PROUST
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—Various friends in England have drawn my attention to a sort of "serial" onslaught upon the late Marcel Proust which has been appearing in your columns. The second, which is not, I hope, to be the final instalment, reached me to- day. With Mr. Andrew Carey's opinion of Proust I am not concerned, especially as he appears on his own confession to have written without reference to, possibly without having read the original text of, that author. But I am seriously
concerned with his attempt to discredit the value of my translation of Proust, now in course of publication, by the use of the following words :—
" We are aware that translations must be idiomatic ; yet if you consistently translate idiom by idiom, you will definitely distort the sense. A la Recherche du Temps Perdu is by no means Remem- brance of Things Pass; The coa de chez Swann and A l'Ombre de [sic] Jeuncs Fates en. Fleur [sic' are really nothing like Swann's .Way and Within. a Budding Grave. Then which do we choose— ungainliness or misrepresentation ? Mr. Moncrieff chose mis- representation."
This kind of objection, though elsewhere more courteously expressed, did not originate with Mr. Andrew Carey. The title Swann's Way was criticized (when the volumes which bear it were first published) in the Times by Mr. Walkley, who suggested I forget what alternative, overlooking the point that du co!e de chez Swann is a phrase quoted from the book itself, where the two roads out of Combray are dis- tinguished in the narrator's family as "the Meseglise way" and "the Guermantes way," the former being called also "Swami's way," because it ran past the park of Swann's property of Tansonville. The English title has the further advantage of suggesting "Swami's behaviour," thus covering also the second and more important part of the book ; and is thus demonstrably a better title than the original, just as Le nommi Jeudi and M. Britling commence a voir clair are better titles than The Man who was Thursday and Mr. Drilling sees it through. Mr. Walkley's objection, which he has now, I think, overcome, was echoed from his deathbed by Proust himself, who (for he did not, it appears, read English) had made no comment on my manuscript when it was submitted to him. Ignorant of English idiom, he anticipated Mr. Andrew Carey's curious opinion that "A la Recherche du Temps Perdu is by no means Remembrance of Things Past," and wrote to tell me so. I replied by quoting to him the well- known sonnet (which Mr. Andrew Carey will find in any house- hold edition of the works of Shakespeare, the English seven- teenth-century dramatist) which, in the compass of fourteen lines, contains almost every phase of the synopsis of the complete Recherche published in early editions of the first and second parts of it, and by suggesting to him that "lost time" in English has a different sense from "temps perdu." His grievance was that by not reproducing the word "perdu" I destroyed the " amphibologie voulue" of the " retroure " in the title of his ultimate and still (1925) unpublished volume. Proust died, suddenly, before I had thought of consulting him as to an English equivalent for the quaint physiologico- mystical title A l'Chnbre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs. This book I had begun to translate in March, 1922, and finished in July, 1923. During almost the whole of that time I kept in mind •and latterly communicated to countless friends the problem of an English title, and the several conditions that must be fulfilled. First among these comes rhythm ; next, perhaps, brevity. The title itself and the several words of the title must each be short enough to be printed in type of a certain size on the linen back of a volume of a certain thickness. (In this connexion, the length of my own name is a serious inconvenience to the binder.) Then association—preferably a line or phrase from some well-known English poem should be chosen, such as might be found in Maud, The Sensitive Plant, Thoughts in a Garden, &c, In the last of these, Mr. Hewlett forestalled me by naming one of his books In a Green Shade, which was. one of my ten or twelve provisional selections. Among the friends whom I consulted were Joseph Conrad, whose page of scribbled suggestions I still have.— January 19th.
[We regret that we have been compelled to shorten Mr. Moncrieff's letter. Mr. Andrew Carey writes : "Mr. Scott Moncrieff has been singularly anxious to take offence. If I had forgotten that Remembrance of Things Past was a stock quotation from Shakespeare, I could not have escaped the persistent reminder of Mr. Moncrieff's half-titles. But certainly it did not occur to me that Mr. Moncrieff held Shakes- peare responsible for the mistranslation of Proust. Definitely and typically Proust's work was an attempt to delve into the forgotten past : it was definitely and typically not a series of spontaneous reminiscences. Proust's title is apt, Mr. Mon- crieff's is misleading. But I admitted the difficulties of trans- lation and held Mr. Moncrieff blameless : I implied that to call the book In Search of the Past or In Search of By-gone Years would be ungainly : I suggested—and here I am proved wrong —that Proust himself would have been satisfied with the version. It seems to me that Swann's Way would at first convey to the English reader only "Swami's behaviour "—an implication not in the French at all. As for the third title, why, surely Mr. Moncrieff will allow that it gives no indication of the contents of these volumes? But is there any need to say more of Mr. Moncrieff's conscientious faithlessness to the original ? He asserts himself that one of his titles is 'demonstrably better' than Proust's. If I gave the impression tlt the translation of the text itself is idiomatic, I must indeed apologize ; for here Mr.• Moncrieff has chosen the opposite course. A string of nominatives pending, of words and phrases which are alien to our language in atmosphere and construction, witness clearly enough to the fact that the book is a translation. It needed some agility of mind to discover the meaning of such a sentence as : 'He will hold endless conversations with the repentant criminals whose remorse, their regeneration formed, when he still wrote, the subject of his novels.' But whichever solution to the difficulties of translation Mr. Moncrieff adopts, he retains my sympathy."—En. Spectator.]
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