Loaf or Hot Water Bottle - Lydia Davis
Thinking of Emma Ramadan’s talk about domesticizing when translating, I find Proust’s “Zut, zut, zut, zut” a good example of a phrase I would consider keeping the same if I was translating it. (Although I like something about “Damn, damn, damn, damn.”) Even having never heard “zut” before, I can infer what it means, especially if the narrator is brandishing his umbrella. If a reader is seriously tripped up on “Zut, zut, zut, zut” then they are exactly the person who needs to read it and stop swimming in the same domesticized waters. In the same way, I prefer an idiom, if possible, to be translated literally instead of replaced with a familiar idiom in English (boring!).
Translating Proust - Shirley Hazzard
“With allowance for the great discrepancies of the analogy” is a funny caveat that could preface any analogy ever.
Guizot’s reaction to Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is such a recognizable pattern. Unquestioned admiration → noticing flaws and harsh critique → back to admiration, this time tempered.
Crepuscular! No!
Translation fatigue or version fatigue is what I imagine Lydia Davis was trying to avoid by doing her own first draft before consulting others. “Distrust of stature” is interesting—something that constantly needs to be renavigated and balanced.
Brian Nelson Introduction
Surprising that Proust was not “in the least affected or ornate”! It’s the same accusation that was leveled at Deborah Smith, though Moncrieff’s language seems more ubiquitously admired as beautiful. And it’s hard not to imagine long syntactically complex sentences as in some sense “ornate” even without extra adjectives/adverbs along the way. As a reader I appreciate my “awareness of the foreign” to be “heightened.” It feels more honest to me—recognizing that a story is set in a specific place. I don’t see British literature being “Americanized” in this way. (Ok, actually I have seen that before, but I’d argue that there is more of an attitude that Americans won’t “get it”—or even be hostile—when it comes to non-Anglophone countries, and this if anything can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.)
Hate “The Swann Way” as a title sorry Brian.
New title: Stalactite of Time.
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