2/11 - Notes on Proust - Lane

  In all of these readings, the influence of Scott Moncrieff’s translation was exceedingly obvious; the discussions surrounding new translations were heavily grounded by an obligation to (or action against) Scott Moncrieff and his translation of Proust. His presence, and the presence of his work, looms over the prospective translator just as heavily as Proust himself. Davis, in discussing her translation of Swann’s Way, at one point refers to Moncrieff’s work as “the original translation.” Nelson shares the fact that new translators of classics work “to some extent in the shadow of their predecessors,” and Hazzard’s invocation of the “twofold twilight” debate demonstrates the problem of successive translations and their attempts to differ from their predecessors (although predecessors can provide helpful solutions to translation problems which often get ported over into new translations instead). All of these anecdotes and translators’ experiences speak to the idea of translation, especially the first translation of a work, as a “second original.” In the Anglosphere, Moncrieff is as canonized as Proust, and every translation works not only with Proust but also with (or against) Moncrieff. One of Nelson’s concerns in his retranslation was Proust’s characteristic “verbal strangeness… stylistic otherness” in response to which “the translator should allow the Anglophone reader to experience something equivalent to the experience of the native French reader.” Given that this approach contradicts with Moncrieff’s notably flowery and (at the time) standard prose, would translating this strangeness theoretically betray one of the “originals?” Davis’s blind reading is one way to approach this problem in re-translations—she refused to look at other translations until she had created a first draft entirely of her own. To an audience accustomed to Moncrieff, almost reverently so, is this betrayal? Davis began her work with only one original, not two, and to the average reader of Proust who had only experienced Moncrieff and rewritings of his work, perhaps it is inaccurate.