readingproust.com

Reading Proust: In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past)

️Daniel Ford

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

READING MARCEL PROUST

(In Search of Lost Time in English translation

Listening to Time Regained

I was delighted to discover that Naxos Audiobooks has issued what it calls "Remembrance of Things Past", narrated by the late Neville Jason. Mr Jason began as an actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company and later appeared in film and television dramas, including From Russia with Love, the James Bond film with Sean Connery (Mr Jason was Karim's chauffeur). Starting in 1987, he began to record classics for Naxos, including the whole of War and Peace and "Remembrance", using the Scott Moncrieff 1920s translations for the first six books and what purported to be a new translation by "David Whiting" for the seventh, Time Regained. (Scott Moncrieff died before finishing his heroic task.) Actually, it appears that the translator was Mr Jason himself, working from the 1931 version by Stephen Hudson, an English friend of Proust who wrote under the pseudonym of Sydney Schiff.

I have acquired the audio of Time Regained, and while Mr Jason's voice rolls out of my Fire tablet, I follow along in the Sydney Schiff translation in the excellent Centaur Classics ebook, which alas is no longer available in the US. Amazon does however offer another edition that looks to be much the same and has the advantage of being free! (I find the actual page essential. When I listen without having something to occupy my eyes, my mind wanders and too often I fall asleep.) I'm enjoying it hugely. The audio is very good, and Mr Jason is a very convincing narrator, though he goes a bit over the top with Robert St Loup and especially the vainglorious Baron Charlus. I appreciate, too, hearing Mr Jason's pronunciation of the names -- Bloch, especially, was a revelation, for he pronounces the ch in a mild Germanic way, neither clearing his throat like Peter Sellars in Dr Strangelove nor hissing the word as I learned long ago in Frankfurt.

A tip of the virtual hat to Jeremy Weinstein, who first alerted me to the Naxos recordings. "Jason does such a wonderful job reading," he says. "As the other translations have a much less ... 'Proustian' feel to them, I imagine he wanted to continue in the same vein [as Scott Moncrieff had done]. It's jarring reading Time Regained as translated by Stephen Hudson.... I suspect Jason felt the sameand thought it worth going ahead himself for the last volume [much as anyone] who put so much effort into something would want to end on a [higher] note."

It would be nice to have Jason's version of Time Regained in a print edition or ebook -- it's better, I think, than the Andreas Mayor translation as updated by Kilmartin and Enright for the Modern Library edition. Perhaps Mr Jason felt, or his heirs or Naxos feel, that there could be a conflict with the Hudson copyright. In the meantime, the Jason narration is available from the Audible library on Amazon. The first month is free, and at an hour a day, I hope to finish the book in about three weeks.

Prowst?

Speaking of audio, I often hear the author's surnamed pronounced as PROWST. I did a web search and found that I was more or less correct to say PROOST. Go to YouTube to hear a Frenchwoman say it.

How this project began

Marcel Proust I had peeked into Swann's Way a few times before a pal challenged me to read the entire novel with him. Every Wednesday on his way to the law office where he was an associate attorney, he stopped by my rented room (it had a kitchen and bath but wasn't really an apartment). We drank coffee, smoked(!), and talked about the week's reading. Egging each other on in this fashion, we both finished Remembrance of Things Past before the year was out.

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

That was the handsome, two-volume Random House edition of the novel, the first six books rendered into English by C K Scott Moncrieff and the seventh by Frederick Blossom. (Scott Moncrieff died before finishing his task, which is probably why Penguin decided to employ seven different translators for its 21st century Proust.) When Terence Kilmartin's reworking came out in the 1990s, I bought that three-volume edition, but read only pieces of it — notably Andreas Mayor's translation of Time Regained, greatly improved over the rather lame Blossom version. Otherwise, Remembrance of Things Past seemed mostly unchanged from Scott Moncrieff's translation.

Then came the Penguin editions, the first four volumes of which were published in the US by Viking. After reading a rave review of vol. 2 — In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower — I decided 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 the Viking edition), I knew that I was once again in for the long haul. 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 reported on them in what was a sort of blog. And more recently I began to add the elegant Yale University Press editions as they were published, though I have now given up on them.

The novel in translation

But why bother?

The French sometimes boast that they have a Shakespeare for every generation, or at least for every century, while we Anglophones must stick with Will’s originals. Well, now we can say the same about Proust! (And indeed it's no longer true for the Bard. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival has commissioned the translation of his 39 plays into modern English, with -- of course! -- more than half the translators being female, and more than half "of color.")

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 C K 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.)

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