Proust has a hole in his head

[calimac]

A number of my friends have read Proust, and I've put this question to a couple of them, but none was certain of an answer. Like a Proustian memory, this question flits in to my mind only fitfully, but I'm thinking of it now, having just passed by a reference to Monty Python's Summarize Proust Competition, which is about the only thing in my regular frame of reference that's likely to bring Proust to my mind.

Proust's great cycle of novels appeared in its first English translation under the general title Remembrance of Things Past, a line from a Shakespeare sonnet. But a more recent translation is titled In Search of Lost Time, and this seems to have rapidly taken over as the preferred English title.

My question is: did Proust mean the original French title, À la recherche du temps perdu, to be a reference to a French translation of Shakespeare, or not?

Knowledge on the web is giving me different answers. The editor of the newer translation says no he didn't:

"Remembrance of Things Past" was [translator] Scott Moncrieff's invention; he picked out a quote from Shakespeare. Obviously, Scott Moncrieff wanted something that echoed English literature. But Proust himself hated the English title, and he was right.

But here's a critic who says oh yes he did:

Proust took his title from Voltaire's translation of Shakespeare's sonnet 30, so when C.K. Moncrieff wrote the first English translation of À la recherche du temps perdu in the year before Proust's death, he used Shakespeare's words.

Next step, I suppose, would be to dig up Voltaire's translation of Shakespeare to see if that is indeed the wording. Then, probably to books rather than websites on Proust to search for evidence that he did indeed deliberately mean to quote, and if he did hate the English title, and if the answer to both is yes, then why. And I may do this when next simultaneously in a research library and thinking of this matter.

My French, which probably couldn't even get me to the railway station, is certainly not up to determining whether the phrase In Search of Lost Time is a better translation. And the two experts above can't agree either. One says yes, a bit:

"Remembrance of Things Past" is quite pretty, but has absolutely nothing to do with Proust's own title. "Remembrance" loses all the ambiguity of the word "lost" - even though "lost" doesn't capture the meaning of "wasted" that is contained in the French word "perdu." "Remembrance of Things Past" also loses the word "recherche," which we've translated as "In Search of," but which is a word with multiple meanings, as it means both "investigation" and "experiment."

The other says no, emphatically:

The new title lacks the wistful poetic quality of "Remembrance of Things Past." The new title is a more 'literal' translation of the title Proust gave his novel, À la recherche du temps perdu, but the French title does not translate literally in all that it intimates and evokes. The sonnet captures Proust's experience far better than the more word-for-word translation does. "In Search of Lost Time" sounds vaguely scientistic, like a cross between a dig at the Aztec ruins and Einstein's Theory of Relativity.

As to the philosophical question of whether, if Proust was quoting a translation of Shakespeare, we ought to revert to the original when translating Proust into Shakespeare's tongue, all I can contribute is the fact that, when a French history of science fiction was rendered into English by a translator who didn't bother to look up the original titles of the English-language works referred to, the results were such a mixture of incomprehensible and hilarious that it spawned an entire F&SF competition (not on the web as far as I can tell, but it's in the April 1977 issue and also in Oi, Robot p. 51-52), of which my favorite winning entries are The Tin Men Go To Sleep by Isaac Asimov and He Has a Hole in His Head and His Teeth Glow in the Dark by Roger Zelazny.

Comments

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

In Search of Lost Time is a literal translation (almost word for word). I agree with the person who says Remembrance of Things Past is pretty but doesn't capture the meaning very well. A huge part of the book is about the author frittering away time, being sick in a hypochondriac way, spending more time thinking about what to do than doing it. Also there are aspects of reconstructing stories from the past, 'lost' time in that respect as well. (I'm not convinced that 'lost' can't mean 'wasted' in English.)

The accusation that 'search' sounds scientific is an odd one considering that 'recherche' can mean 'research,' an even more explicitly scientific meaning. The book is definitely an exploration of different ways of looking at the world, at events, at time, at people.

In short, I think In Search of Lost Time is a better title by far, and am not surprised that it's being widely embraced.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

And here I always thought the literal translation was Research of Squandered Weather!

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

'recherche' can mean 'research'

I knew that, or should have remembered it. I've seen the word in enough scientific journal titles.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I don't know anything about any of this, but I like In Search of Lost Time much better as a title. I think it's far more evocative.

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

Á la recherche du temps perdu
Á: is a preposition that doesn't translate comfortably to a specific English preposition.
La: the
Á la together kind of mean "of the" or "in the manner of."
Recherche: literally, research; generally, a search (for something)
Du: combined form of "de le," meaning "of the."
Temps: Time
Perdu: Lost; past participle of perdre, to lose.

Taken together a literal translation would be something like: Of the search for lost time.

this page seems to be a painstakingly complete list of the works of Voltaire. The only translation of Shakespeare it lists is Julius Caesar. Of course it's possible that Voltaire translated the Sonnets, or just lines of S.30, as part of something else (perhaps in his introduction to the translation of Caesar), but there is no actual listing here for a translation of the Sonnets, nor could I find one on www.google.fr ... For what that's worth.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Before I found the quote claiming that it was Voltaire's translation, the grammatical structure of the French phrase made me doubtful that it came from a translation of the sonnet. How would the "a la" fit into what Shakespeare wrote?

Worth looking into, obviously.