He received no answer from Fasquelle and, in November 1912, wrote to the Nouvelle Revue Française, a more literary publisher which had developed from a literary journal of the same name founded by André Gide and was later to take the name of its director, Gaston Gallimard. Now he was considering three volumes.
In December 1912, Gallimard and Fasquelle both returned their copies of the manuscript. Fasquelle did not want to risk publishing something “so different from what the public is used to reading.” Gide later admitted to Proust: “The rejection of this book will remain the most serious mistake ever made by the NRF—and (since to my shame I was largely responsible for it) one of the sorrows, one of the most bitter regrets of my life.”
At the end of December 1912, Proust approached another publisher, Ollendorff. He offered not only to pay the costs of publication but also to share with the publisher any profits that might derive from it. Ollendorff’s rejection came in February and included the comment: “I don’t see why a man should take thirty pages to describe how he turns over in bed before he goes to sleep.” At last Proust submitted the manuscript to the energetic young publisher Bernard Grasset, offering to pay the expenses of publishing the book and publicizing it, and Grasset accepted.
By April 1913, Proust was beginning to work on proofs. He said in a letter to a friend: “My corrections so far (I hope this won’t continue) are not corrections. There remains not a single line out of 20 of the original text. . . . It is crossed out, corrected in every blank part I can find, and I am pasting papers at the top, at the bottom, to the right, to the left, etc. . . .” He said that although the resulting text was actually a bit shorter, it was a “hopelessly tangled mess.”
During this time, he made final decisions about titles. Ideally, he would have preferred simply the general title, À la recherche du temps perdu, followed by “Volume I” and “Volume II” with no individual titles for the two volumes. However, his publisher wanted individual titles for commercial reasons. Proust decided the first volume would be called Du côté de chez Swann and the second probably Le Côté de Guermantes . He explained several times what these titles meant, that in the country around Combray there were two directions in which to take a walk, that one asked, for example: “Shall we go in the direction of M. Rostand’s house?” (His friend Maurice Rostand had in fact suggested the title of the first volume.) Du côté de chez Swann would, most literally translated, be the answer: “in the direction of Swann’s place” or “toward Swann’s.”
But the title also had a metaphorical signification. Chez Swann means not only “Swann’s home, Swann’s place,” but also “on the part of Swann, about Swann”; i.e., the title refers not just to where Swann lives but to the person Swann is, to Swann’s mind, opinions, character, nature. And by extension the first volume concerns not just Swann’s manner of living, thinking, but also Swann’s world, the worldly and artistic domain, while Le Côté de Guermantes (now the third volume of the novel) concerns the ancient family of the Guermantes and their world, the domain of the aristocracy. And it is true that the character of Swann gives the volume its unity. (By the end of the novel, the two divergent walks are symbolically joined.)
Proust’s friend Louis de Robert did not like the title, and Proust mentioned a few others—rather idly, as it turns out, since he was not really going to change his mind: “Charles Swann,” “Gardens in a Cup of Tea,” and “The Age of Names.” He said he had also thought of “Springtime.” But he argued: “I still don’t understand why the name of that Combray path which was known as ‘the way by Swann’s’ with its earthy reality, its local truthfulness, does not have just as much poetry in it as those abstract or flowery titles.”
The work of the printer was finished by November 1913—an edition of 1,750 was printed—and the book was in the bookstores November 14. Reviews by Lucien Daudet and Jean Cocteau, among others, appeared. Not all the reviews were positive. The publisher submitted the book for the Prix Goncourt, but the prize was won, instead, by a book called Le Peuple de la mer (The People of the Sea), by Marc Elder.
A later edition was published in 1919 by Gallimard with some small changes. A corrected edition was published by Gallimard in its Bibliothèque de la Pléiade series in 1954 and another, with further corrections and additions, in 1987.
The first English translation of Du côté de chez Swann, C.K. Scott Moncrieff’s Swann’s Way, was done in Proust’s lifetime and published in 1922. Sixty years later, a revision of Scott Moncrieff’s translation by Terence Kilmartin, based on the corrected edition of the French, brought the translation closer to the original, cutting gratuitous additions and embellishments and correcting Scott Moncrieff’s own misreadings, though it did not go as far as it could have in eliminating redundancy and also introduced the occasional grammatical mistake and mixed metaphor; in addition, Kilmartin’s ear for the English language was not as sensitive as Scott Moncrieff’s. In 1992, after Kilmartin’s death and after the publication of the still-more-definitive 1987 Pléiade edition, the translation was further revised by D. J. Enright. The two revisions of Scott Moncrieff’s Swann’s Way retain so much of his original work that they cannot be called new translations. Thus, there existed, until the present volume, only one other translation of Du côté de chez Swann, and that was Swann’s Way (Canberra, 1982) as translated by James Grieve, a writer and professor of French literature in Australia. Grieve’s approach was not to follow the original French as closely as possible, as had been Scott Moncrieff’s, but to study the text for its meaning and then re-create it in a style which might have been that of an author writing originally in English. He therefore brings to his version a greater degree of freedom in word choice, order, and syntax.
If Proust has been reputed by some to be difficult reading, this can be attributed perhaps to several factors. One is that the interest of this novel, unlike that of the more traditional novel, is not merely, or even most of all, in the story it tells. (In one letter, Proust himself describes the work as a novel, but then, having second thoughts, qualifies that description with typical subtlety and precision by adding that, at least, “the novel form” is the form from which “it departs least.”) In fact it does not set out to tell a linear, logically sequential story, but rather to create a world unified by the narrator’s governing sensibility, in which blocks of a fictional past life are retrieved and presented, in roughly chronological order, in all their nuances. A reader may feel overwhelmed by the detail of this nuance and wish to get on with the story, and yet the only way to read Proust is to yield, with a patience equal to his, to his own unhurried manner of telling the story.
Another factor in Proust’s reputed difficulty for Anglophone readers in particular may be that in the Scott Moncrieff translation, which has been virtually the only one read hitherto by readers of Proust in English, Proust’s own lengthy, yet concise, expatiations were themselves amplified by a certain consistent redundancy which makes the translation at all points longer than the original. Proust’s single word “strange” is rendered in English by Scott Moncrieff, for the sake of euphony or rhythm, as “strange and haunting”; “uninteresting” becomes “quite without interest”; “he” becomes “he himself.” At the same time Proust’s prose was heightened by Scott Moncrieff, by the replacement throughout of a plain word such as “said” by a more colorful one such as “remarked,” “murmured,” “asserted,” etc.; he was given, regularly, a more sentimental or melodramatic turn: the “entrance to the Underworld,” in the original French, becomes “the Jaws of Hell.” The effect of all these individual choices was to produce a text which, although it “flows” very well and follows the original remarkably closely in word order and construction, is wordier and “dressier” than the original. It remains a very powerful translation, but, as with many of the first translations of seminal literary works, somewhat misrepresents the style of the original, which was, in this case, essentially natural and direct, and far plainer than one might have guessed.
&
nbsp; Yet another factor in Proust’s “difficulty” may be his famously long sentences. Proust never felt that great length was desirable in itself. He categorically rejected sentences that were artificially amplified, or that were overly abstract, or that groped, arriving at a thought by a succession of approximations, just as he despised empty flourishes; when he describes Odette as having a sourire sournois, or “sly smile,” the alliteration is there for a purpose, to further unite the two words in one’s mind. As he proceeded from draft to draft, he not only added material but also condensed. “I prefer concentration,” he said, “even in length.” And in fact, according to a meticulous count of the sentences in Swann’s Way and the second volume of the novel, reported by Jean Milly in his study of the Proustian sentence, La Phrase de Proust, nearly forty percent of the sentences in these two books are reasonably short—one to five lines—and less than one-quarter are very long—ten lines or more.
Proust felt, however, that a long sentence contained a whole, complex thought, a thought that should not be fragmented or broken. The shape of the sentence was the shape of the thought, and every word was necessary to the thought: “I really have to weave these long silks as I spin them,” he said. “If I shortened my sentences, it would make little pieces of sentences, not sentences.” He wished to “encircle the truth with a single—even if long and sinuous—stroke.”
Many contemporaries of Proust’s insisted that he wrote the way he spoke, although when Du côté de chez Swann appeared in print, they were startled by what they saw as the severity of the page. Where were the pauses, the inflections? There were not enough empty spaces, not enough punctuation marks. To them, the sentences seemed longer when read on the page than they did when they were spoken, in his extraordinary hoarse voice: his voice punctuated them.
One friend, though surely exaggerating, reported that Proust would arrive late in the evening, wake him up, begin talking, and deliver one long sentence that did not come to an end until the middle of the night. The sentence would be full of asides, parentheses, illuminations, reconsiderations, revisions, addenda, corrections, augmentations, digressions, qualifications, erasures, deletions, and marginal notes. It would, in other words, attempt to be exhaustive, to capture every nuance of a piece of reality, to reflect Proust’s entire thought. To be exhaustive is, of course, an infinite task: more events can always be inserted, and more nuance in the narration, more commentary on the event, and more nuance within the commentary. Growing by association of ideas, developing internally by contiguity, the long sentences are built up into pyramids of subordinate clauses.
These sentences are constructed very tightly, with their many layers, the insertion of parenthetical remarks and digressions adding color and background to the main point, and delaying the outcome, the conclusion of the sentence, which is most often a particularly strong or climactic word or pair of words. They are knit together using a variety of conscious and unconscious stylistic techniques that become fascinating to observe and analyze: repetition, apposition, logical contrast, comparison; extended metaphors; nuanced qualifications within the metaphors themselves; varieties of parallel structures; balanced series of pairs of nouns, adjectives, or phrases; and lavish aural effects—as in the alliteration of this phrase: faisait refluer ses reflets; or the ABBA structure of vowel sounds in this one: lâcheté qui nous détourne de toute tâche; or the cooing of the dove at the end of this paragraph: Et son faîte était toujours couronné du roucoulement d’une colombe. And yet Proust’s economy prevails, and extends even to his punctuation, with in particular a marked underuse of the comma. The punctuation, with in particular a marked underuse of the comma. The effect of this light punctuation is, again, that the whole thought is conveyed with as little fragmentation as possible, and that it travels more quickly from writer to reader, has a more noticeably powerful trajectory. The punctuation, of course, in part determines the pace and the breath span of the prose. If, as occasionally and conspicuously happens in Swann’s Way, a sentence is chopped into a succession of short phrases separated by commas which halt its flow, the prose gasps for air; whereas the very long sentence, relatively unimpeded by stops, gives the impression of a headlong rush to deliver the thought in one exhalation. In this translation I have attempted to stay as close to Proust’s own style as possible, in its every aspect, without straying into an English style that is too foreign or awkward; with particular attention to word order and word choice, his punctuation, too, can often be duplicated in English, and commas which might have seemed necessary can quite happily be eliminated or reduced.
One last comment concerning word choice: often the closest, most accurate, and even most euphonious equivalent may be a word more commonly used decades ago than it is now: for instance, the French chercher means both “to look for” and “to try,” so its perfect equivalent in English is our “seek,” still current today but rarer and more specialized than its equivalents. Or, to go further back in time, for the French corsage, the part of a woman’s dress extending from the neck to the hips and also known as the “waist” or “body” of the dress, the perfect equivalent is “bodice,” which in fact means the same thing. I have chosen to use both of these and many other close equivalents. Other perfectly identical English equivalents have simply receded too far into the past by now and will be too obscure to be understood: Proust’s solitude, which in French can mean “a lonely spot,” has that meaning in English, too, but will no longer be understood in that sense. A couple of centuries ago, we referred, in English, to a “piece of water” just as Proust does to une pièce d’eau, and meant, like him, an ornamental pool or pond. And then there are some borderline cases, some perfect equivalents which may not convey as much to the contemporary reader as a close approximation, so that what one gains in exactness one loses in expressive power; some of these I have reluctantly bypassed (such as “parvis,” identical to the French, which means the area in front of a sacred building and is the name neatly given by Proust to the part of the garden outside Françoise’s “temple” and for which I have substituted “temple yard”); but others I have used because they were too perfect to give up. One of these was “aurora” for aurore: it is the rosy or yellow-gold light in the sky just before the sun rises, and it follows aube, the first appearance of light in the sky.
A Note on the Translation
The present translation came into being in the following way. A project was conceived by the Penguin UK Modern Classics series in which the whole of In Search of Lost Time would be translated freshly on the basis of the latest and most authoritative French text, À la recherche du temps perdu, edited by Jean-Yves Tadié (Paris: Pléiade, Gallimard, 1987-89). The translation would be done by a group of translators, each of whom would take on one of the seven volumes. The project was directed first by Paul Keegan, then by Simon Winder, and was overseen by general editor Christopher Prendergast. I was contacted early in the selection process, in the fall of 1995, and I chose to translate the first volume, Du côté de chez Swann. The other translators are James Grieve, for In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower; Mark Treharne, for The Guermantes Way; John Sturrock, for Sodom and Gomorrah; Carol Clark, for The Prisoner; Peter Collier, for The Fugitive; and Ian Patterson, for Finding Time Again.
Between 1996 and the delivery of our manuscripts, the tardiest in mid-2001, we worked at different rates in our different parts of the world—one in Australia, one in the United States, the rest in various parts of England. After a single face-to-face meeting in early 1998, which most of the translators attended, we communicated with one another and with Christopher Prendergast by letter and e-mail. We agreed, often after lively debate, on certain practices that needed to be consistent from one volume to the next, such as retaining French titles like Duchesse de Guermantes, and leaving the quotations that occur within the text—from Racine, most notably—in the original French, with translations in the notes.
At the initial meeting of the Penguin Classics project, those present had acknowl
edged that a degree of heterogeneity across the volumes was inevitable and perhaps even desirable, and that philosophical differences would exist among the translators. As they proceeded, therefore, the translators worked fairly independently, and decided for themselves how close their translations should be to the original—how many liberties, for instance, might be taken with the sanctity of Proust’s long sentences. And Christopher Prendergast, as he reviewed all the translations, kept his editorial hand relatively light. The Penguin UK translation appeared in October 2002, in six hardcover volumes and as a boxed set.
Some changes may be noted in this American edition, besides the adoption of American spelling conventions. One is that the UK decision concerning quotes within the text has been reversed, and all the French has been translated into English, with the original quotations in the notes. We have also replaced the French punctuation of dialogue, which uses dashes and omits certain opening and closing quotation marks, with standard American dialogue punctuation, though we have respected Proust’s paragraphing decisions—sometimes long exchanges take place within a single paragraph, while in other cases each speech begins a new paragraph. Last, I have gone through the text of the British edition and made whatever small changes seemed to me called for when I read it freshly in print.
Suggestions for Further Reading
Beckett, Samuel. Proust. New York: Grove Press, 1931.
Carter, William C. Marcel Proust: A Life. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000.
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