2018: Our Year of Reading Proust discussion

I am opening a thread for Book III.

The Guermantes Way?

What it is really mean?

on the road of (or, to, or pass?) Guermantes?

'when to the sessions of sweet silent thought, I summon up remembrance of things past...'

this is on the title of page of 2016 penguin classics.

I guess it is a quote from CKSM.

to the sessions?

"The Guermantes Way" is just like "A cote du chez swann"--hard to translate. One could say: "The Guermantes' way of life" or "The way the Guermantes live" or "the path the Guermantes make through life" or...well, you get the idea.

The quotation in your 2nd question is from Shakespeare's sonnet 30. It goes like this:

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unus'd to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
And moan th' expense of many a vanish'd sight;
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor'd, and sorrows end.

You see, now, where Moncrieff got his title. A newer way to translate it is more literal: "In Search of Lost Time."

Elizabeth wrote: ""The Guermantes Way" is just like "A cote du chez swann"--hard to translate. One could say: "The Guermantes' way of life" or "The way the Guermantes live" or "the path the Guermantes make through l..."

thanks!

I read the following sentence from Chapter One of Book Three, just don't understand what it is meant.

Parfois je levais les yeux jusqu'à quelque vaste appartement ancien dont les volets n'étaient pas fermés et où des hommes et des femmes amphibies, se réadaptant chaque soir à vivre dans un autre élément que le jour, nageaient lentement dans la grasse liqueur qui, à la tombée de la nuit, sourd incessamment du réservoir des lampes pour remplir les chambres jusqu'au bord de leurs parois de pierre et de verre, et au sein de laquelle ils propageaient, en déplaçant leurs corps, des remous, onctueux et dorés.

Sometimes I lifted my gaze to some huge old dwelling-house on which the shutters had not been closed and in which amphibious men and women floated slowly to and fro in the rich liquid that after nightfall rose incessantly from the wells of the lamps to fill the rooms to the very brink of the outer walls of stone and glass, the movement of their bodies sending through it long unctuous golden ripples.