Assessing the English and Spanish Translations of Proust’s ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’ by Herbert E. Craig (review)

Abstract

 Reviews (p. ). Naturalism, however, can be seen as much as a sales tool as literary philosophy (p. ), and Zola ‘may be closer to Saccard than he [. . .] admit[s]’ (p. ). If in L’Argent, the Banque Universelle is ‘a story told, or a prospectus sold, by Saccard’ (p. ), the novel itself, ‘the story of a crash’, is ‘the crash of a story’ (p. ): naturalist narrative bursts its own bubble. e business analogies are occasionally somewhat oversold in Jonathan Paine’s interpretative pitch, and claims for ‘the reader’, despite caveats, would have bene fited from greater theoretical context. However, the arguments are grounded within a well-digested range of relevant criticism, to which this work—containing useful appendices, including the provision of original quotations—is a welcome addition. U  K L D Assessing the English and Spanish Translations of Proust’s ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’. By H E. C. New York: Peter Lang. . viii+ pp.£. ISBN ––––. Proust’s aphorism that the task of a writer resembles that of a translator is the starting point for Herbert Craig’s study of English and Spanish translations of À la recherche du temps perdu. Proust himself dabbled in translation, and he conceived of literature as the translation of phenomenal experience into language. Translation was thus important for the French writer, both as an activity in its own right and also as a metaphor for the alchemy by which life is transformed into art. erefore, it is fitting that translations of Proust’s work receive their share of the scholarly attention that has been dedicated to this giant of French letters. Spanish and English are logical choices for such a study owing to the fact that the first translations of Proust’s work were published in Spain and the United Kingdom. But the choice is not justified by precedence alone. e number of translations produced in both languages and Proust’s influence in the Spanish- and English-speaking worlds are important reasons to examine the texts through which the French writer is known in these different cultures. Furthermore, the story of Proust’s reception in other languages is fascinating not simply because of what it reveals about those other cultural contexts but also because of what it discloses about Proust’s work itself. With his comparative analysis of these translations, Craig contributes an important chapter to the story of Proust’s reception and, in his dissection of translators’ decisions about how to render Proust in other languages, uncovers something of the essence of the Proustian idiom. Craig works his way methodically through the volumes of À la recherche and contrasts the various translations of each—first English, then Spanish. Each chapter begins with a survey of the reception of the translations and goes on to present a comparative analysis based on a representative section of the text. e examination of Proust’s incipit is illuminating, as is the discussion of different translations of ‘Combray’, ‘Un amour de Swann’, and ‘Les Intermittences du cœur’. Craig’s MLR, .,   meticulousness pays analytical dividends in the scrutiny of translators’ differing treatment of noteworthy features of Proust’s writing: Proust’s use of repetition and translators’ varying confidence in their use of the device; translators’ uneven efforts at replicating the symmetries of À la recherche, for example, in its first and last words. eoretical deliberations on fluency versus equivalency acquire substance in Craig’s meditations on how best to render the idiosyncrasies of Proustian syntax and style and in his reflections on the extent to which a translation of Proust should emulate the complexity of the original. Viewed through the lens of translation theory, Proust’s distinctive formatting of dialogue, use of punctuation, and arrangement of paragraph breaks attain new significance as singular characteristics of the work and integral manifestations of the guiding vision behind the writing. Drawing his methodology from the work of Katharina Reiss, Craig endeavours to determine the accuracy and stylistic qualities of the compared translations. In the process, he uncovers patterns of omissions, additions, types of error, and punctuation and identifies translators’ theoretical considerations and the source editions used to produce their versions. Craig’s value judgements on...