Reader Response Required
I’ve already reviewed two Proust-related books for Spike: Jean-Yves Tadie’s monumental biography and Gilles Deleuze complex and inspiring monograph Proust & Signs. But I’m sorely tempted to do something sillier than buy the new translation of In Search of Lost Time, and that’s review it too. Is that being excessive? As Boyd Tonkin, literary editor of the The Independent, reports the translation was a long job shortened only by employing seven different translators for the six volumes in this edition. Tonkin begins by lamenting the nonsense of recent Booker Prize judges rubbishing literary fiction. He tells them that despite their populist assumptions, “Proust ranks among the most engrossing, witty and moving of all novelists.”
Philip Hensher’s review of the new version in the Spectator is the only one I’ve seen so far. He takes to task some of the work by the translators, and though his isolated examples strike one as irredeemable for the whole, I remain enthusiastic about re-reading the greatest novel of the last century. Maybe it needs a non-French speaker to review the book. Perhaps it’s a self-serving opinion, but I think too much is made of the importance of the original language. Comprende? If there’s anyone out there who wants me to review the new translation in ignorance of the French original (though not of the Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation) then please leave a comment!
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- A modern antidreyfusard
- Translated from silence
- Conjunctions Conjunctions magazine is really a …
- Robert Lowell
- A first?
