Literary Translation
in the News

ADVENTURES IN LITERARY TRANSLATION

THE NEW REPUBLIC: 01.17.05

"Swann's Ways"

by Wyatt Mason

I.

Let's not kid ourselves: everyone hates translations. The evidence is everywhere in the history of literature. Cervantes wrote that reading a translation was "like looking at the Flanders tapestries from behind: although you can see the basic shapes, they are so filled with threads that you cannot fathom their original luster." Goethe took issue with translators themselves, whom he likened to "enthusiastic matchmakers singing the praises of some half-naked young beauty: they awaken in us an irresistible urge to see the real thing with our own eyes." Gide observed that the translator was "a horseman who tries to put his steed through paces for which it is not built." Madame de Lafayette equated the translator with "a lackey whose mistress sends him to pay someone a compliment; whatever she said politely, he renders rude." And Milan Kundera sketched a portrait of the translator as good-natured dope, the shaggy dog of letters panting at his author's heels:

 "I meet my translator, a man who knows no Czech.

 --Then how did you translate it?

 --With my heart.

 And he pulls a photo of me from his wallet. He was so congenial that I actually believed it was possible to translate by some telepathy of the heart."

Sentimental, low-born, and bumbling; their work misleading, unclear, and crude: translators--the consensus would suggest--are in the business of turning gold into lead.

Although the extremity of this disregard may surprise us, its origin is no mystery. Consider the Hebrew Scriptures and their promulgation. In various accounts that proliferated before the time of Christ, it was made abundantly clear that to tamper with the Law in any manner was to risk retribution of Old Testament proportions:

"Theodektes, one of the tragic poets ... when he was about to adapt some of the incidents recorded in the law for one of his plays ... was affected with cataract in both his eyes. And when he perceived the reason why the misfortune had befallen him, he prayed to God for many days and was afterwards restored."

In Against Heresies, Irenaeus, an early father of the Christian church, explained how the first translators of the Scriptures into Greek managed to avoid blindness, or worse. Ptolemy, a king of Egypt during the third century B.C.E., wished to expand the holdings of the Library of Alexandria. Learning that it did not boast a copy of the Laws of the Jews, the king prevailed upon the people of Jerusalem to provide him with a Greek translation. They consented, sending "seventy of their elders, who were thoroughly skilled in the Scriptures and in both the languages." Upon the arrival of the translators in Ptolemy's court, the king is said to have split them up "fearing lest they might perchance, by taking counsel together, conceal the truth in the Scriptures." He commanded each to undertake the identical project, in isolation. Unable to consult one another, each prepared a separate translation. And yet:

"When they came together in the same place before Ptolemy, and each of them compared his own interpretation with that of every other, God was indeed glorified, and the Scriptures were acknowledged as truly divine. For all of them read out the common translation [which they had prepared] in the very same words and the very same names, from beginning to end."

Irenaeus would have us understand that the Greek translation was, very literally, faithful. Called the Septuagint after its translators (from the Latin word for seventy, septuaginta), it became the cornerstone text of the early Christian church. Its authority could not be questioned. Its authorship was not up for debate.

Ever since, absent a chorus of angels singing out identical lines, the authority of our translations has been questioned. Most often, these inquiries are answered swiftly and without remedy. Think of Jerome, who gave us the first Latin Bible. When he began, he worked from the Greek
Septuagint. But soon he was checking it against the older Hebrew sources. The Roman clergy were not pleased when he ended up translating most of the Old Testament from Hebrew, nor were they delighted by his decision to translate into the everyday Latin of Romans--certainly not the language of God. So Jerome was forced to flee Rome and complete his translation--the Vulgate--in Bethlehem.

A different kind of exile awaited the man responsible for the first English Bible. John Wycliffe, in the fourteenth century, had believed that the Good Book should be written in a tongue comprehensible to his countrymen. The Anglican church was so happy with his efforts that its officers dug up his corpse and burned his bones for heresy. As Henry Knighton, a fourteenth-century Leicester canon, put it:

"[Wycliffe] translated out of the Latin into the Anglican tongue, not the Angelic tongue.... Thus, the Gospel pearl is cast forth and trodden under foot of swine, and what was dear to both clergy and laity is now made a subject of common jest to both, and the jewel of the clergy is turned into
the sport of the laity."

Not long after, William York Tyndale's translation of the Bible appeared. Arriving just as the revolution in printing was sweeping the Continent, Tyndale's edition became the first English Bible to achieve wide distribution. But the church, too, had managed to accelerate its work.
Tyndale did not have to await the grave to hear charges of heresy. He was sentenced to death: first strangled and then, for good measure, burned at the stake. His last words were "Lord, open the King of England's eyes."

In 1611, Tyndale's prayers were answered. A Bible commissioned by England's King James I and authorized by the Church of England finally appeared. The results were eye-opening indeed:

In the beginning was the word, and the word was at God, and God was the word.  --Wycliffe, 1384

In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God: and the word was God.  --Tyndale, 1530

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  --King James Version, 1611

II.

Sixty-three years ago, Vladimir Nabokov, newly arrived from occupied Paris, contributed an essay to this magazine that may be a read as a sermon. Full of fire and brimstone, "The Art of Translation" knows heresy when it sees it:

"Three grades of evil can be discerned in the queer world of verbal transmigration. The first, and lesser one, comprises obvious errors due to ignorance or misguided knowledge. This is mere human frailty and thus excusable. The next step to Hell is taken by the translator who
intentionally skips words or passages that he does not bother to understand or that might seem obscure or obscene to vaguely imagined readers.... The third, and worst, degree of turpitude is reached when a masterpiece is planished and patted into such a shape, vilely beautified in such a fashion as to conform to the notions and prejudices of a given public. This is a crime, to be punished by the stocks as plagiarists were in the shoebuckle days."

Although Nabokov maintained a life-long indifference "to religion, to the church--any church," the language here, we cannot ignore, is biblically tuned. Errors of inattention or beautification are "evil," "turpitude" for which one goes to "Hell" to be "punished." No less zealously than Bible translators of yore, Nabokov believed in the sanctity of authorship, a belief that can be traced back to his infancy. "I was bilingual as a baby (Russian and English)," Nabokov said in a late interview, "and added French at five years of age." Throughout his childhood and youth, he read a range of authors in their original languages: Verne, Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Tolstoy. Armed with such polylinguality, it would not be long before Nabokov turned to translation.

His first practical opportunity came when he was twenty. Nabokov and his father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, were discussing the French Nobel laureate Romain Rolland, whose latest novel, Colas Breugnon, had been rendered in a Rabelaisian mode meant to evoke the flavor of the sixteenth century. Nabokov's father commented that such an abundant style--full of wordplay and musical effects--would present any contemporary translator with considerable difficulty. The remark sparked the tinder of the son's early ambition: Nabokov bet his father that he could translate it into Russian prose while "preserving rhythm and rhyme." The stakes of their wager are lost to history, but its outcome was altogether clear. Colas Breugnon, rechristened Nikolka Persik, won good reviews that garnered its translator more work.

Soon after Nabokov graduated from Cambridge in 1922 and moved to Berlin, he was approached by a publisher in need of a tricky translation. Pocketing the American five-dollar bill he was offered as an advance, Nabokov agreed to translate Alice in Wonderland into Russian. As he had with Colas, Nabokov strove to reproduce Alice's singsong prose, its rhythms and rhymes. For the benefit of those of us unable to read Anya v strane chudes, or Anya in the Land of Wonder, the translator's wife Véra would explain half a century later that her husband had worked hard to impersonate Carroll's "tricks of demeanor and speech." Puns and portmanteaus that would have been deadly if translated literally were liberally recast. Details of British history sure to baffle Russians were replaced with local color: the "French mouse, come over with William the Conqueror" became a mouse left behind during Napoleon's retreat. Now considered the finest of the seventy substitute Alices that have proliferated throughout the reading world, the twenty-three-year-old Nabokov's translation showed him already exceptionally able at acting "the real author's part."

Twenty years later, once the Reich swept across Europe and Nabokov had emigrated to America, his belief in liberal translation would undergo a radical conversion. It began during his first New York winter, in 1940-1941. His days spent beneath painted clouds among the heads-down hordes in the main reading room of the New York Public Library, Nabokov began to research and write the lectures on European writers that he would recite in various American universities over the next eighteen years. "He later estimated," wrote his biographer Brian Boyd of those days at the library, "that he prepared perhaps a hundred lectures, at about twenty pages per hour, or about two thousand pages in all. Never, he wrote to friends, had he had to work so hard."

One can see the strain of those preparations in the margins of the classroom copies of the books from which Nabokov would teach during the next two decades. In these translations of the European classics that he knew so well in their originals, endless words and phrases are struck through by a tireless, fault-finding pen. Look at his copy, for example, of an early translation of Kafka's Metamorphosis. Nabokov has very nearly interlineated the entirety of the text with alternate wordings of the translator's lines. One can file the corrections neatly into the three classes of evil he would enumerate in his sermon from this magazine. He amends errors of ignorance:

"The old charwoman calls him 'dung beetle' (not 'cockroach' as in this idiotic translation)." He restitutes words the translator has skipped ("rain could be heard falling on the panes" becomes "rain drops could be heard striking the tin of the sill's outer border"). And he explains the motive
behind homely renovations he makes to vilely beautified phrases: "There is a wonderful flowing rhythm here in these dreamy sequences of sentences. He is half-awake--he realizes his plight without surprise, with a childish acceptance of it, and at the same time he still clings to human memories, human experiences."

Nabokov, too, was realizing his plight. As he waded deeper into the translated texts upon which his mythic "hundred lectures" would be based, all the old translation bets were off. Back in Berlin in the 1920s, when he had bet his father he could preserve rhythm and rhyme, he had been bringing home new news from the world. Now, in America, he saw that old news from home had preceded him here, and been garbled in the process. And so onto the leaves of Constance Garnett's translation of Anna Karenina he incised: "A complete disaster this translation. Perhaps still worse than the translation of Bovary." And in the C.K. Scott Moncrieff translation of Swann's Way, after bathing page after page in the blue blood of an editorial pen, we see Nabokov--having lost all patience for the vilely beautified, all tolerance for infidelity--write: "This translator is insane."

Whereas Nabokov went compos mentis. Yes, in 1942, there was a collaboration with Edmund Wilson, this magazine's erstwhile literary editor, on a translation of Pushkin's verse-drama Mozart and Salieri. And sure, in 1945, a few stanzas of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, billed as "rhymed paraphrases," ran in the Russian Review. But that was it. Where Colas and Alice had been liberally reinvented, Nabokov's translation of Lermontov's A Hero for Our Time, in 1958, would be literal. So too 1960's The Song of Igor's Campaign: An Epic of the Twelfth Century. And then there was his rendition in 1964 of Eugene Onegin--a project that took Nabokov over a decade to complete (more time than he devoted to any three of his seventeen novels). Nabokov believed it would be one of the two works (the other being Lolita) for which he would be remembered.

Lolita has become canonical, but Nabokov's Onegin has become a curio. The damning criticism with which it was met rose to a pitch not heard since the Reformation inveighed against Tyndale. Writing for The New York Review of Books in 1965, Nabokov's former friend and collaborator Edmund Wilson rendered Olympian judgment. He tossed Nabokov's translation onto the pyre, watched it burn, fanned the flames, and then, giddy with remorse, stomped on its ashes:

"One knows Mr. Nabokov's virtuosity in juggling with the English language, the prettiness and wit of his verbal inventions. One knows also the perversity of his tricks to startle or stick pins in the reader; and one suspects that his perversity here has been exercised in curbing his brilliance; that--with his sadomasochistic Dostoevskian tendencies so acutely noted by Sartre--he seeks to torture both the reader and himself by flattening Pushkin out and denying to his own powers the scope for their full play ... passages sound like the products of those computers which are supposed to translate Russian into English ... when he tries to translate Onegin "literally," what he writes is not always really English."

The shift in Nabokov's ambition from early liberalism to a late literalism seemed to Wilson incomprehensibly perverse, an act no less "insane" than those Nabokov witnessed between his teaching covers. And yet the explanation for this so-called curbing of his brilliance involves neither torture nor denial. It was much more mundane, certainly more human. The young man who had translated liberally had been doing so with his readers very much in mind, or at least with one reader foremost in his thoughts: his father. This fact need not be plumbed for pseudo-psychological resonance: reduced to its essence, the act of translation had been undertaken to bring pleasure to readers. Whereas four decades later, fighting a war of words on the margins, the act of translation was undertaken to bring justice to writers. The charge--fidelity--was the same in both eras. Only its polarity had changed.

III.

High on the list of the writers who would present grave peril to translators is certainly Marcel Proust. Considered one of the supreme stylists of twentieth-century French literature, Proust wrote in beautifully balanced, carefully cadenced prose, the elegance of which has long been understood as a central feature of his accomplishment. It has also been viewed as the chief impediment to the appreciation of that achievement, whether in French or in any of the dozens of languages into which his work has been passed.

Proust's style is built on deferral and qualification. The declarative is often undercut by the ruminative, and the ruminative transformed into the metaphorical. Just as metaphor transfers the relationship of one set of objects to another, Proust's prose is always shuttling us between the
literal and the figurative, the direct and the indirect, in the hope that the incoherent itch will find relief through the salve of articulation, and by articulation attain the cure of truth. Consider a characteristic passage:

"Had my parents allowed me, when I read a book, to pay a visit to the country it described, I should have felt that I was making an enormous advance towards the ultimate conquest of truth. For even if we have the sensation of being always enveloped in, surrounded by our own soul, still it does not seem a fixed and immovable prison; rather do we seem to be borne away with it, and perpetually struggling to pass beyond it, to break out into the world, with a perpetual discouragement as we hear endlessly, all around us, that unvarying sound which is no echo from without, but the resonance of a vibration from within. We try to discover in things, endeared to us on that account, the spiritual glamour which we ourselves have cast upon them; we are disillusioned, and learn that they are in themselves barren and devoid of the charm which they owed, in our minds, to the association of certain ideas; sometimes we mobilize all our spiritual forces in a glittering array so as to influence and subjugate other human beings who, as we very well know, are situated outside ourselves, where we can never reach them. And so, if I always imagined the woman I loved as in a setting of whatever places I most longed, at the time, to visit; if in my secret longings it was she who attracted me to them, who opened to me the gate of an unknown world, that was not by the mere hazard of a simple association of thoughts; no, it was because my dreams of travel and of love were only moments--which I isolate artificially today as though I were cutting sections, at different heights, in a jet of water, rainbow-flashing but seemingly without flow or motion--were only drops in a single, undeviating, irresistible outrush of all the forces of my life."

Truth: found in a book; sought in the world; recognized as self; isolated in a work of art. Proust's movements of mind in the passage that I have cited  are rendered in the rented English of Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff. A decorated infantry captain in World War I, Moncrieff fought in the Scottish regiment known as the King's Own Scottish Borderers (famed for wearing red roses rung around their helmets while in battle). A soldier's fortitude was  quite appropriate to the long march through Proust's text, and roses in the translator's helmet worth our keeping in mind. When Moncrieff returned from the war, he worked at the Times Literary Supplement and, the story goes, during lunch hours rendered our first English Proust.

Though not without flowery embellishment: in the passage above, Moncrieff has made many additions to the original French. Perhaps, given the deeper linguistic reserves upon which an Englishlanguage writer may draw for descriptive color, Moncrieff merely wished to take good advantage and make our view more scenic. Thus Proust's "la conquete" (conquest) becomes an "ultimate conquest"; his "entouré" (surrounded) becomes "enveloped in, surrounded by"; "immobile" (motionless) becomes "fixed and immovable"; "pour agir sur" (to effect) becomes "to influence and subjugate"; and "immobile," used a second time, now becomes "without flow or motion."

There are several things to be said about these sorts of additions, which are a consistent feature of Moncrieff's work. First, upon reading the paragraph in English above without consulting the French (which I had not read in a decade and do not carry around in my head), I can tell you that I didn't bat an eye. I found Moncrieff's version neither infelicitous nor unclear. Still, reading the French, one cannot argue the fact that Moncrieff's choices frequently are amplifications of Proust's prose. Although Moncrieff's English, taken on its own terms, is certainly attractive and clear, his consistent departures from the original French do serve to inform Nabokov's marginal "This translator is insane." One might not agree with such an extreme assessment, but one could well understand why, in the interim since Moncrieff's version was first published, his work has seen revision by two separate editors with versions that vie for our marketplace dollars and reading-chair hours.

Terence Kilmartin, whose edition (the silver one) of Proust's novel appeared in 1981, meant it to manifest two classes of improvement over Moncrieff's original. He wanted to bring the English text into congruence with the corrected French text that was published in 1954 (Samuel Beckett, in 1931, wrote that the first French edition was "abominable"); and he wanted to make adjustments to Moncrieff's prose style, albeit cautiously. As Kilmartin wrote: "I have refrained from officious tinkering for its own sake, but a translator's loyalty is to the original author, and in trying to be faithful to Proust's meaning and tone of voice I have been obliged, here and there,
to make extensive alterations."

"Here and there" is the key phrase. For in the five examples I gave above of Moncrieff's amplifications--which, I am sure, one could safely file under matters of "tone" rather than "officious tinkering"--Kilmartin lets stand four. One should not conclude from my isolated example that Kilmartin's edition is not valuable or does not offer improvements; it is and it does.
Still, as Kilmartin was the first to say, and with great graciousness, his revised edition is fundamentally Moncrieff's, albeit with gentle, useful, and inconsistent amendments.

The competing corrected edition (the beige one), prepared by D.J. Enright ten years later and called by Enright a "re-revision," was based on the Kilmartin text (to which Enright served as editor), but with adjustments that reflect the publication of a second, corrected French text published between 1987 and 1989. Enright, who undertook the revision to Kilmartin's
edition after that editor's death, makes adjustments that reflect current French scholarly consensus, which "both adds, chiefly in the form of drafts and variants, and relocates material: not always helpfully from the viewpoint of the common (as distinct from specialist) reader, who may be surprised to encounter virtually the same passage in two different locations when there was doubt as to where Proust would finally have placed it."

Enright makes very few stylistic emendations. With Kilmartin, he agrees that, in the passage I quoted earlier, four-fifths of Moncrieff's amplifications should be allowed to stand. The most obvious difference between these two editions, then, is their titles. Kilmartin, following
Moncrieff, and apparently under duress from his publisher, kept the name by which the novel had achieved fame: Remembrance of Things Past--a title the flowery translator plucked from Shakespeare's sonnets. For his edition, Enright elected to employ the more literally accurate and now canonical In Search of Lost Time. (It is worth noting, though, that this version too is not infallibly literal, not really: Proust's word "recherche" is, in French fashion, characteristically pregnant with possibilities. It means both "search" and "pursuit," but, equally, contains shades of "inquiry," "research," and even "refinement.")

Competing translations of a literary text are nothing new. Proust, who began his writerly activity as a translator of Ruskin (working from English trots that his mother prepared to supplement her son's negligible knowledge of the language), was well aware of the allegiances that form around a translation, no matter how supposedly flawed. Midway through the Sodom and Gomorrah portion of his novel, Proust's narrator returns home, where he has an exchange with his mother that involves two editions of the Arabian Nights:

"As in the old days at Combray, when she gave me books for my name day, so as to make it a surprise, my mother sent secretly for both Galland's Arabian Nights and Mardrus's Arabian Nights. But having cast an eye over the two translations, my mother would certainly have wanted me to stick to that by Galland, while being afraid to influence me on account of the respect she had for intellectual freedom, of a fear of intervening clumsily in the life of my mind."

Antoine Galland's twelve-volume translation in 1704 of the group of medieval tales that he called Les Mille et une Nuits was the first made into French, or into any European language. It was an instant best-seller, bringing fame to its translator and a wide readership to a charming literature that previously had been unknown to the West. When J.C. Mardrus's new translation in sixteen volumes arrived in 1899, sporting the different title Les Mille Nuits et une Nuit, it also featured the subtitle "literal and complete." The "literal" referred to the new scholarly consensus which held that, though lyrical, Galland's translation was often inaccurate. The "complete" referred to Mardrus's inclusion of erotic material that Galland had suppressed.

Still, more correct doesn't mean better loved, as Proust's narrator explains. His mother "had been revolted by the immorality of the subject-matter and the coarseness of the expression" in the Mardrus version. The narrator could imagine the fuss his grandmother would have made "on
seeing the title of her Arabian Nights deformed on the cover itself."

IV.

In the twentieth century, Moncrieff was Galland to our Proust. Now, in the twenty-first, our Mardrus has appeared, gorgon-headed. The new Viking/Penguin In Search of Lost Time, which divides the novel among the hands of seven translators, has some critics worried. Robert Alter, one of our most dependable and perspicacious arbiters on matters of language in literature, has commented that "the idea of entrusting one of the supreme French stylists to seven different English sensibilities is a strategy of desperation, but arguably an understandable one." For no single translator, in the eighty-three years since Proust died finishing his enormous book, has managed to complete, alone, a translation of this novel that undid even its maker. Not unreasonably, therefore, Alter strikes a cautious note, out of fear that seven translators will not manage to render a single, stylistically coherent Proust. And yet there is ample precedent for the practice of gang-translation.

When the fifty-four translators who prepared the King James Version of the Bible built their edition, they divided their membership into six "companies." Each company was given a portion of the Holy Book. "First Westminster Company" handled Genesis through 2 Kings; "First Cambridge Company" worked on 1 Chronicles through the Song of Solomon; and so forth.

Although they worked alone, all followed a group of "Rules to Be Observed in the Translation of the Bible," drawn up in advance by the archbishop of Canterbury. These included instructions on what to do "When a word hath divers Significations" or "When any Place of special Obscurity is doubted," as well as commands that "No Marginal Notes at all to be affixed." The success of their method, and of their gambit, is impossible for a sensible person to refute.

The nature of that success was built on a fundamental accord among the participants. A similar accord would seem essential for the new Proust to succeed. As Lydia Davis, the lead translator for the Penguin Proust, explains in her "Note on the Translation," which accompanies the new
volumes, a "face-to-face meeting" of the translators and their editor was held at the outset:

"we communicated with one another and with [editor] Christopher Prendergast by letter and e-mail. We agreed, often after lively debate, on certain practices that needed to be consistent from one volume to the next.... At the initial meeting ... those present had acknowledged that a degree of heterogeneity across the volumes was inevitable and perhaps even desirable, and that philosophical differences would exist among the translators. As they proceeded, therefore, the translators worked fairly independently, and decided for themselves how close their translations should be to the original--how many liberties, for instance, might be taken with the sanctity of Proust's long sentences."

It is interesting to wonder why Davis believes that a "perhaps even desirable" heterogeneity might serve such an endeavor, but her introduction does not provide an answer. Rather, in the British editions, series editor Christopher Prendergast offers the following justification of the benefits of unruly autonomy:

"[Proust exhibits a] shifting array of modes and registers across the individual volumes, from, say, Proust's version of the bucolic (in A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs) to his version of the apocalyptic (in Sodome et Gomorrhe). One of the benefits of the division of labour entailed by a
collective translation is that it arguably heightens the chances of bringing into focus the stylistic variety we encounter as we move from one volume to the next. A single translator, however flexible, is more likely to be constrained by the conscious or unconscious operation of a particular parti pris."

Whether we are ready to concede the point to Prendergast, there is certainly no arguing whether his seven approach their vocation with very different notions of its fundaments. Davis, who translates very closely, has since written about the eleven rules she found herself following when translating the first volume, Du côté de chez Swann. Like those that governed the King James companies, hers were developed to impose internal consistency (albeit on her text alone).

Consider four of Davis's rules: "not to add any material that is not in the original ... not to subtract anything from the French ... not to normalize something that seems off at the moment ... retain the same order of elements in a sentence." James Grieve, translator of the second volume, A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, has a very different methodology:

"In translating, it is sometimes necessary to edit. For example, the French has a strange parenthesis in "la reine de (Naples)": had I faithfully translated this, it would have given "the Queen of (Naples)"; rather than perplex my reader, I edit. Similarly, in a scene where Andrée is absent, she appears to speak. Or, rather, which character speaks the words "I've put up with her awful dishonesty for ages" is in French unclear; in English it must, I believe, be clarified."

Grieve is also at odds with Davis's rule regarding the retention of Proust's order of elements in his sentences. This is more significant. Grieve, who produced his own translation of Du côté de chez Swann twenty years ago, justified his project at the time this way:

"The idea of attempting a new English version of Du côté de chez Swann arose out of the dismay I felt on first reading the old Scott Moncrieff. This feeling was compounded by my discovery of the uniform mediocrity of other translations from French that came my way, and by the belief that translation was too important to be left to professionals.... I have tried to preserve [Proust's] combination of semantic clarity and syntactical complexity. My version may not please all readers; but if some of them judge that it comes closer to Proust, and to real English, than its competitors, they will please me."

Where Davis refuses to add, subtract, or normalize, Grieve methodically does all three. Let us look, then, at how these philosophically varied approaches are reflected in translations of the same sentence by Davis, Grieve, and Moncrieff. (Kilmartin's and Enright's renderings are, not surprisingly, identical to Moncrieff's.)

Here is the original:

"Un genre d'esprit comme celui de Brichot aurait été tenu pour stupidité pure dans la coterie où Swann avait passé sa jeunesse, bien qu'il soit compatible avec une intelligence réelle."

And here are Moncrieff, Grieve, and then Davis:

"A sort of wit like Brichot's would have been regarded as out-and-out stupidity by the people among whom Swann had spent his early life, for all that it is quite compatible with real intelligence."

"The group among whom Swann had spent his youth would have considered Brichot's brand of wit to be painfully stupid (although it can be quite compatible with genuine intelligence)."

"A wit like Brichot's would have been considered pure stupidity by the people among whom Swann had spent his youth, even though it might be compatible with real intelligence."

Some critics take at the comparison of versions of the same translated phrase with great verve; I do not. "The pleasure," wrote one hungry critic, "of going through any translation is to catch lapses," a statement, it seems to me, on a par with saying that the joy to be gained by scaling Everest may be measured by the number of frozen alpinists one finds as one climbs. If I do not subscribe to this sport, it is not out of squeamishness. I have become certain, when discussing translation, that there is little to be gained by such comparative exertions. For yes, if pressed, in the phrases above, we can see that Moncrieff and Co. are doing their amplification thing: Proust's "pure" ("pure") becomes their "out-and-out"; his "compatible" their "quite compatible." And sure, it is clear that Grieve, with great liberality, wants his version to come closer to "real English": rather than trotting behind the grammar of the French, he's Saxonizing.

Object becomes subject: whereas in Proust's French "wit" is the subject that is held in objection by "the group," in Grieve's English "the group" is the subject that finds "wit" objectionable. Lastly, there's Davis's consistently literal version, which hews closely to French grammar and exact sense at every turn.

And yet, such philosophically different approaches noted, we must acknowledge that ultimately the differences they embody, however substantial, are not differences of substance: rather, of style. And in matters of style, if any more indisputably conveys the qualities of the original French, if any is unambiguously more faithful, wiser minds than mine will over similar matters disagree. Consider the reception of Peter Constantine's translation of Isaac Babel's Complete Works. Francine Prose, who does not read Russian but certainly is trustworthy on matters of English prose style, wrote that "the Constantine translation too often makes one feel that, on some basic level, Babel must not have been, after all, a very good writer.... No one could fault Constantine's command of Russian, but he appears to lack an ear for the grace of the English language. Oddly, he seems unaware that rhythm and cadence is as important in prose as in poetry." Whereas James Wood suggested in these pages about the same translation that "as far as the nonRussianist can tell, Peter Constantine's translation is extraordinary. There are very few writers one reads in translation with any kind of greed for style, but Babel, thanks to Constantine, is one. Sentence after sentence--and Babel's sentences are some of the most dynamically potent in literature--gleams in its rented English."

Unsettled by such violent aesthetic teeters around a pivotal original, what judicious, stabilizing force could we hope to find? Some critics propose a modest solution. Although they don't go so far as to suggest whether a liberal or a literal approach to translation would more appropriately suit a given writer, they do suppose that an ideal translator is waiting in the wings of past and present history to turn our authorial ashes back to flesh. Why not, their logic runs, dependably draft a Great Writer to take over where the bungling translator is bound to drop the ball? "How one pines," wrote one critic grieving over Davis's version of Swann's Way, "for a translation of Proust by the hand of Nabokov." And yet one cannot help but ask: which hand? The liberal left, with which young Nabokov rendered his rhythmic and rhyming translations? Or the literal right, with which he later pinned down wriggling languages with entomological precision?

Naturally, there are less conflicted examples of the "great writer to the rescue" strategy. An elegant translation of Milton was done into French by Chateaubriand. So too a musical Poe, from the desk of Baudelaire. A Homer of great verve echoes in the Southsea English of Christopher Logue. Strindberg's Swedish Huckleberry Finn is said to have no equal, except perhaps in Boris Pasternak's rendering of Shakespeare. And then of course we always have

   Richard Howard's Baudelaire
   Dear Ezra's Cavalcanti;
   Seamus Heaney's Beowulf
   Gabriel Rosetti's Dante

--but trying to add another stanza tests more than my capacity for rhyme. It isn't that we aren't grateful when we happen upon translations by sanctioned hands; rather, that there are so few sanctions to hand around. So what's an eager reader to do? What recourse does a reader have if, as Francine Prose assures us, "the ideal is not to translate from one language into another but rather from one writer into another"?

Alas, in the name of such ideals, many virtuous hearts have met their end. Two millennia earlier, say, idealism guided the Roman clergy to send Jerome on his way (his Vulgate on the brink of becoming the official Bible of the Roman Catholic Church for more than fifteen hundred years). And later, idealism drove the Anglicans to unearth and burn Wycliffe's bones. Soon thereafter, idealism guaranteed Tyndale's last, strangled breaths. For none of these virtuous translators was deemed ideal in his day--which is to say, faithful enough in the judgments of his critics.

And yet, if these men of faith, hard at work upon the classic text to end all classic texts (and with true hell to pay if they should fail), were deemed to have fallen short, what hope is there for the low-rent translator of literature? How could such a person--devoid of any kind of genius--manage something not rudely stamped, not sent before our eyes scarce half made up? How could poor Helen Tracy Lowe Porter, a druggist's daughter from Towanda, Pennsylvania, handle such hot lights? Sure, she single-handedly imported all of Thomas Mann, but her lasting reward is to be filed under Nabokov's rubric for her caste--"laborious ladies" (and to be called "Mr. Porter" in The New York Times). And what about those Muirs and their Kafka, who we all know (by now) is much funnier and far less religious than they made him? And please don't ruin everyone's day by mentioning contumacious Constance Garnett, who had the temerity to render all of Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky, and Gogol, and Lermontov, and Chekhov--which is to say invented the idea of Russia for a century of Western readers. Because, yes, while all of these writers would not exist to us without these translators, let us not forget that the prose of all these shoebuckle villains was second-rate. Their methods? Crude. Their focus? Blurry. How could they give us a sense of these great writers' Great Styles?  Unless, of course, we consider something that Proust, that supreme stylist, said on the subject. In an interview in 1913, when the first volume of his novel was published, Proust told his interlocutor:

"Style has nothing to do with embellishment, as some people think; it's not even a matter of technique. Like the color sense in some painters, it's a quality of vision, the revelation of the particular universe that each of us sees and that no one else sees. The pleasure an artist offers us is to convey another universe to us."

It is rarely a risk to say that Proust was right; but Proust was right. The trouble with translations, the reason so many Gides and Goethes find them galling, is that they erase a writer's every careful choice, and replace a burnished surface with a second-rate surrogate--and still manage to reveal a universe. We hate translations because they succeed despite their failures, and in so doing they reveal our easy ignorance. For we have misunderstood the true nature of great literary style. Fetishizing surface, we have missed substance. For style is not the conspicuous effect--the easy alliteration, the calculated repetition, the deliberate echo. These pleasures--and they are no less enjoyable for being, ultimately, incidental--are merely pleasures of the flesh. And style, however much its appealing skin suggests it, is not flesh. Flesh can be destroyed by a single, critical parasite. But bone endures, no matter the nature of its burial. And style, it turns out, is bone. I know this to be true. After having spent the better part of four months reading the new Viking/Penguin Proust, and the old Kilmartin/Enright Proust, and the erenow Moncrieff Proust, I will tell you there is no comparing them. No matter the local differences aplenty, the global movements of mind and the quality of vision are undeniably, uniformly there. Reading each from tip to toe, no matter which, one follows Proust's narrator as he makes his way, "descending to a greater depth within myself"--ourselves. That depth survives in translation, in all the translations, for--however subjective assertions of "goodness" surely are when assessing literary quality--greatness is calculable, irrefutable, inviolable: a great writer survives any translation. And yes, without question, some writers take longer to show their greatness, or to have their greatness fully shown: we still await a broader view of Pushkin; we as yet glimpse only a fraction of Mahfouz. And yet surely these writers, however diminished, survive our fatal shores. How?

It is as Miles Smith said in his preface to the pilfered King James:

"Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light; that breaketh the shell, that we may eat the kernel; that putteth aside the curtain, that we may look into the most holy place; that removeth the cover of the well, that we may come by the water; even as Jacob rolled away the stone from the mouth of the well."

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WYATT MASON is currently translating Montaigne's Essays. His translation of Dante's Vita Nuova will be published next year.

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Copyright 2004, The New Republic