes, he embeds dialogue in
     the same paragraph, often further cemented with surrounding narrative and discursive
     material. The latter procedure is particularly noticeable in the later volumes and
     is apparently to be explained on the purely material grounds of his
     publisher’s worry about space. The ‘naturalizing’
     model of translation might well be tempted to ventilate some of this, in the name of
     a more accessible English version. An unintended consequence of Proust’s
     method of embedding, however, is a tendency to dissolve individuated speech into the
     flow of the Proustian monologue, an