Scott Moncrieff's Way: Proust in Translation


by Jerry Farber

Occasionally, readers of A la recherche du temps perdu in English may find themselves wondering, "How good is this translation?" My own short answer would have to be "Very good." But what I'd like to offer here is a somewhat longer and, I hope, more useful response to the question.

We'll need to begin with a little history.

I. It was in London shortly after World War I that C.K. Scott Moncrieff began translating Proust. His version of Swann's Way appeared in September 1922, two months before Proust died and before the last three sections of the novel had appeared in French. Scott Moncrieff himself died in 1930, by which time he had translated all but the final section, which was subsequently translated by "Stephen Hudson" (a pseudonym adopted by Proust's friend, Sydney Schiff).

For the next half-century, the English text of Proust's novel remained fixed, (except for the last section, The Past Recaptured, which was retranslated in the U.S. by Frederick Blossom, and in Great Britain by Andreas Mayor). What did change, however, was the French text. There had been countless errors in the original French edition, particularly in the later volumes which were published after Proust's death. So, when a "definitive" scholarly French edition came out in 1954, English readers were left with a translation based on an out-of-date text (except for Mayor's version of the last section, which was done after the 1954 French edition).


"At the same time, tell me whether you have chosen a translator for England. It is very important... They like my books better in England than in France; a translation would be very successful there."
        -letter to Gaston Gallimard
        December 2, 1919

Terence Kilmartin's revision of Scott Moncrieff was intended to solve this problem, that is, to bring the English version into accord with the current French text. And, while he was at it, Kilmartin set out to correct various mistakes that had been made in the original translation and also to eliminate what he saw as certain stylistic weaknesses on Scott Moncrieff's part.

Kilmartin's revision came out in 1981 and would undoubtedly have remained untouched for at least another couple of decades if another, still more reliable and authoritative French text hadn't appeared in the late 80s: the new, four-volume Pléiade edition.

So, with Kilmartin's work less than a decade old and already out of date, D.J. Enright, who had assisted Kilmartin in the earlier revision, did a re-revision, bringing the English version in line with the new Pléiade text, and, as Kilmartin had done, using the opportunity to make some other changes as well. This new version of the novel came out in the U.S. in 1992 in a six-volume Modern Library edition.

So-after 70 years' work on both sides of the Channel-is this finally it? Are we there?

II. Not quite. For one thing, an entirely new translation, by Richard Howard, should be in print before long. Up to now, only a brief excerpt from this translation has made its way into print (in the Paris Review), an excerpt which is promising in many ways and, to me at least, worrying in others. As for the Scott Moncrieff/Kilmartin/Enright translation, though I would love to report that it is finally as close to perfect as any translation can be, that is not quite the case.

But the title, I'm glad to say, is finally right. A la recherche du temps perdu does not mean "Remembrance of Things Past"; what it means is what the 1992 Modern Library version is called: In Search of Lost Time. Scott Moncrieff borrowed his title from one of Shakespeare's sonnets; it's a pretty phrase, but inappropriate. Proust's title is more active; it implies a quest. What, unfortunately, remains untranslatable in the title is a secondary meaning present in "temps perdu," which can mean not only "lost time," but also "wasted time."

Now, finally, the titles of the seven major parts of the novel are right as well. Kilmartin correctly substituted Time Regained for The Past Recaptured. And Enright has replaced the euphemistic Cities of the Plain with Sodom and Gomorrah. Only Within a Budding Grove remains as a departure from the original-a wise departure in this case, since "In the Shade of Girls in Bloom" just doesn't work that well in English. The Fugitive doesn't correspond to the new French edition's Albertine disparue ("Albertine gone" [or "disappeared"]). But Proust had been intending to call this volume La Fugitive, and changed it, at least in part because another book had been published with this title.

........  ......... ........  ......... ........  .........

Readers of the 1992 edition should have a right to expect that three layers of translation will at least have filtered out the full-on mistakes, the embarrassing goofs that can show up even in the work of an excellent translator. And, by and large, this is the case. There's a passage, for example, in "Swann in Love," when Swann is about to kiss Odette for the first time, where Scott Moncrieff got a pronoun wrong ("her mind" instead of "his mind" [SM I,179]) and wrecked Proust's meaning. Kilmartin, fortunately, caught it. There's another passage in the last section of the novel when the narrator sees the setting sun illuminating the upper halves of a line of trees. Mayor misread this as a vertical rather than horizontal division, so that one side of each tree is in sunlight and the other in shadow. A trivial mistake, it might seem, but not in Proust, whose narrator up to this point has repeatedly enjoyed this particular effect of sunlight but now is dismayed to find himself bored by it. In fact, coming where it does, this constitutes a rather substantial plot development, which in Mayor's version loses much of its power. Kilmartin let it get by him, but here Enright comes through-like an alert outfielder who snags a ball that has shot past two of his teammates-and gets it right. [K III,886; E VI,238].

But is there anything that has gotten past all three? Yes, I'm afraid so. One notable instance occurs in The Guermantes Way in the section dealing with the narrator's grandmother's illness. There's a reference to the "rupture or obstruction of a blood-vessel which had produced the uraemia." [K II,330; E III,434]. Medically this is nonsense, and, in fact, it's not what Proust wrote. Proust's wording is "qu'avait produit l'urémie": "which the uremia had produced" (the "que" here is an object, not a subject) [P II,616].

Another mistake in all three versions occurs in "Swann in Love"; here we're not dealing not with a grammatical error but with a rather interesting case of misreading. The narrator is talking about the effect music had on Swann.

And the pleasure which the music gave him . . . was in fact akin at such moments to the pleasure which he would have derived from experimenting with perfumes, from entering into contact with a world for which we men were not made, which appears to us formless because our eyes cannot perceive it, meaningless because it eludes our understanding, to which we may attain by way of one sense only. [K I,259; E I,336]

This would be a pretty good translation, except that Proust doesn't say "we men"; he just says "we." If you read the passage carefully, it becomes clear that the points he's making about the peculiar nature of scents have to do with their effect on people in general, not just on men. Scents inhabit a formless, elusive world which we may enter only through the sense of smell. But the three translators, by adding "men," project onto the text a masculine stereotype-"Hey, what do we guys know about perfumes" -and turn a Proustian exploration of human experience into a shallow comment on gender.

It's uncommon, however, for all three translators flatly to get something wrong. Even Scott Moncrieff, working on his own, did a reasonably good job on this level. But his style was self-consciously "literary" at times in a way that departed from the original. And he translated with a certain prudishness. For example: at one point in Swann's Way, if you are reading the revised translation carefully, you realize the narrator is talking about masturbation; there's a description of semen smearing the leaves of a flowering currant [K I,172; E I,222-23]. Scott Moncrieff, however, is unwilling to be as explicit as Proust was, though he does add a gratuitous "until passion spent itself and left me shuddering" [SM I,121]. And it was Scott Moncrieff's decision, which his two successors have respected, to give us that cutesy, A.E. Housman-ish quatrain:

Frogs and snails and puppy-dogs' tails,
And dirty sluts in plenty,
Smell sweeter than roses in young men's noses
When the heart is one-and-twenty. [K I,134; E I,172]

in place of Françoise's trenchant folk wisdom:

Qui du cul d'un chien s'amourose,
Il lui paraît une rose. [P I,122]

which means roughly: "Fall in love with a dog's behind and it will seem like a rose."

Scott Moncrieff's quatrain, I'm afraid, is still with us, but, generally speaking, Kilmartin did a pretty fair job of fixing up the earlier translation. His revision is not an entirely unmixed blessing, though. To take one example: when Proust's narrator refers to the "double" that exists, in his imagination, of a white linen dress and a colored flag, Kilmartin uses "carbon copy"-a bewildering choice: how are we to visualize a carbon copy of either a white dress or a colored flag [K I,963; E II,657]?

Similarly, where Proust, in The Captive, has "leur double spirituel" ("their spiritual double" [or possibly "duplicate" or "replica"]), Kilmartin gives us "a spiritual Doppelgänger" [K III,288; E V,381]. As we can see, Kilmartin sometimes introduces a fancier diction than exists in the original. Proust, in The Captive, describes an impulse as "purement mienne" ("purely mine"). Kilmartin makes it "purely solipsistic" [K III,17; E V,23]. Proust, in The Guermantes Way, refers to the "Le dédoublement de Rachel" ("dédoublement" means a splitting or dividing in two). Kilmartin makes it "The deutero-Rachel" [K, II,166] (fortunately, Enright fixed this one).


"Are you working? I no longer am. I have closed forever the era of translations that Mother favored. And as for translations of myself, I no longer have the courage."
        -letter to Marie Nordlinger
        December 8, 1906

Kilmartin's ear just isn't always as good as it could be. Where Proust, for example, uses a fairly neutral word ("mitoyenne") to describe the way the church in Combray sits between its two neighbors, Kilmartin says it's "cheek by jowl," which is, to my mind, a rather ugly expression to use in this particular context [K I,67; E I,85]. Again, in connection with the church, the narrator's grandmother, admiring the naturalness of the steeple, says that, if it could play the piano, it wouldn't sound "sec" (which means "dry" and can also connote "cold" or "unfeeling"). Kilmartin uses "tinny," which really misses the mark, especially because it tends to describe the sound of a piano, not the way it's played [K I,69; E I,87]

..

I have to say I almost regret that Kilmartin eliminated a bit of unintentional comedy in Scott Moncrieff, who had the Duchess saying to Marcel at one point: "apart from your balls, can't I be of any use to you" [SM IV,90]. Kilmartin soberly amends this to "parties." However, if Kilmartin taketh away, he also giveth. He has the narrator saying of Albertine early in The Captive: "her taste for sensual pleasure was chronic too, and was perhaps only waiting for an opportunity to be given its head" [K III,14; E V,18]. There's no giving head in the original here; Proust says "pour se donner cours," which could just as easily come out to "be given free rein."

The third translator, Enright, has done a remarkably good job. I myself wish he had been more willing to undo some of Kilmartin's work; still, he almost never leaves a passage in worse shape than he found it. There is one thing, though, that I wish he'd left as is: Brichot's silly pun in Sodom and Gomorrah. Brichot is talking about the "oriental god" who has more followers in France than any other. The god is "Je-Men-Fou" (in other words, "Je m'en fous": "I don't give a damn"). Scott Moncrieff translated "Je-Men-Fou" as "Ubedamnd." Enright comes up with "Dun Gifa Hoot," which may be a bit closer to the original in meaning, but which is simply not playable; it's too awful even for Brichot [E IV,481-82].

Obviously, a careful study of these translators' work would need a book to itself; what I have offered here can only be the briefest of samplings. And, in fact, it's hard not to keep going endlessly from one example to another: "No, Swann is not wearing a toupee in 'Swann in Love'; no, the narrator is not so tacky as to call one of Elstir's paintings a 'square panel of beauty'; no, some of the people at the reception in Time Regained don't carry replicas of streets on their faces." And there are countless instances of a subtler kind, which are by no means mistranslations, but which raise interesting interpretive or stylistic questions.

In any case, it hasn't been my intention to attack or undermine the Scott Moncrieff/Kilmartin/Enright translation. I thought it might be useful for readers of Proust in English to have some sense of the limitations of this translation, but, in fact, there is far more to admire in it than to cavil at.

........  ......... ........  ......... ........  .........

Howard's new translation will be appearing before long, and you can be sure there will be others to follow. But I doubt that any of these will simply "replace" the current one. C.K. Scott Moncrieff was a remarkably able translator, possessing style and flair, and passionately devoted to Proust's novel. He was, in some ways, temperamentally similar to Proust, and he shared Proust's interests in nature, music, poetry-even in genealogy. Equally important, as a cultivated Britisher in the 1920s, he was writing in a language and from a culture that in many ways closely paralleled Proust's own, whereas any translation that appears now will inevitably-whatever its brilliance, whatever its concern to be faithful to the original-bear the imprint of our own age.

The Scott Moncrieff translation has helped make it possible for Proust's novel to become, in Harold Bloom's words, "widely recognized as the major novel of the twentieth century." It has delighted and profoundly influenced successive generations of English-speaking authors. Even before the revisions, which have on the whole improved it, it was a masterpiece of translation. I hope that my own brief critique will be taken as a kind of tribute.


PROUST TEXTS CITED

SM = Remembrance of Things Past. Trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff. 7 vols. New York: Vintage-Random, 1970.
K = Remembrance of Things Past. Trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. 3 vols. New York: Vintage-Random, 1982.
E = In Search of Lost Time. Trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. Revised by D.J. Enright. 6 vols. New York: Modern Library, 1992.
P = A la recherche du temps perdu. Ed. Jean-Yves Tadié. 4 vols. Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade-Gallimard, 1987-89.

Return to the Cover of Proust Said That, Issue 6
P Segal

What the Critics Said Recently