Proust

[Inderjit Sanghera]

Anybody else here a fan of Proust? If so, which volume is your favourite? And for any native French readers, which translation do you feel is better, Moncrieff's or the newish Penguin one?

[Freewheeling Andy]

I prefer to eat madeleines. They bring back memories...

[Maggie Dana]

I've often wondered how to pronounce Proust. PROWst or PROOst, but only when eating napoleons.

[Seiichi]

I'm slowly making my way through the books --- I'm reading the original Moncrieff translation that's available online. As far as I can tell, Moncrieff is a little too literal in places and perhaps doesn't do justice to the original French when capturing the mood and language. I'm reminded of something my Latin teacher once said: literal translations are good for GCSE, but a good translator will also try to capture the beauty of the language. As far as I know, the new Penguin translations are a little looser and attempt to reflect the change in the writer's voice. Whichever you prefer comes down to how you like your translations, although I've heard Lydia Davis' translation of Volume 1 is excellent and is preferable to Moncrieff's.

 

As a companion book, I'd recommend reading How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain De Botton. Also, if you can get hold of a copy of Cultural Amnesia, Clive James wrote a lovely entry on Proust.

[sadya]

I adore his work. I don't like the French pronounciation of 'Proust', even though it is of course the accurate one. I always use the English pronounciation which often causes librarians to laugh at me when I request one of his volumes of 'Remembrance of things past'.

 

I read the volumes as I could get them. I had no internet for a while, so I read what I could find in the local library, translated in Dutch. The first volumes were difficult to find for one reason or another. And you can't skip one volume. I noticed that when I had first read 'Time Regained' out of curiosity to see what the hype was about (they praised Proust in a book about writing stories yourself). Immediately liked him.

 

Then I found the first few volumes in our library and afterwards it was difficult. So when many months later I had internet, I read the rest online and also got the Moncrieff translation. I had to get used to the style because it was different from the style of the Dutch translation of course.

 

Didn't stop me from enjoying the rest of the volumes though. To know more about Proust and his work, I joined some yahoogroups and people were discussing the different translations in English. They said that there were many errors in the Moncrieff translation and praised one of the new translations. Someone else said that she preferred the Moncrieff translation because the style appealed more to her. I wouldn't know. Personally I liked the Dutch translation I had found of the first volumes better.

 

There were many wonderful phrases and I wrote many sentences in my notebook as a remembrance. One quote which made me laugh:

 

"Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written yawning."

 

(from 'Seascape, with frieze of girls', everytime Marcel tries to begin writing, he can't and it disappoints him, he starts musing on why he finds it boring to write something and his thoughts end with the above quote)

Edited May 3, 2009 by sadya

[Inderjit Sanghera]

I am plodding through the first volume-it is extraordinary-I prefer this translation to Moncrieff's more flowery one, because it is (apparently) more literal. Proust is a very painterly writer, even more so than Nabokov, he is like a painter who cannot paint, but can write, his description of the humdrum, churches, meadows and people, are utterly beautiful, and like many great painters, he brings out a certain light or aspect in a person or object which nobody else could notice, he has the ability, like the narrator's grandmother, to see beauty where nobody sees it, or wants to see it.

 

As sadya mentions, he can also be very funny-his descriptions of his great auntie Leonie, 'a grotesque parody of Marcel himself

[Kylie]

Inderjit, I really enjoyed your description of Proust's writing. I'll have to be careful which translation I buy by the sounds of it.

[Inderjit Sanghera]

Thanks, I really feel I need to read Proust slower than any other writer, due to the painterly nature of his prose and his descriptions, of, for example, the hawthorn berries. I think Proust does best what all true artists aspire to do. His characterisation is also beyond most writers-characters like Albertine, Swann, Marcel, Saint-Loup and of course Charlus are beyond one, two or three dimensional, they are Proustdimensional, utterly unique, utterly individual, as free from cliche's as possible.