Why an Imperfect Version of Proust Is a Classic in English
This writing was originally published in The New Yorker in March 30, 2015, written by Adam Gopnik.
The art of translation is usually a semi-invisible one, and is generally thought better for being so. A few translators’ names are familiar to the amateur reader—we know about Chapman’s Homer, through Keats, and Richard Wilbur’s Molière is part of the modern American theatre—but mostly translators struggle with sentences for even less moment (and money) than other writers do. One key exception to this rule is C. K. Scott Moncrieff (1889-1930), whose early-twentieth-century English version of Marcel Proust’s masterpiece, “À la Recherche du Temps Perdu,” has been a classic in our own language since the day of its first publication. Newly published volume by newly published volume, working almost as a simultaneous translator, Moncrieff inserted Proust into the English-speaking reader’s consciousness with a force that Proust’s contemporaries in continental languages never really got. Mostly thanks to Moncrieff, Proust is part of the common reader’s experience in English. John Middleton Murry, in an early review, wrote, “No English reader will get more out of reading ‘Du cote de chez Swann’ in French than he will out of reading ‘Swann’s Way’ in English,” and amateur book readers, for whom other works of mega-modernism—“The Man Without Qualities,” or “Buddenbrooks”—remain schoolwork, still read Proust. Everybody tries to climb Mt. Proust, though many a stiff body is found on the lower slopes, with the other readers stepping over it gingerly.
But the ease of Moncrieff’s translations also started a fistfight, ongoing, about whether his Proust is Proust, near Proust, Anglicized Proust, or not Proust at all. That Moncrieff called Proust’s book “Remembrance of Things Past,” borrowing from Shakespeare, rather than anything close to a literal rendering of the title “In Search of Lost Time,” is typical of what the translation’s detractors kvetch about to this day. The first full-length biography of Moncrieff is now out, written by Jean Findlay and bearing the cumbersome title “Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Soldier, Spy, and Translator.” And though it occasionally makes one wish that the old form of the brief life would come back into fashion (Moncrieff was an interesting man who led an exceptional life, but he was not that interesting nor that exceptional) the book still helps us see how someone who was not even particularly expert in the original language managed to make a great French book into a great English one.
Moncrieff, who was Uranian, as the self-designation was then, emerged from the élite boarding school Winchester College and Edinburgh University into that strange half-lit, prewar world of London homosexuality after the Wilde trial. It’s frequently said, in popular literature, that after Wilde’s imprisonment the gay literary establishment fled or was frightened into silence, but judging from the evidence assembled here, and in other memoirs of the period, that isn’t quite so. The Wilde circle persisted, more or less openly Uranian, though less expansively self-confident, and came to produce respectable figures such as Moncrieff’s intimate friend Edward Marsh, who was Winston Churchill’s private secretary, and who was hardly “out,” but was, in his serial infatuations, not exactly in, either. These men were inside the closet, certainly, but it was a bigger and better panelled one than many before or since—and a closet that big and that well panelled is really more like a private club.
It is good to be reminded, too, that the mood and spirit of the circle was not remotely radical but rather cautiously reactionary and happily militaristic: the alternative to Uranian love was not socialism but Catholicism, of the kind to which Wilde himself succumbed in the end. (The link lies in aestheticism: if you live for lovely, the Catholic rite has all others beat.) Edward Marsh, Compton Mackenzie, Reggie Turner, and Noël Coward—the politburo of what W. H. Auden called the Homintern—attended Moncrieff’s farewell lunch when he left for Italy, in the nineteen-twenties. The group’s secure social position did not guarantee an absence of persecution, but it tended to keep the persecution from becoming regularly renewed. The rules of the game were as complex, to an outsider, as the rules of cricket—but they knew how to play that game, too. (On the other hand, Moncrieff fled to Italy in part because he wanted sex without the police.)
At one moment, Moncrieff writes to Marsh to ask if he could “stop them [i.e., the government] from prosecuting me if I translate Sodom et Gommorhe,” the most overtly “gay” volume in Proust’s book. Then, two sentences later, he writes, “I am seriously delighted that Winston has returned to power and hope to see him prime minister.”
The picture of the times that Moncrieff’s life provides is interesting, but what matters most is the book he made from the book he found. He began translating Proust in 1919, after returning with a serious leg wound from what was called “gallant service” in the war. In a spirit very nearly casual, he interspersed his translations of the later volumes with a great deal of other work. What made his Proust translation so superior—so much so that Joseph Conrad could actually say that he thought Moncrieff was a better translator than Proust was a writer?
Proust himself, in a cranky letter of thanks, put his finger on the conventional complaint about Moncrieff’s version—which was that Moncrieff tended to smooth out or sweeten certain knotty or perverse moves in Proust. The question of the first volume’s title captures the issue: “Du Cote de chez Swann” is a weird construction in French, meaning more or less “The Way by Swann’s Place.” Proust’s own advice for improving on Moncrieff’s title is, in a way, perfectly right—he said that you only need add a “to”: “To Swann’s Way.” But that wouldn’t sound right in English. “To Swann’s Place” is closer. But, ultimately, “Swann’s Way” is the simplest choice and has the right kind of nimbus. The place isn’t the subject; Swann is. Moncrieff, though off, is actually on, and on without being too self-consciously poetic in the pursuit.
One other, I think significant, aspect of the translation that the biography illuminates is the intertwining, in Moncrieff’s imagination, between the materials of Proust and the related—slightly different, but related—rhythms of Henry James. James’s direct influence on Proust is debated; certainly James disliked what he read of the French writer. But in Moncrieff’s mind Proust and James always seem to come up together, to get twinned—and not James’s novels so much as his occasional writing and non-fiction. Opening James’s letters, Moncrieff remarks that it is “a book that fills the emptiest winter room with the warm breath of intimate communicative people.”
And, indeed, the tone and syntax of the first volume of James’s memoir, “A Small Boy And Others,” which was published in 1913, is startlingly, at times eerily, like that of the young narrator in Moncrieff’s Proust—there is the same small boy of uncanny maturity, who for all his nuanced scruples, still has the interests (such as playing in the park) of a small boy.
James’s is a very odd kind of autobiography where, as often happens in Proust, there is no obvious hierarchy of incidents: anything remembered matters. It’s a memoir whose chief subjects are memory itself and the relationship of the child to the man—or to men, as Henry constantly defers to his brother William, whom he presents as an intimidating pillar of superior sense. “If in my way I collected the new,” he says, bashfully, contrasting himself with his more active brother, “as well I yet cherished the old; the ragbag of memory hung on its nail in my closet, though I learnt with time to control the habit of bringing it forth. And I say that with a due sense of my doubtless now appearing to empty it into these pages.” To this ear, at least, echoes of James’s memoirs are everywhere in Moncrieff’s Proust, with an abundance of particularized memory that is held in a sort of solution of nostalgia, so that the act of memory is as evident as the thing remembered, as when James writes of the simple delivery of summer fruit in early nineteenth-century New York:
Why the throb of romance should have beat time for me to such visions I can scarce explain, or can explain only by the fact that the squalor was a squalor wonderfully mixed and seasoned, and that I should wrong the whole impression if I didn’t figure it first and foremost as that of some vast succulent cornucopia. What did the stacked boxes and baskets of our youth represent but the boundless fruitage of that more bucolic age of the American world, and what was after all of so strong an assault as the rankness of such a harvest? Where is that fruitage now, where in particular are the peaches d’antan? where the mounds of Isabella grapes and Seckel pears in the sticky sweetness of which our childhood seems to have been steeped? It was surely, save perhaps for oranges, a more informally and familiarly fruit-eating time, and bushels of peaches in particular, peaches big and peaches small, peaches white and peaches yellow, played a part in life from which they have somehow been deposed; every garden, almost every bush and the very boys’ pockets grew them.
Such passages surely echo in Moncrieff’s rendering of Proust’s voice in that most beautiful section of modern prose, the “Place Names: The Place,” which concludes his first volume:
With admiring eyes I saw, luminous and imprisoned in a bowl by themselves, the agate marbles which seemed precious to me because they were as fair and smiling as little girls, and because they cost fivepence each. Gilberte, who was given a great deal more pocket money than I ever had, asked which I thought the prettiest. They were as transparent, as liquid-seeming as life itself.
There’s no way to quantify such things of course—or, rather, there are ways, but none of them is convincing, stylometrics seeming about as reliable as lie-detector tests—but, at least to one who has pushed through Proust twice in Moncrieff’s version and once, more laboriously, in French, it can often seem that Moncrieff’s note of winsome gravity is more Jamesian than Proustian. Proust, being French, more or less takes sexual avidity of all kinds for granted—as in the famous scenes in which the narrator and Gilberte practice some kind of four-o’clock-in-the-park frottage. James needs to put such human elements more elusively, in inverted commas, and so, delicately, does Moncrieff. Proust could be direct about things that Moncrieff had to fudge—that title “Sodome et Gomorrhe,” for instance, which Moncrieff makes into “Cities of the Plain.” The point and subject is perfectly clear, but disappears just a little into the moist air of euphemism. And what is true title by title is also true sentence by sentence: forced to make Proust a little more elusive and enigmatic and allusive than he is, Moncrieff turned instinctively to James’s elusive and enigmatic allusiveness, the English equivalent nearest at hand. Beginning in a desire to placate English Puritanism, the little cloud of Jamesian evasion extended, charmingly, elsewhere in the book. Fudge is sweeter than straightforwardness, if also always a little more cloying. Euphemism and sublimation were habits of the English aesthetes more than of the French ones—the Gallic taste is for abstraction and ellipsis instead—and this lends a particular poetic tone to Moncrieff’s translation. (Proust is often abstract and usually elliptical, but rarely delicate.)
The final revelation of Findlay’s book is that Moncrieff was far from the perfect Proustian of our imagination. Moncrieff is a lot more fun to be around than his careful sentences might suggest. Recommending that a friend—Wilde’s aggressively heterosexual son Vyvyan Holland, as a matter of fact—try his hand at translating Stendhal, he explains, “You can do it straight on to the typewriter without even stopping to masturbate, as in the case of Proust.” (It is not clear if Holland then tried his hand at it.) Elsewhere he writes, of a translation of Abelard and Heloise’s letters: “The passage about fornication at Argenteuil you will find on my folios 76-77. They did it in the refectory, apparently, in a smell of stale mutton fat and wine lees.” He had a thoroughly lively time in life, in that British way that is still surprising to our more earnest American minds—he has rough sex on the streets of Venice, spies for the secret service, translates his Proust and Pirandello, goes to Catholic mass, and works for the Tory party, in one big, very British, and happy entanglement of sodomy, spirituality, spying, and sociability. Far from being a Proustian acolyte perfuming the altar, he refused to be remotely pious about the great book he had brought into English literature—if anything, he seems to have generally preferred Pirandello. Proust attracts, perhaps, too much piety; certainly the Proust cult is always an enemy of Proust the writer. By humanizing the priest, we re-enliven the god.
This writing was originally published in The New Yorker.
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