Not lost in translation

Friend WS (not William Shakespeare) takes me to task for suggesting that one of the qualities of enjoyable literature is the beauty of the language - and then citing Proust. To make that claim, he asks, shouldn't I have to be reading Proust in the original French? Good point, to a degree - I'm sure P.'s fiction is even more beautiful in his original language, but I don't agree that you have to read Search of Lost Time in French to appreciate and experience its beauty. Frost said that poetry is what's lost in translation - and that's true, for poetry. We (I) rarely read poetry in translation and even more rarely remember or can quote a line of translated poetry (exceptions: Cesar Vallejo in Bly's translation). But prose fiction is somewhat more pliable, even really difficult prose like Proust's - and I do think I should give full credit to the translator(s) when I praise the beauty of Proust's writing, so hats off to Lydia Davis for her translation of Swann's Way. With some great translations, like the Volokhonsky-Pevear translations of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Chekhov, I'm never struck by the beauty of the language but by the beauty of the writing. With Proust, it's different. The beauty of Proust's writing isn't so much about the choice, sound, cadence of individual words and phrases (that would be more true for Joyce, and perhaps for Faulkner too) but about the very nature of his observations - the choice of details, the evocation of particular places and moments. I notice the same phenomenon in some of the Thomas Mann stories that I have just finished reading, but Mann accumulates specific details from the outside - a cold-eyed and scrutinizing observer - he can detail every object in a room, every article of clothing, every facial feature - whereas Proust can isolate just one detail (the red shoes of the duchess) and elevate it, perseverate on it, to such a degree that the detail stands for the entire character or the entire scene. So there's a beauty of language that comes from the sense and sound of the words, and there's another kind of beauty that comes from the referential quality of the language - the images that the language evokes and conveys. You can appreciate this beauty in any good translation.