r/Proust

Sorry for yet another translation thread, I've tried searching around but haven't found a ton of discussion about the Oxford translations yet, understandably as they're newer.

This year I set a goal for myself to read all of In Search of Lost Time and have been smoothly plugging away, currently on Guermantes Way. I have been reading the Carter edition, which I have found enjoyable to read and have really appreciated the annotations. I've seen critiques here and elsewhere about the decline in quality of the Carter version as you get further along, but from what I understand, the consensus seems to be that there isn't a perfect translation, especially for the later volumes. I have seen plenty of praise for the new Oxford translations, which has got me thinking that I would be totally fine pumping the brakes on my goal if it meant I could get the most enjoyment out of this novel by reading along as the new volumes get published. Of course this gambles on the later volumes being good where past translations may have failed. Would anyone recommend this, or want to argue in favor of Carter or another translation for the Sodom and onward?

Viva La France

I’ve read In Search of Lost Time on three separate occasions. I’ve read Swann’s Way 5 times. Now I’m reading the whole thing again and writing something between a response and summary on a weekly basis, covering maybe 12 pages at a time. My challenge is to make a guide and summary of the text but in a way that also includes my own feelings and thoughts. I believe a well-written summary can communicate some of the novel’s power and bring some underlying pieces to the surface as I begin some authentic analysis of its genius. Mostly, I hope it’s fun to write and read!

*

Appropriately, Swann’s Way starts with the narrator out of place and time. It tells us not about a specific event in time but about a series of events merged as one (“For a long time…”). The narrator falls asleep accidentally and unwittingly. He believes he’s awake, experiencing reality, but he’s in his dreams, and his dreams are infected with the book he was reading when he fell asleep. This all occurs in the past, when he was a child (*edit, possibly not a child, as a reader pointed out, it's unclear, and probably unlikely that he's reading what he reads in the opening as a kid). He’s telling us this in retrospect. Fiction, dreams, and memory displace the present and the real. We’re in his mind, where we’ll be for the remaining million or so words.

For these opening pages, we stay in a diffuse moment. Nothing happens. He describes a habit. The phrase “I would” appears again and again, letting us know this happened frequently, that this is close to a nightly routine.

The narrator takes leaps of imagination. Distant sounds bring to mind far-away travelers. A light beneath the door is first the sun (“Oh, joy of joys it is morning.”), and then it’s extinguished. It was a gas lantern, put out by a servant going to bed. Rather than ending, the night is beginning. Like so much of the novel, the narrator’s confusion produces fears, hopes, and drama out of thin air.

He sleeps again and has anxious dreams. The narrator feels his uncle pull at curls the narrator cut off long ago. He finds a woman who, “just as Eve was created from a rib of Adam,” has been created in his dreams from some “strain in the position of my limbs.” Sometimes this dream woman resembles a real one, and, with his satisfaction incomplete, he decides to seek her out, “like people out on a journey to see with their own eyes some city that they have always longed to visit, and imagine that they can taste in reality what was charmed their fancy.” But the memory of this woman “would dissolve and vanish, until I had forgotten the maiden of my dreams.”

Unsatisfied desire. Unattainable love. A reality that can’t hold a candle to the dreams. It’s all here already.

In his dreams, the narrator goes on far away adventures, and when he wakes in different rooms, he has to “put together by degrees the component parts of my ego.” Even his own identity can shift beneath him. Even that must be composed. He must wonder: “perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them.” In his analysis of objects, we can see the future anxieties he’ll have about people.

In the dark room where he’s woken, he remembers rooms from the past. Maybe he’s recomposed himself. But when is this? Is he in his bedroom at his great-aunt’s house? Has Mamma only recently gone to bed? No, he is in Madame de Saint-Loup’s country home. Or is he? He’s not sure. For a few seconds, he is lost amidst the “shifting and confused gusts of memory.”

When he finally wakes fully, he reflects and thinks on the various places he’s known—Combray, Balbec, Paris, Doncieres, Venice, and more—and the many people he met.

The narrator remembers Combray and his room there and a gift he received, a magic lantern, which projects onto the walls an “impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many colours, in which legends were depicted, as on a shifting and transitory window.” The walls become a land of tales, but this only adds to his sorrows (his mind is fertile soil for sorrows, which sprout like crabgrass in spring). The room has been bearable only because it was stable, and though he loves stories and legends and fictions and fantasy, these projections have disturbed the room’s stability and the narrator already has enough instability to contend with: he has to recompose his own self when he wakes, after all, he loses tracks of dreams and reality, and time is easily placed out of joint.

In the span of a handful of dense, perambulating pages, the novel has established some primary concerns amidst confusion, dread, and dreams. Similes, metaphors, and metonyms abound. At certain times, they’re frightful and unwanted, and at other times they seem to be life’s animating source. Why must a distant train whistle be like “the note of a bird in a forest” and why must that bring to mind a traveler? Because to do otherwise would be to prune the world of the true reality, of the many layers and possibilities present in a dream woman, who can be Eve or a real woman or a city, or of those present in a streak of light, which can be the sun or a lamp. The “immobility” of these objects, their oneness and wholeness, is “forced upon them.” The novel’s figurative language and comparisons aren’t the work of an overly imaginative mind but rather the result of someone truly seeing the objects as their truly incomprehensible, uncircumscribable, fragmented selves.

It’s a perfect declaration for one of the great of imagination that mankind has ever produced. We’re in a world of abundance and pluripotentiality, where two things can be the same thing and neither can be only one thing. Appropriately, it is as if we, the readers, are emerging from a dream of our own.

*

A note on translation:

I first read In Search of Lost time through the Modern Library editions, the Moncrieff translation revised by Kilmartin and Enright. I then reread the same translation. I then read the new Penguin editions. For this project, I’m reading the unrevised Moncrieff translations while simultaneously listening to the audiobook of that version (a practice known as Immersive Reading, which I enjoy and recommend). I have a sentimental attachment to the Moncrieff/Kilmartin/Enright, but I think that regardless of individual flaws, you can read any translation and love the books. I would recommend you pick one set, and when it’s time to reread (if you love these books, you’ll want to reread), you pick a different set.

I recently completed In Search of Lost Time, and I loved it, and it is still top of mind despite reading two other books since I finished it. So here I am reading East of Eden 170 some odd pages in, and there is a sequence where Samuel, after meeting Cathy, is riding away thinking about her eyes, and that they seemed so familiar. He then relates a memory of witnessing a hanging as a young boy and recognizing that the "Golden Man" who was executed had eyes with "no depth," not "eyes of a man" and wondering of that is where he recognized in Cathy. Samuel's memory is very detailed and very in-depth, then we get the line

"there it was mined put of the dusty past"

and followed immediately by

"Doxology was climbing the last rise before the hollow of the home ranch and the big feet stumbled over stones in the roadway."

That right there is what triggered me, the horse stumbling over the stones in the middle of a mining of a memory felt very similar to the narrator, about halfway through Finding Time Again, stumbling over some uneven paving stones and that triggering a flood of memories not unlike the bite of the Madeline, in Swanns Way.

I know if you walk around with a Hammer everything looks like a nail, so will everything feel like a Proust reference if you just spent 5 months reading him, but Steinbeck's choice to mention the horse stumbling in the middle of a memory and revelation for Samuel feels to coincidental to be accidental.

What do you think??

Also I have NOT advanced far past this part in East of Eden so please so spoilers.

Fellow Proustians, I have a favor to ask:

I've seen cited in many places a letter from Proust to Jacques Riviere from February 7, 1914. It contains this quote: "Enfin je trouve un lecteur qui devine que mon livre est un ouvrage dogmatique et une construction!" Google translates: "Finally, I've found a reader who understands that my book is a dogmatic work and a construction!"

If anyone has a copy of the correspondence (in either French or English) which includes this letter, I would be very grateful if you could take a photo of the pages containing the letter and post it here. Thank you kindly.