Best English Translations of In Search of Lost Time/Remembrance of Things Past?

[R.F. Schiller]

So I've read Swann's Way, which was brilliant. I used a 1981 version by Terence Kilmartin that was essentially just originally a revision of the original Scott Moncrieff translation. I'm thinking of completing the next six volumes over the next year and I'm wondering which translation people think is the best. I heard MLA published one as well as a highly-acclaimed one by Lydia Davis that came out fairly recently.

[Bill 42]

Earlier this year I read the Modern Library's In Search of Lost Time box set, ISBN 978-0-8129-6964-1. According to bookdepository.com, "D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin's acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff's translation." The translation is easy to read and the books (there are six of them) are high quality. The notes are included in each book so if you like to refer to the notes you don't have to bring two books wherever you go, but you do have to flip back and forth.

[mal4mac]

I liked Swann's way, but I gave up about half way through the complete set of the Enright/Kilmartin translation in Penguin. But I don't think the translation was at fault, I just found the work too boring. The extremely long-winded psychological dissection of homosexuals and Parisian snobs was nothing I could identify with, and there were no compensating factors (e.g., the work is devoid of humour, the plot not exciting, the sentences long and involved for no reason, and there was no significant dealing with "big ideas".) I just couldn't follow the storyline through the labyrinthine prose, although I'm usually quite happy with big novels and involved story lines (in Tolstoy or Dickens, for instance.) I don't think the prose was too difficult for me, I just found the story became too tedious, my eyes glazed over.

'Edmund Wilson ... called the Search "one of the gloomiest books ever written." Henry James...: "inconceivable boredom..." Joseph Conrad...: "no reverie, no emotion." Arnold Bennett ... : "the clumsy centipedalian crawling of the interminable sentences." Aldous Huxley's describes Proust as a "hermaphrodite, toadlike creature spooning his own tepid juice over his face and body." William H. Gass: "... there is no special truth in him.... Proust writes a careless self-indulgent prose, doesn't he? ... Epithet follows epithet like tea cakes in flutes of paper.... It is a style that endangers the identity of the self in its reckless expressions of it.'

https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/shattuck-way.html

Shuttuck summarises the main criticisms superbly, summarising my feelings about the work better than I could : "First, Proust's work is boring because of slackness in both style and construction. Second, the moral universe of Proust's work never breaks free from the attitude of a spoiled, sickly, adolescent snob, born to wealth on the fringes of high culture and high society."

But then Shattuck goes on to praise the work and tries to give the reader a way into it. So I would say, don't worry so much about the translation, read Shattuck! He may get you past the obstacles that stopped me and caused such vitriol to pour from great writers. He *almost* inspires me to try again...

For someone, like me, who admires Kafka and Camus, Proust provides a particular problem outlined by Shattuck:

"In one respect this sense of the plenitude of relations between things runs counter to a human temper often treated in modern literature. In writers like Kafka and Camus we discern a quality of emptiness that it is hard to describe. For K and Meursault, experience generates very little motivation to undertake anything, to oppose the world or to affirm oneself. They act out of gratuitous impulse or yield to mere circumstance. In Proust the opposite is true. Multiple desires and motivations converge on every action and often impede its execution. Marcel goes to unbelievable lengths to explain to himself the behavior of the women in his life. For them as for him potential motives are often spelled out in a series of either/or propositions. But one motive will never prove to be the correct one and eliminate the others. After two pages of speculation on the character and behavior of one of his oldest friends, Gilberte Swann, Marcel throws up his hands. "None of these hypotheses was absurd" (III 708/vi 26). The mystery of Proust's world arises not from gratuitousness or from the absence of motivation but from the conflictingly overdetermined quality of most actions, and from the adaptability of most actions to a great number of attributions. Until Marcel reaches a wider wisdom, what happens around him is not indifferent but overwhelming."

I think this is where most of the boredom comes from, Marcel's continuing rumination over either/or propositions seems (from the beginning!) to be going nowhere, and indeed he eventually realises this himself, but a discerning, already indifferent, reader will think, "I could have told you that 100 pages ago, before all your tedious ramblings!"

So, an admirer of Kafka, might be better reading The map and the territory by Michel Houellebecq. There, when the Kafkaesque hero's lover leaves him there is no endless dwelling on motivations. It happens in a sentence, then the story moves on. I wonder if this great author is partly reacting against Proustian ramblings? He's certainly a breath of ice-cold fresh air!

[Lykren]

Descriptions like the ones mal4mac quoted actually make me more interested in reading ISOLT, because I enjoy watching myself think. The subject itself isn't of interest necessarily, it's the patterns of thought that intrigue me.

EDIT: Oh, and RF Schiller, there are only four translations of ISOLT, two of which are revisions of the first one. The most recent translation is not entirely by Lydia Davis, but is actually by seven different authors, one for each volume (Davis just did Swann's Way).

[SaintMagnus]

Without humour? The Balbec passage in Within a Budding Grove is wonderfully funny. The humour arises out of the consistent series of expectations and denials that, usually caused by the contrast placed between his orotund prose (of which he is obviously aware) and reality, conclude in the hilarious visit of the narrator to Albertine's room! You really must read him as though he is absolutely conscious of he doing as he often is astutely so. There's also much humour in the passages that relate to the narrator and the manner in which he treats Francoise of whom he is credulously unconscious and how she in turn reacts to him. For example, in The Guermantes Way, somewhere within the first hundred or so pages of the volume, the narrator speaks of how honestly Francoise's face and general expression manifest the truth of his humiliation (at the time having haunted Mme de Guermantes) and then it is revealed only pages later that Jupien (whose particular role I've forgotten) has told him that Francoise says about him horrible things. He continues, languishes for a moment only on the nature of appearance, forgets about Francoise, and then describes how he, in his infatuation with Mme de Guermantes, has Francoise repeatedly pack his bags and unpack them as he would like so much to leave but cannot allow himself. The general obliviousness of the narrator, even in instances of philosophical clarity, are what allow the book its humour; it is as if Hemingway's iceberg were gilded and brilliantly adorned.

In regard to the original post, the Moncrieff/Kilmartin/Enright is the translation that I've read and it's wonderful, although I am no authority on its likeness to the text itself.