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...

  Out of concern for his grandmother's health, Marcel has left Doncières and returned to the family home in Paris. The scene that immediately greets him there is a still life that is both sad and alarming, and the analysis of that fleeting instant is worth quoting in full.  Painting by M Knoop “Entering the drawing-room before my grandmother had been told of my return, I found her there, reading. I was in the room, or rather I was not yet in the room since she was not aware of my presence, and, like a woman whom one surprises at a piece of work which she will lay aside if anyone comes in, she had abandoned herself to a train of thoughts which she had never allowed to be visible by me. Of myself—thanks to that privilege which does not last but which one enjoys during the brief moment of return, the faculty of being a spectator, so to speak, of one’s own absence,—there was present only the witness, the observer, with a hat and travelling coat, the stranger who does not belong to...