To Proustify

Marcel Proust spoke in long sentences early in life. By the time he was in junior high or high school his friends made up a word for it that translates into English as "to Proustify." In Search of Lost Time is a very long book--which doesn't mean you will drop dead upon finishing it. However, there are people who claim that it is the best novel written in the 20th century. If they are right, all those other novels you read in the rest of your life just won't as good as they might have been if you'd saved Proust till last.

I bought a full paperback set of what I call "the Kilmartin edition" for just $47.25, which is cheaper than used copies on eBay. This edition is the C.K. Scott-Moncrieff translation that Terence Kilmartin revised based on a better edition of Proust in French being made available. Kilmartin's revision also eliminates Scott-Moncrieff's excesses. I have only read the first part: Swann's Way (656 pages).

I have so far managed to assemble three of the volumes of the six-volume edition that editor Christopher Prendergast oversaw, published by Viking in 2003. This got my attention when I saw the smashing review Lydia Davis received for her translation of the first part: Swann's Way (468 pages). Apparently Viking had a big print run for the first volume but printed fewer copies of some of the others. It doesn't seem to be sold as a set; so, you have to track down its parts. I have never seen all six volumes together in a bookstore. In her introduction, Davis says that Proust is not wordy. In fact, she says, he is concise, but it takes him as many words as it does to articulate the fineness of nuance that he achieves.

I'm reading other stuff right now, but I do occasionally dip into the 2003 Penguin edition. In The Guermantes Way, translated into English by Mark Treharne, I found the following:

Ever since I had ceased to see actors solely as the depositories, in their diction and acting ability, of an artistic truth, the had begun to interest me in their own right; with the feeling that I was watching the characters from some old comic novel, I was amused to see the naïve heroine of a play, he attention drawn to the new face of some young duke who has just taken his seat in the theater, listen abstractedly to the declaration of love the juvenile lead was addressing to her, while he, through the rolling passion of this declaration, was in turn directing an enamored eye at an old lady seated in a stage box, whose magnificent pearls had caught his interest; and in this way, largely owing to what Saint-Loup had told me about the private lives of actors, I saw another drama, silent but telling, being played out beneath the words of the play that was being performed, yet the play itself, however uninspired, was still something that interested me, too; for within it I could feel germinating and blossoming for an hour in the glare of the footlights--created out of the agglutination on the face of an actor of another face of greasepaint and pasteboard, and on his individual soul the words of a part--the ephemeral and spirited personalities, captivating, too, who form the cast of a play, whom one loves, admires, pities, whom one would like to met again after the play is over, but who by that time have already disintegrated into the actors, who are no longer what they were in their roles. into a script that no longer shows the actors' faces, into a colored powder that can be wiped off by a handkerchief, who have reverted, in a word, to elements that contain nothing of them, because their dissolution is complete as soon as the play has ended, and this, like the dissolution of a loved one, causes one to doubt the reality of the self and to meditate on the mystery of death.

That paragraph is one sentence long. That isn't the longest sentence in In Search of Lost Time, and Proust did not always write in long sentences. But it is a tribute to Proust as an author and Treharne as a translator that it is a beautiful sentence--the kind of thing that Proust produces, sentence after sentence, for thousands of pages. And although it is a translation, few native-English-speaking writers today can ever hope to write a sentence as good.

I don't really know French, but, for the curious, here is the foregoing translated passage in Proust's own words:

Depuis que les acteurs n'étaient plus exclusivement, pour moi, les dépositaires, en leur diction et leur jeu, d'une vérité artistique, ils m'intéressaient en eux-mêmes; je m'amusais, croyant contempler les personnages d'un vieux roman comique, de voir du visage nouveau d'un jeune seigneur qui venait d'entrer dans la salle, l'ingénue écouter distraitement la déclaration que lui faisait le jeune premier dans la pièce, tandis que celui-ci, dans le feu roulant de sa tirade amoureuse, n'en dirigeait pas moins une oeillade enflammée vers une vieille dame assise dans une loge voisine, et dont les magnifiques perles l'avaient frappé; et ainsi, surtout grâce aux renseignements que Saint-Loup me donnait sur la vie privée des artistes, je voyais une autre pièce, muette et expressive se jouer sous la pièce parlée, laquelle d'ailleurs, quoique médiocre, m'intéressait; car j'y sentais germer et s'épanouir pour une heure, à la lumière de la rampe, faites de l'agglutinement sur le visage d'un acteur d'un autre visage de fard et de carton, sur son âme personnelle des paroles d'un rôle, ces individualités éphémères et vivaces que sont les personnages d'une pièce, séduisantes aussi, qu'on aime, qu'on admire, qu'on plaint, qu'on voudrait retrouver encore, une fois qu'on a quitté le théâtre, mais qui déjà se sont désagrégées en un comédien qui n'a plus la condition qu'il avait dans la pièce, en un texte qui ne montre plus le visage du comédien, en une poudre colorée qu'efface le mouchoir, qui sont retournées en un mot à des éléments qui n'ont plus rien d'elles, à cause de leur dissolution, consommée sitôt après la fin du spectacle, et qui fait, comme celle d'un être aimé, douter de la réalité du moi et méditer sur la mort.