Proust swann's way6/12/2023 ![]() ![]() The first volumes of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu were printed with quantities of typesetter errors Proust's elliptical sentences were hard to follow and his handwritten annotations on top of the typescript indecipherable in places. The few who weren't killed in the war were overworked with undertrained assistants. In postwar France there was a shortage of typesetters. He knew he could not find an English expression meaning time wasted and time lost, involving memory and still reflecting the beauty of what the novel contained, so he chose a line from Shakespeare's Sonnet 30: "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought / I summon up remembrance of things past." This horrified purists, and still does, and so the new version translates the title as precisely as you'll find it on Google Translate.īut there were reasons for internal technical inaccuracies. He took liberties with the title from the very beginning. Scott Moncrieff was not a mechanical translator he was more like Gielgud interpreting Shakespeare, or Casals interpreting Bach. ![]() Joseph Conrad wrote to him that "I was more interested and fascinated by your rendering than by Proust's creation … You have a supreme faculty akin to genius." But critics have since deemed his work "inaccurate", "overinterpretive" or "flowery". In the following year – and F Scott Fitzgerald would later concur – his translation was hailed as a masterpiece in itself. ![]()
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