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- - - - Copyright 2003 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Inc.
- - - - SECTION: A&E; Pg. C11 LENGTH: 601 words HEADLINE: NEW TRANSLATION CONVEYS PROUST'S STYLE AND WORDS BYLINE: Roland A. Champagne Special To The Post-Dispatch BODY: "Swann's Way" Marcel Proust Translated by Lydia Davis; general editor Christopher Prendergast Published by Viking, 468 pages, $27.95 Partly published in French for the first time in 1912, "A la recherche du temps perdu" ("In Search of Lost Time") has become canonical in world literature. Marcel Proust's fictional poetic of the images of memory gives a permanent place to the explosive impact of everyday experiences -- in his case, the madeleine, the church steeple and the music of Vinteuil, among others. This new translation into the American language is the first of seven projected volumes from a team of seven English-language transla tors from around the world, sponsored by Penguin Books in the United Kingdom. The need for new translations is obvious in contrasting the improvements in this one to the last near-faithful translation of the entire work published by C.K. Moncrieff in 1922 and revised twice since then. As the saying goes, however, a translation necessarily betrays the original text. Translation is not a science but an art. Lydia Davis, however, is an artist with a heightened sensitivity to Proust's use of assonance, alliteration, punctuation choices and word selection. The translator's insightful introduction advises the reader to be patient with the narrator. Certainly, this patience is also rewarding thanks to her translation because of the carefully crafted Ciceronian sentences, ones that go on and on as if in search of some ultimate meaning. Meanwhile, Marcel the narrator tries to retrieve his past privileged moments in their entirety, complete with the ambience of the colorful, unforgettable characters who were attracted by Swann's personality. Davis does well to imitate the breathless style of the asthmatic Proust. Her translated sentences in American appear to lean forward, as if gasping for breath, with their paucity of commas, as they do in French. For example, when the child Marcel finally receives his mother's goodnight kiss after his long period of waiting for her in his bed, he yearns for another kiss, for just "one kiss more." By placing "more" at the end of the sentence rather than before the word "kiss," the reader senses Marcel's search for that additional sign of affection. The title of this volume, "Swann's Way," refers to Swann's character as well as to one of the two footpaths that crossed in Combray. One path led to Swann's property, and the other to the nobility of the region, the Guermantes. This double meaning of the actual path and Swann's manners captures the odyssey of the adult mind retracing the paths of its past and the psychology of the man called Swann, the narrator's role model of affectation and influence. Why should we read Proust in translation? If one does not have sufficient command of French to read the original, also called "Remembrance of Things Past, " this translation provides access to Proust's style in a manner that simply reproduces the original in both form and con tent while also providing the explanatory notes from the latest French scholarship. This translation is direct and not flowery, as was Moncrieff's romanticized selection of words that made his translation more laborious to read than the original. Davis also includes helpful synopses of the narrative with indexed pages to guide the reader's trek. The form of Proust's style is almost musical. It ignores chronological order and proceeds instead by impressions that have to do with his need to escape from chronological time and to create fictional time as our imagination keeps it for us in our memory. NOTES:
GRAPHIC: PHOTO; Photo - Book cover, "Swann's Way" LOAD-DATE: October 21, 2003 - - - -
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