Proust Regained
John Sturrock
- Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott-Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin
Chatto, 1040 pp, £17.50, March 1981, ISBN 0 7011 2477 6
In the spring of 1920 Marcel Proust was fretting because the good ‘Gaston’ (Gallimard, his post-war publisher) had been unforgivably slow in arranging for translations of his now successful novel to be started. In the past 12 months Du Côté de chez Swann had been published for a second time (the little-noticed earlier edition was in 1913) and A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs for the first time; and Proust had, strangely, won the Prix Goncourt, a corrupt award which he had wanted but which generally goes to works of uncomplicated mediocrity. There should, he thought, have been foreign editions pending of these first instalments of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, and an English edition mattered most of all. English was a language which Proust knew and had read in; with help, he had translated his dear Ruskin into French. His sense of symmetry, if not of justice, called now for his own deeply Ruskinian work to be turned into English, and if nothing had so far been done the fault must be Gaston’s because the English themselves were hugely enthusiastic about it: there had, he promised Jacques Rivière, been ‘eight or nine articles in the Times alone’.
You are not Logged In
- If you have already registered login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
- If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions
Letters
Vol. 3 No. 8 · 7 May 1981
From E.E. Duncan-Jones
SIR: John Sturrock does not in his estimable review (LRB, Vol. 3, No 5) inspire full confidence in Terence Kilmartin’s revision of Scott-Moncrieff’s translation of Proust. It is impossible to judge with certainty of the aptness of translations of clauses and phrases taken out of context. But the dozen or so examples of changes made by Kilmartin that Sturrock gives are picked from many that he came upon in a prolonged sampling; and three of them at least raise doubts over and above those raised by Sturrock himself.
Consider, first, dévote. Scott-Moncrieff (‘SM’) has ‘instinct with piety’, Kilmartin (‘K’) has ‘devout’, obviously an improvement. But the word dévot is usually used with pejorative intent – it is often best translated by ‘bigot(ed)’. This would doubtless be too strong in the context in question. But is there no pejorative nuance in Proust? ‘Pious’ can fairly readily take on pejorative tones in English, in the right contexts; ‘devout’ rarely does. Something of Proust might not have been rendered here.
Second, orageux et doux in Proust is translated ‘dear tempestuous’ by SM, ‘delightful stormy’ by K. ‘Stormy’ is doubtless better than ‘tempestuous’. But why is doux in both cases rendered by a merely approbative adjective? Doux has a distinct descriptive meaning, ‘soft’, ‘sweet’ or ‘gentle’, and in virtue of this meaning stands in specific and directly oxymoronic contrast with orageux. This opposition is doubtless intended by Proust. It should be preserved.
Third, je puisse un peu les emmerder. SM has ‘I can s – t on them,’ K, Sturrock says, ‘naturally gives us the full four letters’. But this is simply inaccurate, unless emmerder has changed its meaning radically in the last sixty years: it is simply slang (now very harmless and very widely employed indeed) for ‘to make things difficult for’, ‘to make trouble for’, ‘to irritate’, ‘to get on the nerves of’. It may have been stronger sixty years ago, but I do not believe that it had anything like the force that ‘to shit on’ has, still less had, in English. A translator into French would make a mistake of the same order if he were to use pisser in his rendering of the expression ‘pissed off with’. In this respect emmerder is like con, which, as an adjective, has between familiars about the same force as bête, and absolutely no hint of obscene connotation; as a noun, too, its standard use to mean ‘stupid fool’, ‘idiot’ is wholly non-obscene, and often affectionate.
Galen Strawson
Oxford
SIR: Disengaged from its context in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30, the phrase that Scott-Moncrieff took as his title might have served well enough for the ‘unsought’ Proustian memories. Curiously, the phrase, did not originate with Shakespeare. It is Scriptural, as would have been well-known had it not occurred in one of the Apocryphal books no longer included in the English Bible. In Shakespeare’s day it was no doubt to be heard regularly in church. ‘Remembrance of things past’ was already there in the Geneva (1560) and the Bishops’ Bible (1568). It is retained in the Authorised Version (1611). The Geneva version reads: ‘Whether they were absent or present their punishment was alike: for their grief was double with mourning, and the remembrance of things past’ (Wisdom of Solomon, XI 10). The Vulgate has ‘memoria praeteritorum’: more Ruskinian.
The well-merited sufferings of the Egyptians are what the passage refers to, and they are not to the point: but as Shakespeare’s sonnet shows, with its ‘grieve at grievances foregone’ and ‘fore-bemoanèd moan’ (cf. ‘their grief was double’), Scriptural expressions in secular contexts are easily freed from their origins.
E.E. Duncan-Jones
Cambridge
From Isabel Jacobs
SIR: I am outraged by John Sturrock’s dismissal of Philippe Jullian’s brilliant illustrations to the 1957 Scott-Moncrieff translation as ‘weedy and intrusive line drawings’. For me and many others they are wonderful visual evocations of Marcel’s times past. Sturrock’s hidebound attitude to visual fantasy perhaps explains why the journal he helps to edit, the TLS, is often such heavy going.
Isabel Jacobs
London NW11
