Swann's Way
The two-minute 'Swann'
First we lull Little Marcel to sleep, then we join him on long walks out from Combray. One direction takes him "the Guermantes way," prefiguring the rich, beautiful, addled, and perverted clan that will people the novel to come. The other direction is "Swann's way." On one of the latter walks, Marcel spies a girl with red hair and promptly falls in love, as he is prone to do. (For folks who seek symbols in literature, Swann's way is also the life of the mind, as opposed to the high society of the Guermantes.)But the big news of this volume is the earlier love of Charles Swann for the courtesan Odette de Crecy. This section is best summarized in Swann's closing words: "To think that I wasted years of my life, that I wanted to die, that I felt my deepest love, for a woman who did not appeal to me, who was not my type!" (But note that Swann's renunciation doesn't stop him from marrying her! This he evidently does in order that their daughter may be introduced to the Duchesse de Guermantes, a sweet but rather loopy motive.)
Flash forward to Paris, where Young Marcel (my guess is that he is now 14) meets the redhaired Gilberte Swann in the Jardin des Champs Élysées and realizes his love, after a fashion.
The new Penguin/Viking edition
The American fiction writer Lydia Davis has done a masterful job
at brushing up Scott Moncrieff's
somewhat musty, post-Victorian prose. (Helas, I can't compare her
version with Proust's Du côté de chez Swann,
for the very good reason that I've never studied French. I can
suss it out, and I can buy a meal or a railway ticket, but no more.) The two versions really aren't that much different: I've compared
sentences here and there, and generally only one word has been changed.
But often that word is important. Scott Moncrieff, for example,
will have Swann exclaiming something, while Davis has him
saying it—and from what I can tell, that's what
Proust was writing also. Then too, she strips out many of the
intensifiers, so that Swann is now content with something,
instead of being quite content. This too seems closer to
the original. Finally, she often opts for the less elegant word,
delicious instead of exquisite
(see Dueling madeleines for an extended
example of Moncrieff v. Davis).
The new translations are also technically more accurate than the earlier versions, because they incorporate the latest French scholarship on Proust. I found a few typographical errors in the American edition of the new Swann's Way; I don't know whether they spring from the Penguin edition or were created in the course of rendering the British language into American. Except for one case (where O appears instead of An), they won't cause any confusion. (I had to go back to the French to clear that one up.)
In Britain, this first volume is titled The Way By Swann's, and there are a few differences in the text as well. French literary quotations remain in French; conversation is shown by dashes instead of quotation marks, and the spelling presumably is British standard.
