BOOKS OF THE DAY
Time's Labour Lost
REVIEWLNG Mr. Leon's book on Proust here, some months ago, I expressed doubts as to whether he was much read by the young of today. I was gratified to learn from some members of that vaguely defined class, les jeunes, that the old spells had not altogether lost their power to enchant and that one was not immediately written-off as an old fogey for preferring Proust to Trollope or Fromentin. But a more conclusive proof that my fears were exaggerated is furnished by the decision of Chatto and Windus to issue a new complete edition of Proust, agreeably printed, if a little too gaily bound. It may be surmised that one does not, in these days of paper-shortage, issue twelve volumes, some millions of words, without a certain hope of a reasonable reward in the way of readers.
Here we have Proust made as clear, as intelligible and as read- able as is consistent with his being Proust. And these decently- printed volumes have a special attraction for those of us who began
not with the French text on " papier verge pun fil Lafuma- Navarre au filigrane," but on what appeared to be imperfectly
repulped telegraph forms, and, in some editions, even the ink seemed to have run short, so that one was forced to imitate Mr. Lobel or some other great scholar reconstructing the text of Sappho from a few odd scratches on a papyrus.
At it happens, this reviewer had only read one volume of Scott-Moncrieffs translation and that hastily. His whole impres- sion of Proust had been got from reading and re-reading the French text. It was natural, then, to turn first of all to the translation. Translation from the French is usually bad. " We all know French," and that means that the critical reader does not, as a rule, read the English version at all, and that persons in imperfect command of English are thought to be good enough to translate from French—which they have usually mastered even less successfully. And Proust is a very difficult French author, difficult for French people as well as for us. His grammar and syntax are his own—so I have been assured by an expert—and what he had to say, in some cases, could hardly be said in words. The Scott-Moncrieff translation has been extremely highly praised; almost the only dissident voice has been that of Pro- fessor Denis Saurat, but that is a voice worth attending to, for Professor Saurat knows English and French with a perfection that few of us can claim to rival.
Which is right, Professor Saurat or the mass of enthusiastic English reviewers? Both is the statesmanlike answer imposed by the facts. The translation is good, considering the difficulties of the task more than good, but it is not quite as good as one had been led to believe. One of its faults is made evident in the literary fantastication of the titles of the different parts. A la Recherche du Temps Perdu becomes Remembrance of Things Past, Albertine Disparue becomes The Sweet Cheat Gone, Sodome et Gomorrhe becomes The Cities of the Plain. Any reader with a taste for New Statesman competitions enjoys these little tricks, but we have to notice that Proust (who could play them admirably himself as is shown in Pastiches et Mélanges and all through his novel) did not think fit to play them. He could have lifted phrases from Racine or Saint-Simon had he wanted to. He did not want to; should his translator indulge in fun- and-games not called for by his author? It is not only the titles that show the Scott-Moncrieff weakness for over-translation. Proust was technically brought up as a Catholic, yet it is most noticeable how thin, casual and bald are his allusions to the rites of the Church. The circumstances of his ancestry, of his educa- tion, of his affiliations all explain this. But Scott-Moncrieff by over-translation gives a definitely bien pensant flavour to very neutral phrases. Thus the " week before Easter " becomes "Holy Week " ; " la Vierge " becomes " Our Lady " ; "les rites de Combray" becomes " the Use of Combray." The last ingenious little joke would have been quite in place in an Anglo-Catholic novel by Mr. Compton Mackenzie, but it distorts the attitude of Francoise—and the text of Proust. Then Scott-Moncrieff is sometimes indifferent to niceties that Proust took seriously. Starting from the erroneous belief that "Drait des gens" means the " Rights of Man," Scott-Moncrieff distorted a long Proustian analogy (which Proust had used before). Marcel was not dis- cussing his relations with his father in terms of constitutional law; he was not reproaching a domestic Charles X with the breach of his promises under the charte octroyee. His analogy is from international law and, of course, is carefully and ingeniously carried out.
Then Scott-Moncrieff was too afraid of the faux amis. It is not enough to avoid using the linguistically identical word in English to escape mistranslating the French. It is bad translation
to put " chastised " for " puni". in the context, the English for "puni" is " punished and " chastised " is simply a mistransla- tion. So I suggest that the English for "prie-Dieu " is " prie- dieu " not " prayer-desk." In short, Scott-Moncrieff was too good a French scholar to have quite the necessary humility in face of his text.
But at a higher level he was admirable. He always meant some- thing, and if he sometimes wrested concrete meanings out of Proust which were not there, who are we to complain, especially in the later volumes when the French text was highly corrupt? How good, for example, is " the vast structure of recollection " for "l'idifice immense du souvenir."
There is no space left for Proust who, after all, took millions of words to say what he had to say and died with it incompletely and imperfectly said. But for escaping from the present world there are few authors like him. That his world is strange and for ever dead as a social phenomenon does not matter. "II en est ainsi de notre passe. C'est peine perdue que nous cherchions a l'evoquer, tour les efforts de notre intelligence sont inutiles." " A labour in vain," Scott-Moncrieff puts it. Not in vain, espe- cially in this dark hour when the past has a charm which we find it hard to attribute to the immediate future!
D. W. BROGAN.
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