Reading Proust - A Running Commentary

First edition in Great Britain  of Sodom et Gomorrhe translated as Cities of the Plain    We have already discussed Scott Moncrieff's loose translation of the title of the novel (see my third introductory comment ). Here is perhaps the place to make a couple of comments on his translation of the titles of the separate parts of the novel. Proust, having been alerted by Stephen Hudson (who later completed, badly, the English translation following Scott Moncrieff's death), was worried that his translator had rendered Du côté de chez Swann as Swann's Way on the basis that it might be misunderstood to mean Swann's manner or style. This is a baseless worry that credits the English reader with too little sense, a concern that is carried to the extreme by Lydia Davis' recent rendering of the title as The Way by Swann's , which is laughably fussy and awkward, the hanging possessive being surely too puzzling to the sort of reader who cannot be trusted to understand Swan...

 It is now two years after the Gilberte episode and Marcel, aged about 16 or 17, finally gets finally to go to Balbec, accompanied by his grandmother. In Place-Names: The Name, at the end of Swann's Way, Marcel has only the names of desired destinations with which to conjure. But now in the much longer Place-Names: The Place, he experiences one of the destinations of which he has long dreamed. In particular, he has been looking forward to seeing the Persian-influenced church at Balbec and, as ever, he is disappointed by the reality. He has alighted from the train at Balbec-le-Vieux rather than Balbec-Plage and discovers that the church is not next to the sea, which he had romantically imagined lapping at the foot of its walls, but twelve miles away in the inland town's mundane surroundings of a café, an omnibus office, a bank and a pâtisserie. Furthermore, the church's statue of the Virgin appears as a little, wrinkled, old lady (which is discussed in a 357-word sentence – ...