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Thursday, January 19, 2012

A note on the translation of the titles of Proust's Search for Lost Time/Remembrance of Things Past

Wrapping up the very long first section of "In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower," Proust's 2nd volume of In Search of Lost Time - with more strange behavior by the sinister M. de Charlus, who gives the narrator, M., hell over some weird minor infraction and tells him that will be good for him - hes obvious a cruel, even sadistic man, who would ordinarily be shunned by society, by everyone, but because of his great wealth and his many titles, which he says he scorns but which obviously are very important to his self-image and have made him the powerful man that he is, he can get away with about anything - as we see through the ensuing volumes. Oddly, the "young girls in flower" have not yet appeared in this volume - 350 or so pages in; odd, in that my memory from previous reading was that the whole volume was about M. meeting Albertine on the beach at Balbec. Been reconciled to the Grieve translation of this volume, which at the outset I considered a little choppy - translating Proust is a daunting task, and I have found many beautiful passages in this translation. One thing I do admire about this new translation is the fidelity of the volume titles: the Moncrieff translation titles - this volume was Within a Budding Grove - are more mellifluous and "poetic" - but they're not Proust's titles (including Remembrance - if Proust had wanted to evoke Shakespeare or any other writer, he would have done so and Moncrieff should not have done so for him). Oddly, though, the final volume gets translated as Finding Time Again, when the title clearly (I think) should the Time Regained or Time Found or Time Recaptured - not Finding...

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