/lit/ - Literature

>>18085239
It is Carter's own revising of Moncrieff.

From his original intro:

In many instances revising is a question not so much of modernising the text as of restoring Proust's sentences and phrases to their original simplicity. For example, where Proust writes, "mon semmeil fut profond et detendit entierement mon espirit", Scott Moncrieff translates "my sleep was so heavy as to completely relax my consciousness," which is certainly accurate, but could have been rendered as simply as Proust's original: "my sleep was deep and completely relaxed my mind."

A common practice of Scott Moncrieff's, and one that is perfectly legitimate and often the best solution, when two or more adjectives occur in French, is to make one of them a noun. For example, Proust describes a young man hired to be a footman's assistant as "nouveau et timide," which Scott Moncrieff renders as "a timid novice." Again, this is certainly accurate, but in such cases, it is easy to restore the original simplicity: "one of his aides, new and timid."

Scott Moncrieff is at times more explicit than Proust and adds words to help the non-French reader understand French culture and society as described by Proust. For example, when describing Swann's position in Parisian society, Proust mentions all Swann's "friends in the official world of the Third Republic." The "Third Republic" is an addition by Scott Moncrieff, who no doubt believed that while the era in question was immediately clear to the French reader, others might appreciate more specificity. I have used my own discretion to eliminate or keeping these signposts. In some cases, where I have found the information helpful but inessential, I have moved such an addition to a note.

Here are some examples of corrections that I have made in this volume. In one passage, he mistranslated the sentence "Je craignais qu'elle eut encore mal au coeur," as "I was afraid that her heart might be troubling her again." The passage in question is the one where the grandmother becomes ill: "mal au coeur" means to feel sick or nauseated and, despite the presence of the world "coeur" does not indicate heart trouble. Scott Moncrieff also translated literally Proust's "aigle", used to describe the Duchesse de Guermantes, as "eagle", whereas colloquially, and in the context in which it is used, it means "genius". In one passage, Proust uses a colourful idiom, "les alouettes me tombent toutes roties", which Scott Moncrieff translated nearly literally: "larks drop into my mouth already roasted." I have chosen a less literal but more accurate meaning: "things will just fall into my lap."