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shadowkatThis morning, I considered my options after a bowl of mesa sunrise cornflakes and raspberries sprinkled on top, do I finish Chapter 1 of Swann's Way or pop in a DVD of an old TV Series?
I chose the former, even though yesterday felt a bit burnt out on info. Unlike many of the books and articles I've been reading lately, Swann's Way felt like an exhalation or inhalation of air, possibly both. I did not feel, like I often do when reading something, as if I'm holding my breath under water or that the words are attempting to confine me in a neat little defined box each new sentence another brick in the wall of my confinement. Which I suppose is one of the many problems of reading a psychological analysis of a human condition - *cough*selfimprovementbooks*cough*. What happens if you don't quite fit within all the borders of analysis? But I digress, this post is not going to be about self-improvement books or rather a rant about self-improvement books.
Before picking up Swann's Way, I flirted with it for about two months in the local book store. Prior to that I read numerous posts in numerous blogs expounding on the brilliance of Proust...which like it or not can occassionally come across as a little pretentious. It's *not* deliberate. But I think sometimes, and this goes back to my days as an English Lit major sitting within the bowels of the library computer room hammering away at my oh so pretentious comparision of James Joyce's Ulyssess to William Faulkner's Sound and the Fury while next to me was a cool guy (wore black, blond curly hair, glasses, and a sharp almost hawkish nose matching equally sharp cheekbones, plus black leather boots) wrote his thesis on the superhero as vigilante in noir graphic novels, that discussing great works of literature can come across as pretentious (or maybe elitist is the better word) - especially if one feels the need to state obvious things like "oh its brilliant" and "a great work" - well, duh, otherwise it would not still be in print after 100 years or for that matter translated in numerous languages. (I always loved Joss Whedon's statement:"no we are not going to comment on how pretty the actors are, of course they are pretty otherwise we would not have hired them" which more or less goes to the same point.) I think this while reading Lydia Davis' interview with Rick Moody in the literary magazine, The Tin House that I picked up yesterday at the Brooklyn Book Festival (along with two other mags: Poets & Writers and Bomb (which features film, art, and book interviews)). I also thought it while reading Francine Prose's "Reading Like A Writer" - which for some reason much like Jonathan Franzen's "How to Be Alone" literary essays feels the need to only mention writers within the "literary canon" such as Edith Wharton, Virgina Woolf, Marcel Proust, Isaak Bable, Joseph Heller, et al as if nothing else out there is worthy of our attention. Making me wonder what it takes to make the "club" and if you are not in the "club" should you even bother? And I'll be honest for a while I avoided reading Swann's Way because of its literary pedigree. A rebellion of sorts against my literary past.
That said, Swann's Way is *not* what one would think and deserves its literary pedigree not solely for the author's use of language, which is nothing to scoff at but as read solely through a translation of the work (more on that later) may also be circumspect (I don't think it is), but also for why the author tells his tale and how he takes what many might call a simple memoir and turns it into a work of fiction, commenting on both forms as he does so - and all I might add within the first 47 pages. The story is about the loss and rediscovery of memory, in the case of this volumn "childhood memories" from the distant perspective of an adult. And to an extent, it is also one of the most honest "memoirs" I've seen, since unlike most memoirs, Proust places his within the category of "fiction" instead of "non-fiction", allowing himself the ability to embellish and change items that happened to him in life. For example regarding the famous bit about the petite madelines: The item that brought back the memory in reality was a bit of dry toast (not a madeline) and the memory it inspired? One regarding his grandfather (not an aunt). He chose to fictionalize the work and not make it about him. A hint to why he does this may be found within the following passage:
The past is hidden outside the realm of our intelligence and beyond its reach, in some material object (in the sensation that this material object would give us) which we do not suspect. It depends on chance whether we encounter this object before we die, or do not encounter it.
Memories are fleeting and a bit like butterflies, those pretty monarchs that rest oh so briefly on one's shoulder like a feather then flutter off the moment you notice. Proust describes the summoning of a memory from a petite madeline his mother places with his tea, it takes a while, he has to work for it and in this famous passage that has been reproduced elsewhere - he states how the memory emerges from a sensory experience causing the madeline to taste far better than it usually does - because within it was a lost bit of time.
And suddenly the memory appeared. That taste was the taste of the little piece of madeline which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because that day I did not go out before it was time for Mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Leonie would give me after dipping it in her infusion of tea or lime blossom. The sight of the little madeleine had not reminded me of anything before I tasted it: perhaps because I had often seen them since, without eating them, on the shelves of the pastry shops, and their image had therefore left those days of Combray and attached itself to others more recent; perhaps because of these recollections abandoned so long outside my memory, nothing survived, everything had come apart; the forms and the form, too, of the little shell made of cake, so fatly sensual within its severe and pious pleating- had been destroyed, or, still half asleep, had lost the force of expansion that would have allowed them to rejoin my consciousness. But, when nothering subsists of an old past, after the death of people, after the destruction of things, alone, frailer but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, smell and taste still remain for a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, upon the ruins of all the rest, bearing without fiving way, on their almost impalapable droplet, the immense edifice of memory.
The overall title of Proust's novel which has been published in a series of volumns due to its length, much like George RR Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire" or JRR Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" or even Dorothy Dunnett's "The Chronicles of Lymond", is In Search of Lost Time. Good Titles often will provide a potential reader with a teaser or hint of what the novel is about. In this case -Proust has summed it up in phrase. He tells us in that phrase that his novel is about hunting memories and how memories unfold, and their effect on us, as we reconsider our past. In Search of Lost Time is not necessarily meant as a coming of age story, we are not following a young boy on his journey through life but rather an adult's review of his own life and how it has changed and influenced and affected him. Why he remembers certain things over others and why those memories play out in his head the way they do, and how he remembers them - what brings them on. [Now as an aside, I'll put in a little disclaimer, which I possibly should cut and past to the top of this but cannot figure out where to put it - in the intro, the translator, Lydia Davis, states: "...confronting the book itself is an entirely different, and individual, experience. One will have one's own way of visualizing the narrator's childhood bedtime scene with his mother...[each bit - don't want to give everything away)]will be colored by the personal associations of each reader, who will likewise have unexpected memories, recalled by unexpected stimuli, that enable him or her to identify with the narrator..." This seems obvious on its face but bears repeating, no one's experience of a work of art will be the same. As you read essays on Proust or on Buffy or on a painting by Jackson Pollack, what you will see within the essay or review is a bit of the reviewer/critic/essayist's own personality, own experience, and own mental processing of the work. And it is important, I think, to remember that just because their interpretation conflicts or does not fit with our own, does not mean it is wrong or that ours is. That I think is the beauty about art - the fact that we can each experience it on our own terms yet at the same time share in the experience and in those rare or perhaps not so rare now that I think on it - instances actually be in complete agreement.]
The subtitle of Volumn One is according to the publisher and most people: Swann's Way and that is how you'll locate the book in your book store or library. The new translations each have a different translator, Lydia Davis did the first volumn - Swann's way. According to Davis in the interview with Rick Moody recently published in the International Issue of the literary magazine Tin House (Vol. 7, No. 3), Davis states:
" Swann's Way is a very good title in itself but is not close to Proust's title in rythm and meanings as I thought it should be. So I spent a great deal of time trying to find the ideal title - one whose sound and sense would be true to Proust and also strong in itself. The best candidate in the end, was By Way of Swann's. The English publisher (Penguin UK), however, nixed this and we arrived at a compromise that probably no one liked much, The Way by Swann's. The American publisher (Viking Penguin) was at first willing to let me have the title I wanted, but then the marketing people said that under that title the book wouldn't sell, as they had discovered when they tried to sell Kafka's The Transformation - readers were looking for The Metamorphosis. In the end, I accepted this - Swann's Way under that title has a long and interesting history in the last century, and also, keeping this title avoids involved explanations such as the one I have just given!"
The importance of titles - you shrug it off. But it is important. Swann's Way has a completely different meaning than By Way of Swann's - which is less assertive and more wandering. One title means - I explored this path a bit for a while, the other is almost a commentary - this was Swann's Way. But one is also easier to remember.
While an English Lit major, I remember discussing, at times heatedly, the point of analyzing a translation of a literary work. That if you wish to study it - it should be in its own language. True, perhaps. But - not all of us have the ability to learn another language, which I've learned after taking six years of French and never quite grasping the language - inculding two months living in the country with a family that spoke little English. Language or linquistic ability is not a learned skill so much as an affinity that you are born with. True - like everything, practice makes perfect. But - You can either pick them up and handle multiple languages or you can't. Affinity is sort of like talent, except it means you have a gift for something/a curiousity that is bred inside you and if you work at it - it will become something more. And some things, like playing a musical instrument, drawing, writing fiction, picking up languages, solving complex mathematical formulas require an affinity. Therefore - there has to be way to share prose with folks who do not speak the language and do not have an affinity for languages not to mention the fact that there are more than a million languages being spoken and written and there's just no way you can learn them all. The translators job is to find a way of doing that and stick as closely to the original as possible in the attempt.
Davis discusses the task of translating Proust in the interview as well as translating in general.
There is a strange self-effacement that goes on in the act of translation, which I rather welcome. I leave myself for a while, disappear, enter this other prose, assume the guise of this other writer. In the case of the most recent translation, Proust's Swann's Way, I tried to stay closer to the original than I have with any other writer except perhaps Maurice Blanchot, though I'd have to go back and check...
I could feel, with Swann's Way, that no effort was too much, and I went to great lengths to look into the history of, often, a single word in my search for a good equivalent.
Regarding the eternally debated question of what should a translation sound like:
I wanted my translation of Swann's Way to read comfortably and naturally in English (though necessarily in rather formal or Latinate English) - or at least no less comfortably than Proust reads in French- while at the same time following the original so exactly and closely that one could look right 'through' the English to the French. I wanted students of this book, for instance, to be able to study not only the content of the book but also Proust's own style as beautifully, neatly, possible.
Not an easy thing to achieve, I think. No clue if she did it or not, I presume so, but would be curious to know what someone with an affinity for English and French things.
So how did she do it?
According to the interview she approached it as if she'd never read it. As unknown territory. For the first draft. The second and third drafts - she consulted a book that closely analyzed Proust's style (discussing his alliteration, parallel structures, embedded alexandrines (whatever that is)).
"I was justified in immersing myself as deeply as possible in the work, to the extent of regularly consulting seven dictionaires, any number of reference works, and spending the morning or even the day finding out what kind of ivy might have been turing red on the trees in the Bois de Boulogne in the coda of the book;debating whether I could follow Proust in distinquishing between different stages of the dawn's changing light; deciding to make a rhythmical improvement and move closer to the original (but also into less familar English) by changing 'catastrophic deluge' to 'diluvian catastrophe'. " (Okay now I have to look up Alexandrines and Diluvian in the dictionary.)
The translation often makes a world of difference, I know it did with Joyce's Ulysses - which yes was published in English - but the original was transcribed by French nuns who didn't speak or write or read in English and Joyce had atrocious handwriting. So you get all sorts of versions. The one you read does make a world of difference. Same deal with Garcia Marquez's A Hundred Years of Solitude.
While reading this, assuming of course you are or made it all the way through, you may or may not be wondering why bring up the translation in the midst of discussing the themes of the work - ah, because I think one of the themes is the translation of memory. How to explain what we remember to others. To translate it in a way someone else can understand and grasp. Proust is communicating senses, feelings, emotions.
In the passage regarding the child waiting to kiss his mother good night or rather pleading to be given the opportunity to do so, we aren't given an age of the child - which does influence the meaning of the passage - nor the name of the child, it's just impressions and as the chapter moves forward the writer tells us why these are just impressions and hints within that explanation his age at the time of the memory. It was a long time ago, when he was a very small child, and what he remembers most is the "emotion" that came first. Then the actual events. He sobs as an adult hunting sleep as he remembers the saddness he felt then. The small child who hates to be separated from his or her mother, what Freud may call Oedipal, but in reality is quite normal. The fear of the dark, the desire to be comforted when alone staring at the ceiling. As children we are seldom alone. I know this watching my friends and brother with their children, and from my own foggy memories, the child is not left alone. For the first year of my neice's life - she slept cuddled between her parents, safe, their bodies the walls of her crib. The reason? My brother refused to put his child in what he considered to be no more than a cage. Another friend comments, when I ask her if she can't get one of her step-daughters to baby-sit or even her mother, that her child gets upset and her husband does not want to let the child be separated from either parent for too long. And I recall my father leaving my mother in childbirth because he was fearful of how alone and afraid I might be. Proust describes through the foggy state of adult memory the child's desire to be with the parent. And the adult's envy of it. For adults are more alone than children. He translates this emotion carefully, much like Lydia Davis translates his words into English, through the use of sensory images and at times sarcastic critiques of authors such as George Sand, which had been read to him as a child(the adult's tongue apparent). I think that is what writing is at times - a translation of the thoughts/emotions/pictures in our minds to words that can hopefully be understood by another, creating
similar thoughts/emotions/pictures in another's mind.
For me, this morning, reading Proust was a bit like sitting by a tinkling brook, under a big leathy tree, with just the scent of wildflowers...on a clear sunny pristine day. Letting ones thoughts roll over past memories, not worrying too much about today or tomorrow or even yesterday.
I chose the former, even though yesterday felt a bit burnt out on info. Unlike many of the books and articles I've been reading lately, Swann's Way felt like an exhalation or inhalation of air, possibly both. I did not feel, like I often do when reading something, as if I'm holding my breath under water or that the words are attempting to confine me in a neat little defined box each new sentence another brick in the wall of my confinement. Which I suppose is one of the many problems of reading a psychological analysis of a human condition - *cough*selfimprovementbooks*cough*. What happens if you don't quite fit within all the borders of analysis? But I digress, this post is not going to be about self-improvement books or rather a rant about self-improvement books.
Before picking up Swann's Way, I flirted with it for about two months in the local book store. Prior to that I read numerous posts in numerous blogs expounding on the brilliance of Proust...which like it or not can occassionally come across as a little pretentious. It's *not* deliberate. But I think sometimes, and this goes back to my days as an English Lit major sitting within the bowels of the library computer room hammering away at my oh so pretentious comparision of James Joyce's Ulyssess to William Faulkner's Sound and the Fury while next to me was a cool guy (wore black, blond curly hair, glasses, and a sharp almost hawkish nose matching equally sharp cheekbones, plus black leather boots) wrote his thesis on the superhero as vigilante in noir graphic novels, that discussing great works of literature can come across as pretentious (or maybe elitist is the better word) - especially if one feels the need to state obvious things like "oh its brilliant" and "a great work" - well, duh, otherwise it would not still be in print after 100 years or for that matter translated in numerous languages. (I always loved Joss Whedon's statement:"no we are not going to comment on how pretty the actors are, of course they are pretty otherwise we would not have hired them" which more or less goes to the same point.) I think this while reading Lydia Davis' interview with Rick Moody in the literary magazine, The Tin House that I picked up yesterday at the Brooklyn Book Festival (along with two other mags: Poets & Writers and Bomb (which features film, art, and book interviews)). I also thought it while reading Francine Prose's "Reading Like A Writer" - which for some reason much like Jonathan Franzen's "How to Be Alone" literary essays feels the need to only mention writers within the "literary canon" such as Edith Wharton, Virgina Woolf, Marcel Proust, Isaak Bable, Joseph Heller, et al as if nothing else out there is worthy of our attention. Making me wonder what it takes to make the "club" and if you are not in the "club" should you even bother? And I'll be honest for a while I avoided reading Swann's Way because of its literary pedigree. A rebellion of sorts against my literary past.
That said, Swann's Way is *not* what one would think and deserves its literary pedigree not solely for the author's use of language, which is nothing to scoff at but as read solely through a translation of the work (more on that later) may also be circumspect (I don't think it is), but also for why the author tells his tale and how he takes what many might call a simple memoir and turns it into a work of fiction, commenting on both forms as he does so - and all I might add within the first 47 pages. The story is about the loss and rediscovery of memory, in the case of this volumn "childhood memories" from the distant perspective of an adult. And to an extent, it is also one of the most honest "memoirs" I've seen, since unlike most memoirs, Proust places his within the category of "fiction" instead of "non-fiction", allowing himself the ability to embellish and change items that happened to him in life. For example regarding the famous bit about the petite madelines: The item that brought back the memory in reality was a bit of dry toast (not a madeline) and the memory it inspired? One regarding his grandfather (not an aunt). He chose to fictionalize the work and not make it about him. A hint to why he does this may be found within the following passage:
The past is hidden outside the realm of our intelligence and beyond its reach, in some material object (in the sensation that this material object would give us) which we do not suspect. It depends on chance whether we encounter this object before we die, or do not encounter it.
Memories are fleeting and a bit like butterflies, those pretty monarchs that rest oh so briefly on one's shoulder like a feather then flutter off the moment you notice. Proust describes the summoning of a memory from a petite madeline his mother places with his tea, it takes a while, he has to work for it and in this famous passage that has been reproduced elsewhere - he states how the memory emerges from a sensory experience causing the madeline to taste far better than it usually does - because within it was a lost bit of time.
And suddenly the memory appeared. That taste was the taste of the little piece of madeline which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because that day I did not go out before it was time for Mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Leonie would give me after dipping it in her infusion of tea or lime blossom. The sight of the little madeleine had not reminded me of anything before I tasted it: perhaps because I had often seen them since, without eating them, on the shelves of the pastry shops, and their image had therefore left those days of Combray and attached itself to others more recent; perhaps because of these recollections abandoned so long outside my memory, nothing survived, everything had come apart; the forms and the form, too, of the little shell made of cake, so fatly sensual within its severe and pious pleating- had been destroyed, or, still half asleep, had lost the force of expansion that would have allowed them to rejoin my consciousness. But, when nothering subsists of an old past, after the death of people, after the destruction of things, alone, frailer but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, smell and taste still remain for a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, upon the ruins of all the rest, bearing without fiving way, on their almost impalapable droplet, the immense edifice of memory.
The overall title of Proust's novel which has been published in a series of volumns due to its length, much like George RR Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire" or JRR Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" or even Dorothy Dunnett's "The Chronicles of Lymond", is In Search of Lost Time. Good Titles often will provide a potential reader with a teaser or hint of what the novel is about. In this case -Proust has summed it up in phrase. He tells us in that phrase that his novel is about hunting memories and how memories unfold, and their effect on us, as we reconsider our past. In Search of Lost Time is not necessarily meant as a coming of age story, we are not following a young boy on his journey through life but rather an adult's review of his own life and how it has changed and influenced and affected him. Why he remembers certain things over others and why those memories play out in his head the way they do, and how he remembers them - what brings them on. [Now as an aside, I'll put in a little disclaimer, which I possibly should cut and past to the top of this but cannot figure out where to put it - in the intro, the translator, Lydia Davis, states: "...confronting the book itself is an entirely different, and individual, experience. One will have one's own way of visualizing the narrator's childhood bedtime scene with his mother...[each bit - don't want to give everything away)]will be colored by the personal associations of each reader, who will likewise have unexpected memories, recalled by unexpected stimuli, that enable him or her to identify with the narrator..." This seems obvious on its face but bears repeating, no one's experience of a work of art will be the same. As you read essays on Proust or on Buffy or on a painting by Jackson Pollack, what you will see within the essay or review is a bit of the reviewer/critic/essayist's own personality, own experience, and own mental processing of the work. And it is important, I think, to remember that just because their interpretation conflicts or does not fit with our own, does not mean it is wrong or that ours is. That I think is the beauty about art - the fact that we can each experience it on our own terms yet at the same time share in the experience and in those rare or perhaps not so rare now that I think on it - instances actually be in complete agreement.]
The subtitle of Volumn One is according to the publisher and most people: Swann's Way and that is how you'll locate the book in your book store or library. The new translations each have a different translator, Lydia Davis did the first volumn - Swann's way. According to Davis in the interview with Rick Moody recently published in the International Issue of the literary magazine Tin House (Vol. 7, No. 3), Davis states:
" Swann's Way is a very good title in itself but is not close to Proust's title in rythm and meanings as I thought it should be. So I spent a great deal of time trying to find the ideal title - one whose sound and sense would be true to Proust and also strong in itself. The best candidate in the end, was By Way of Swann's. The English publisher (Penguin UK), however, nixed this and we arrived at a compromise that probably no one liked much, The Way by Swann's. The American publisher (Viking Penguin) was at first willing to let me have the title I wanted, but then the marketing people said that under that title the book wouldn't sell, as they had discovered when they tried to sell Kafka's The Transformation - readers were looking for The Metamorphosis. In the end, I accepted this - Swann's Way under that title has a long and interesting history in the last century, and also, keeping this title avoids involved explanations such as the one I have just given!"
The importance of titles - you shrug it off. But it is important. Swann's Way has a completely different meaning than By Way of Swann's - which is less assertive and more wandering. One title means - I explored this path a bit for a while, the other is almost a commentary - this was Swann's Way. But one is also easier to remember.
While an English Lit major, I remember discussing, at times heatedly, the point of analyzing a translation of a literary work. That if you wish to study it - it should be in its own language. True, perhaps. But - not all of us have the ability to learn another language, which I've learned after taking six years of French and never quite grasping the language - inculding two months living in the country with a family that spoke little English. Language or linquistic ability is not a learned skill so much as an affinity that you are born with. True - like everything, practice makes perfect. But - You can either pick them up and handle multiple languages or you can't. Affinity is sort of like talent, except it means you have a gift for something/a curiousity that is bred inside you and if you work at it - it will become something more. And some things, like playing a musical instrument, drawing, writing fiction, picking up languages, solving complex mathematical formulas require an affinity. Therefore - there has to be way to share prose with folks who do not speak the language and do not have an affinity for languages not to mention the fact that there are more than a million languages being spoken and written and there's just no way you can learn them all. The translators job is to find a way of doing that and stick as closely to the original as possible in the attempt.
Davis discusses the task of translating Proust in the interview as well as translating in general.
There is a strange self-effacement that goes on in the act of translation, which I rather welcome. I leave myself for a while, disappear, enter this other prose, assume the guise of this other writer. In the case of the most recent translation, Proust's Swann's Way, I tried to stay closer to the original than I have with any other writer except perhaps Maurice Blanchot, though I'd have to go back and check...
I could feel, with Swann's Way, that no effort was too much, and I went to great lengths to look into the history of, often, a single word in my search for a good equivalent.
Regarding the eternally debated question of what should a translation sound like:
I wanted my translation of Swann's Way to read comfortably and naturally in English (though necessarily in rather formal or Latinate English) - or at least no less comfortably than Proust reads in French- while at the same time following the original so exactly and closely that one could look right 'through' the English to the French. I wanted students of this book, for instance, to be able to study not only the content of the book but also Proust's own style as beautifully, neatly, possible.
Not an easy thing to achieve, I think. No clue if she did it or not, I presume so, but would be curious to know what someone with an affinity for English and French things.
So how did she do it?
According to the interview she approached it as if she'd never read it. As unknown territory. For the first draft. The second and third drafts - she consulted a book that closely analyzed Proust's style (discussing his alliteration, parallel structures, embedded alexandrines (whatever that is)).
"I was justified in immersing myself as deeply as possible in the work, to the extent of regularly consulting seven dictionaires, any number of reference works, and spending the morning or even the day finding out what kind of ivy might have been turing red on the trees in the Bois de Boulogne in the coda of the book;debating whether I could follow Proust in distinquishing between different stages of the dawn's changing light; deciding to make a rhythmical improvement and move closer to the original (but also into less familar English) by changing 'catastrophic deluge' to 'diluvian catastrophe'. " (Okay now I have to look up Alexandrines and Diluvian in the dictionary.)
The translation often makes a world of difference, I know it did with Joyce's Ulysses - which yes was published in English - but the original was transcribed by French nuns who didn't speak or write or read in English and Joyce had atrocious handwriting. So you get all sorts of versions. The one you read does make a world of difference. Same deal with Garcia Marquez's A Hundred Years of Solitude.
While reading this, assuming of course you are or made it all the way through, you may or may not be wondering why bring up the translation in the midst of discussing the themes of the work - ah, because I think one of the themes is the translation of memory. How to explain what we remember to others. To translate it in a way someone else can understand and grasp. Proust is communicating senses, feelings, emotions.
In the passage regarding the child waiting to kiss his mother good night or rather pleading to be given the opportunity to do so, we aren't given an age of the child - which does influence the meaning of the passage - nor the name of the child, it's just impressions and as the chapter moves forward the writer tells us why these are just impressions and hints within that explanation his age at the time of the memory. It was a long time ago, when he was a very small child, and what he remembers most is the "emotion" that came first. Then the actual events. He sobs as an adult hunting sleep as he remembers the saddness he felt then. The small child who hates to be separated from his or her mother, what Freud may call Oedipal, but in reality is quite normal. The fear of the dark, the desire to be comforted when alone staring at the ceiling. As children we are seldom alone. I know this watching my friends and brother with their children, and from my own foggy memories, the child is not left alone. For the first year of my neice's life - she slept cuddled between her parents, safe, their bodies the walls of her crib. The reason? My brother refused to put his child in what he considered to be no more than a cage. Another friend comments, when I ask her if she can't get one of her step-daughters to baby-sit or even her mother, that her child gets upset and her husband does not want to let the child be separated from either parent for too long. And I recall my father leaving my mother in childbirth because he was fearful of how alone and afraid I might be. Proust describes through the foggy state of adult memory the child's desire to be with the parent. And the adult's envy of it. For adults are more alone than children. He translates this emotion carefully, much like Lydia Davis translates his words into English, through the use of sensory images and at times sarcastic critiques of authors such as George Sand, which had been read to him as a child(the adult's tongue apparent). I think that is what writing is at times - a translation of the thoughts/emotions/pictures in our minds to words that can hopefully be understood by another, creating
similar thoughts/emotions/pictures in another's mind.
For me, this morning, reading Proust was a bit like sitting by a tinkling brook, under a big leathy tree, with just the scent of wildflowers...on a clear sunny pristine day. Letting ones thoughts roll over past memories, not worrying too much about today or tomorrow or even yesterday.
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no subject
Date: 2006-09-17 05:50 pm (UTC)Diluvian is : 1. Concerning or pertaining to a flood, especially the Flood mentioned in the Book of Genesis in the Bible.
2. Caused by a flood.
To translate it in a way someone else can understand and grasp. Proust is communicating senses, feelings, emotions.
I read Swann's Way about 20 years ago but my memories are indeed of a series of feelings and emotions. But I also imagine that unless you are capable of reading it in the original French you never quite "get" what Proust is trying to convey.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-17 06:04 pm (UTC)Regarding the last point - of course the question remains is it possible to ever quite get what another person is trying to convey? I mean I see responses to my posts and others posts online all the time that look as if the responder has come from Mars or Jupiter. Their response is so alien from the intent. Demonstrating to me they did not get it.
I know some people who will not read a work of fiction or nonfiction that has been translated.
Which of course limits them. And they are in a sense wrong, because you do get a portion of the other's work - it may be through the translator's viel but it is there all the same. It is like listening to someone tell you a story that a friend of theirs told them. Oral story-telling is not unlike translation, except I suspect, translation may be closer to the original intent of the teller.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-17 06:22 pm (UTC)It's very hard for me to imagine an English translation of Proust because his style is sooo French in terms of syntax and rhetorical forms.
Interesting bit about the title. I suppose that "Swann's Way" isn't too bad for "Du côté de chez Swann". The problem is that there's another book in the series called "Le côté de Guermantes" that title echoing the first book and the connection will be lost in translation with "Sawnn's Way".
My older sister gave me all the 7 books (in paperback edition) of "A La Recherche du Temps Perdu" when I was 13 for my birthday and it kind of changed my life. Just wait until you'll read "La Prisonnière" and "Albertine disparue", there are wonderful pieces about the narrator's memories of Albertine.
Just to give you a taste, here's the quote you posted from "Du Côté de chez Swann" in its original language:
Et tout d'un coup le souvenir m'est apparu. Ce goût c'était celui du petit morceau de madeleine que le dimanche matin à Combray (parce que ce jour-là je ne sortais pas avant l'heure de la messe), quand j'allais lui dire bonjour dans sa chambre, ma tante Léonie m'offrait après l'avoir trempé dans son infusion de thé ou de tilleul. La vue de la petite madeleine ne m'avait rien rappelé avant que je n'y eusse goûté; peut-être parce que, en ayant souvent aperçu depuis, sans en manger, sur les tablettes des pâtissiers, leur image avait quitté ces jours de Combray pour se lier à d'autres plus récents ; peut-être parce que de ces souvenirs abandonnés si longtemps hors de la mémoire, rien ne survivait, tout s'était désagrégé, les formes - et celle aussi du petit coquillage de pâtisserie, si grassement sensuel, sous son plissage sévère et dévot - s'étaient abolies, ou, ensommeillées, avaient perdu la force d'expansion qui leur eût permis de rejoindre la conscience. Mais, quand d'un passé ancien rien ne subsiste, après la mort des êtres, après la destruction des choses seules, plus frêles mais plus vivaces, plus immatérielles, plus persistantes, plus fidèles, l'odeur et la saveur restent encore longtemps, comme des âmes, à se rappeler, à attendre, à espérer, sur la ruine de tout le reste, à porter sans fléchir, sur leur gouttelette presque impalpable, l'édifice immense du souvenir.
Damn you made me want to read it again!
no subject
Date: 2006-09-17 06:37 pm (UTC)The French title's closest English translation is "By Way of Swanns" not the Way by Swann's or Swann's Way.
The paragraph you reprinted above - also is different, quite beautiful in how it reads. Oh, you make me want to take French again and try to learn it. I fell in love with the language as a child - which is why I tortured myself for six years attempting to learn it, but unfortunately do not have the ear for it. The best I could manage was a simplistic understanding of the written language. I understand a bit of what you wrote above, enough to sense the differences, but am not comfortable enough with the understanding to analyze the differences. I'd love for a native French speaker, who knew and could read English, to read an English translation of Proust and comment on it. Am curious to see if the response would be similar to Nabakov's view of translating Pustkin's poem into English.
Some things just cannot be captured.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-17 08:29 pm (UTC)This bit might be the least close to the original text:
perhaps because of these recollections abandoned so long outside my memory, nothing survived, everything had come apart; the forms and the form, too, of the little shell made of cake, so fatly sensual within its severe and pious pleating- had been destroyed, or, still half asleep, had lost the force of expansion that would have allowed them to rejoin my consciousness.
"had been destroyed" and "half asleep" for instance slightly change the meaning of the sentence, lacking the impressionistic and poetical touch of Proust's lexicon. It's hard to explain but he managed to be accurate and to convey precise thoughts and sensations by using sometimes words or expressions that were a bit vague or equivocal, exactly like impressionists. "S'étaient abolies" is much more mysterious and ambiguous than "had been destroyed" that implies a passive voice and an action verb.
But I am not a translator, it's a very difficult work to do.
Oh and yes French is from the Latin branch and English from the German one, although there are actually many words deriving from French in English.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-18 12:19 am (UTC)Yes, over time English has picked up many French words and Latin prefixes - part of this is due to the mixture of cultures. Much like the inhabitants of a conguered country might mix portions of the invader's religion with their own, they'll do the same with language. The Anglos got invaded by the Normans and Romans, but the languages mixed. The oldest languages, if memory serves, of Great Britian are Welsh, Gallic and whatever language is in Yorkshire. Also Gaule or Breton in Brittany.
Again not a linguist and my memory of it is foggy.