swanns_way

SWANN'S WAY by Marcel Proust

Translated by Scott Moncrieff/Kilmartin/Enright

(1981/1992) 2005. Vintage Classics. Paperback.

About five years ago, at a Lifeline bookfair in Chatswood, I saw and
immediately bought, for just six dollars, a giant single-volume edition
of A la recherche de temps perdu, the great classic by Marcel Proust,
published by Editions Gallimard.

The number of clauses and commas in my first sentence make it
Proustian and I'm tempted to continue this review in the same
manner. But I'll stick to the normal language of my book reviews.

Reading the translation and the original side-by-side, I can see this
translation is very literal and maintains to an obsessive degree the
word order of French grammar. Occasionally it is prudish, for instance
on Vintage page 147/Gallimard page 105 a little rhyme is concocted
instead of Proust's simple but scatalogical "He who falls in love with
a dog's bottom/will think it's a rose".

Swann's Way takes 513 Vintage pages but just 330 Gallimard pages. The
French printing also crams quotations into the same paragraph as
sentences before and after. <<How annoying this is, thought Stuart to
himself, and there's sometimes confusion which words are spoken inside
the double less-than/greater than quotation symbols>>. Shakespeare was
first printed like this and it's not always clear which lines are
prose and which lines are iambic pentameter poetry. The entirety of A la
Recherche in Gallimard takes 2,401 very dense pages.

Because I was writing the Gallimard page numbers into the Vintage, I
paid special attantion understanding the bottom of each French
page. If I liked a phrase I'd find and check the original French and
sometimes copy it into the Vintage. I've read about Five percent of
Swann's Way in French in this fashion. My favourite discovery was that
the French for "verisimilitude" is "vraisemblance", a mixture of
"vrai" for truth and resemblance.

This was a big reading project but I'll keep up the effort and start
the second book soon. At different times, Swann's Way had a lot to
tell me or nothing at all. The narrator M. is such a Mummy's boy in
the first 50 pages and the country town church at Combray was of no
interest. The "Swann in Love" flashback episode was very good,
especially the insight into Swann's obsession for a lady, Odette, who
certainly got around a lot.

The last 50 pages, "Place Names - The Name" I expected to find very
dull but as it happened it flew past. M.'s digressions on nomenclature
were worthwhile and his youthful games with Gilberte (daughter of
Swann and Odette) kept my interest. With such a huge book, the first
50 pages and last 50 pages often go quickly, I get bogged down in the
meaty middle of huge volumes.

I have two other translations of Swann's Way which I'll read in years
to come. Penguin have a beautiful hardback set of A la recherche, with
each book using a different translator. The Swann's Way in Penguin is
424 pages and translated by Lydia Davis. My third translation is by
James Grive who was an ANU Canberra academic. His Swann's Way is 346
pages and he is also the Penguin translator of Volume 2, "Within a
Budding Grove/In the Shadow of Young Girls with Flower".

                                             25th January 2024

My book reviews are at https://github.com/stucooper/booksiveread