Ma mère, quand il fut question d’avoir pour la première fois M. In French, the volume begins with two words: Ma mère, “my mother.” But “my mother” is not the subject of the sentence.

While Lydia Davis’s treatment of Swann’s Way was always scrupulous, exacting, and judicious, here a romp around the china shop is the norm. The very first words in James Grieve’s In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower do not bode well. Conversely, however, Remembrance of Things Past, derived from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30, was a good enough title, and changing it was like deciding to change the title of the Book of Genesis to In the Beginning. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin erred with Time Recaptured.Įnright had made “cosmetic” changes to Scott Moncrieff’s Remembrance of Things Past and changed its title to In Search of Lost Time, this, of course, being an exact translation of the French. What a thoroughly absurd title when Miltonian English is staring us right in the face: Time Regained. On the subject of titles, the final volume of the series, which is not out yet in the United States, is translated as Finding Time Again. Accuracy, particularly in this volume, is proclaimed, not practiced, promised, not delivered. What is a young girl in flower? Is she dressed in Laura Ashley prints? Or is a young girl in flower a girl who is just about to blossom? This punctilious and ultimately priggish commitment to word-for-word accuracy turns out not only to be a cunning way of attracting attention and of publicizing a radically new translation out to make sweeping changes, but it is, all said and done, thoroughly deceptive. The title of James Grieve’s translation, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, is gobbledygook.

Scott Moncrieff’s title Within a Budding Grove was a most felicitous rendering of an untranslatable title. À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, the title of Proust’s second volume, for which he was awarded the prestigious Prix Goncourt, was not so fortunate. Du côté de chez Swann, traditionally translated-despite Proust’s initial objection-as Swann’s Way, appeared in England as The Way by Swann, which echoes something along the lines of “How’s by you?” “By me is fine.” It is fortunate for Lydia Davis, the translator of Volume One, that Penguin USA decided to delete all traces of The Way by Swann and restored the old way, Swann’s Way. And yet the titles of the first two volumes approach monstrosity. The six volumes of the new Viking Penguin translation of Proust received rave reviews in England.

André aciman