All about the new Penguin/Viking editions of Marcel Proust's great novel, À la recherche du temps perdu, once known in English as Remembrance of Things Past but now more accurately titled In Search of Lost Time

e-books by Daniel Ford

READING PROUST

(In Search of Lost Time, with special attention to the new translations from Penguin/Viking)

One of the benefits of running a website like this one is the email that come from strangers far away: ' Dear Sir, Your Reading Proust site is absolutely stunning, and I have just spent two marvellous hours browsing thru it.... By any chance, do you have any tips to give me on how to find the golden fleece, i.e. the translation of Swann's way by James Grieve? Again, my most enthusiastic congratulations. Olivier Lécrivain' Inspired by M. Lécrivain, I located a copy of the Grieve translation in Australia, and it reached me in an amazingly short time. I'm enjoying it hugely--which worries me a bit! This is my fifth encounter with Swann's Way; could it be that I like it the better, the more familiar I am with it? This throws into confusion the whole premise of this website--that the Penguin translations are ever so superior to those of Charles Scott Moncrieff and his helpers. However that may be, I've added Mr Grieve's version to my page on the Dueling madeleines. You decide!

Another email comes from Bronxville, New York, in Westchester County half an hour from Grand Central Station. A reading group there, having successfuly negotiated Joyce's Ulysses, plan next to start on Proust's masterwork, and they're looking for a knowledgable amateur to help them along. They're couples and singles, and they meet the second Thursday evening of the month, starting in October. Interested? Send me email, and I'll put you in touch with Christina, who's organizing the read. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

How this project began

Marcel Proust I started Swann's Way a couple times before a pal challenged me to read the whole of the novel with him. Every Wednesday on his way to the law office where he was a low-level attorney, he'd stop by my room (it had a kitchen but wasn't really an apartment). We'd drink coffee, smoke(!), and talk about Proust. Egging each other on in this fashion, we both finished the novel before the year was out.

Ten years later, I read the novel again—and aloud—to my wife over the course of two winters. (One of the French deconstructionists, arguing that one can't just study a novel by itself, because it's a collaborative venture between the author and the reader, cinched his case by pointing out: "After all, who has read every word of À la recherche du temps perdu?" It pleased me hugely to be able to say, if only silently, "I did!")

That was the handsome, two-volume Random House edition of the novel, entitled Remembrance of Things Past, the first six books rendered into English by Charles Scott Moncrieff and the seventh by Frederick Blossom. (Scott Moncrieff died before finishing his task, which is probably the reason Penguin decided to employ seven different translators for its 21st century Proust.) When Kilmartin's reworking came out in the 1990s, I acquired that, too, but only read pieces of it—notably book seven, The Past Recaptured, greatly improved over the rather lame Blossom translation. Otherwise, however, Remembrance of Things Past was still hobbled by the post-Victorian prose of Scott Moncrieff.

Then came the new Penguin editions, the first four volumes of which have now been published in the U.S. by Viking. After reading a rave review of vol. 2—In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower—I realized that I would have to read it. On second thought, I decided to start from the beginning with the new Swann's Way. It was a good decision. Lydia Davis did a wonderful job with the first volume, and by the time I'd lulled Little Marcel to sleep (on page 43 in this edition), I knew that I was once again in for the long haul. So I set out to acquire a complete set of hardcover books—not so easy, as matters turned out! I read them in sequence, and I have reported on them here.

The novel according to Penguin

And for extra credit :)

But why bother?

The French sometimes boast that they have a Shakespeare for every generation, or at least for every century, while we Anglophones are stuck with Will's originals. Well, now we can say the same about Proust!

Beyond that, I've seen it argued that literary French has changed little over the past hundred years, while English most certainly has, under the battering of such writers as James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. (Whatever you say about Charles Scott Moncrieff, he probably never read Ulysses and he certainly was unfamiliar with the noisy young journalist who stormed into Paris in 1921.) However that may be, it's nice to have a freshened version of Proust's prose, and one that arguably is closer to the original than the one rendered by Scott Moncrieff in the 1920s.

(Proust, Joyce, and Hemingway! It's pleasant to think that my three favorite writers once breathed the same air in Paris. Indeed, Joyce and Proust once met at a party ... and had little or nothing to say to one another.)