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Rong Yu

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Abridged Rechercher: An Abridgement Of La Recherche Du Temps Perdu (On Research Into Lost Time, In Search Of Lost Time, Remembrance Of Things Past)

by Steve Bachmann

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Aug 08, 2025 02:17AM

Rong Yu is currently reading

In Search of Lost Time

by Marcel Proust

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Rong Yu said: " The views of Conrad, Eliot, Nabokov, Maugham, Virginia Woolf, and Fitzgerald on the translation of Proust.

Conrad's letter to Moncrieff: "I was more interested and fascinated by your rendering than by Proust’s creation. One has revealed to me somethin The views of Conrad, Eliot, Nabokov, Maugham, Virginia Woolf, and Fitzgerald on the translation of Proust.

Conrad's letter to Moncrieff: "I was more interested and fascinated by your rendering than by Proust’s creation. One has revealed to me something and there is no revelation in the other. I am speaking of the sheer maitrise de langue; I mean how far it can be pushed – in your case of two languages – by a faculty akin to genius. For to think that such a result could be obtained by mere study and industry would be too depressing. And that is the revelation. As far as the maitrise de langue is concerned there is no revelation in Proust."

T.S. Eliot: "Next week a new member of the group asked what he thought of the translation of Proust by Scott Moncrieff, and Eliot delivered a very weighty, and rather long, tribute to that work. It was not enough, he said, to say that it was better than the original in many single passages; it was his impression that the translation was at no point inferior to the original (which, to be sure, was often careless French), either in accuracy of detail or in the general impression of the whole."

"In February 1923, T. S. Eliot, who was editing the ambitious literary periodical, The Criterion, founded the year before, wrote to Jacques Rivière, the editor of the Nouvelle Revue française, saying, ‘J’ai causé avec Monsieur Scott Moncrieff qui s’est fait un succès éclatant par sa traduction de Swann’40 (‘I have spoken to Mr Scott Moncrieff who has made a brilliant success of his translation of Swann’), and could the Criterion please have a morceau of unpublished copy and Scott Moncrieff would translate it. Eliot wrote to Charles saying that it would be a coup for The Criterion to print something not yet printed even in French. Charles agreed but Rivière delayed sending the piece. Meanwhile Richard Aldington, Eliot’s assistant, was given the task of dealing with Charles, but went to Italy, so Charles was left hanging, not knowing what was going on until Eliot sent him a courteous letter explaining the situation and insisting he would rather print the piece in French than have any translator other than Scott Moncrieff."

Maugham: "His work has been so well translated that I am inclined to think it alone, of all those I have mentioned, loses nothing in its English dress."

The Times critic A. B. Walkely said it was ‘very close to the original, yet it is written in fastidious English’.

John Middleton Murry in the Nation and Atheneum declared, ‘nothing less than amazing. Had it not been done, it would have seemed impossible. But it has been done … No English reader will get more out of reading Du Côté de chez Swann in French than he will out of reading Swann’s Way in English.

Virginia Woolf described reading Scott Moncrieff’s Proust as an ‘erotic experience’; F Scott Fitzgerald called it a ‘masterpiece in itself’; and Joseph Conrad declared Scott Moncrieff’s version to be better than the French original.

"Woolf loved Proust, writing of his ‘astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification’. She first read Proust in the Scott Moncrieff translation, admitting to Roger Fry that reading the translation was akin to a sexual experience, and in her notebooks all her page references correspond to the translation. In To the Lighthouse published in 1927, entire phrases are taken from the Scott Moncrieff translation. Similarly, there are two coinages in Finnegans Wake, which Joyce started working on in 1922, that can only come from the translation, not the original – ‘swansway’ and ‘pities of the plain’."

An anecdote: "Intensely loyal to Proust, the Schiffs were shocked at the liberties that had been taken with the translation of the title and wrote at once to Proust in protest. In spite of the fact that Gallimard had been sent the translation, it turned out that Proust, isolated and ill, had not been shown a copy. He was distressed by what the Schiffs wrote and considered stopping publication. ‘I cherish my work,’ he told Gallimard, who could have prevented the shock, ‘and won’t have it ruined by Englishmen.’ However, the Schiffs bought an early copy of Swann’s Way, sitting down to read it and telegraphing the same day to Proust that the translation was excellent. They then became as passionate and loyal and generous to the translator as they had been to Proust."

The only dissenting voice was Nabokov (Nabokov's translation standards can be seen from his translation of Pushkin. Julian Barnes believes that the best way to read Pushkin is to read only Nabokov's annotations with someone else's translation), but he also admitted that Moncrieff's translation has a certain 'style':

"The Moncrieff translation of Proust is awful, almost as awful as the translations of Anna and Emma but in a way still more exasperating because Mr. Moncrieff has a son petit style a lui which he airs."

"I have only looked into the Moncrieff translation of Proust. What struck me was that he had turned Proust's lugubriousness into something lighter and brighter and English." ...more "

Dec 28, 2024 05:39AM · see review