Finding time again in se.., p.1
Finding Time Again: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 7, page 1
penguin classics deluxe edition
FINDING TIME AGAIN
marcel proust was born in Auteuil in 1871. In his twenties he became a conspicuous society figure, frequenting the most fashionable Paris salons of the day. After 1899, however, his chronic asthma, the death of his parents, and his growing disillusionment with humanity caused him to lead an increasingly retired life. From 1907 he rarely emerged from a cork-lined room on the Boulevard Haussmann. Here he insulated himself against the distractions of city life, as well as the effect of the trees and flowers—though he loved them, they brought on his attacks of asthma. He slept by day and worked by night, writing letters and devoting himself to the completion of In Search of Lost Time. He died in 1922.
ian patterson is a Life Fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge. He has published many translations, including a translation of Charles Fourier’s The Theory of the Four Movements, and is the author of Guernica and Total War, numerous essays on twentieth-century literature, and twelve collections of poetry.
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Le Temps retrouvé first published 1927
This translation first published in Great Britain by Allen Lane The Penguin Press 2002
Published in Penguin Books 2023
Translation, introduction, and notes copyright © 2002 by Ian Patterson
Note on the translation copyright © 2002 by Lydia Davis
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library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Names: Proust, Marcel, 1871–1922, author. | Patterson, Ian, translator. |
Prendergast, Christopher, editor.
Title: Finding time again / Marcel Proust ; translated with an introduction and notes by Ian Patterson ; general editor: Christopher Prendergast.
Other titles: Temps retrouvé. English
Description: Penguin classics deluxe edition. | New York : Penguin Books, 2023. | Series: In search of lost time ; 7
Identifiers: LCCN 2022021007 (print) | LCCN 2022021008 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143133711 (paperback) | ISBN 9780525505549 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: France—Social life and customs—Fiction. | LCGFT: Autobiographical fiction. | Novels.
Classification: LCC PQ2631.R63 T413 2023 (print) | LCC PQ2631.R63 (ebook) | DDC 843/.912—dc23/eng/20220623
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022021007
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022021008
Cover design: Kelly Blair
Adapted for ebook by Cora Wigen
pid_prh_6.0_142226813_c0_r0
Contents
Introduction, by Ian Patterson
A Note on the Translation, by Lydia Davis
FINDING TIME AGAIN
Notes
Synopsis
Introduction
The last volume of In Search of Lost Time begins, as the previous one ends, with the narrator staying with Gilberte de Saint-Loup at Tansonville. It is there that he is given a recently published volume of the Goncourts’ journal to read in bed, a wonderfully accurate pastiche of the Goncourt style which leads on to a series of revisionary retrospects of his own life. Proust had written an earlier pastiche of the Goncourts’ journal, in Pastiches et mélanges (1908), and various sorts of pastiche in fact crop up at different times in Finding Time Again, contributing implicitly to its continuing interest in questions of authenticity, reality and representation. This can be seen, for example, in more topical form in the pieces of fashion journalism, or in Charlus’s comments on Brichot’s newspaper articles. The journal extract that Proust reads provides a different perspective on his own past experience, since it deals with the Verdurins’ salon and describes several figures—Swann, Elstir, Cottard—well known to him. His response to its ornate, mannered and precious style is significant: by focusing his attention on his own capacities, it allows him to work out his interest in general psychological features rather than in the specificities of visual and aural observation. This enables him to launch what is to be the central theme of the book: the question of how to write his book. Whether it should be a novel or a philosophical essay was a question which had occupied him when he first considered the subject matter of In Search of Lost Time, and woven tightly into the complex folds of the narrative structure of Finding Time Again are many essayistic sequences in which the significance of the enterprise is gradually drawn out.
The pastoral prelude at Tansonville is interrupted by the war, the account of which, as experienced in Paris, is structured by the narrator’s two brief returns to Paris from the sanatoriums where he is undergoing unsuccessful cures. The first visit coincides with the outbreak of war, in 1914, and provides him with an opportunity to discuss the tradition of strong, silent masculinity in relation to homosexuality, and to contrast Saint-Loup’s courage with Bloch’s false patriotism.
The second, in 1916, continues this theme at much greater length, with Baron de Charlus at its center. The narrator has returned to the capital for a while and, in a conversation with Robert de Saint-Loup about the progress of the war, evokes the abstract aesthetic pleasure of aerial warfare above the darkened streets, described as a Wagnerian extravaganza of zeppelins, biplanes and searchlights. Then, picking his own way through the pitch-black maze of small streets, he comes to the boulevard and runs into Charlus. We learn of the Baron’s exclusion from society, his vilification by Mme Verdurin and his relative unconcern for the external affairs which had plunged the world into war. Proust’s clear-sighted depiction of a Paris in which war throws moral behavior into a sharper focus is the backdrop for the narrator’s most surprising discovery, when he takes shelter unwittingly in a sadomasochistic homosexual brothel owned by the Baron, and is witness to the Baron’s own pleasures and to the comings and goings of a varied and well-connected clientele. For all this, the episode takes its place in Proust’s extended meditation on love, as the narrator reflects that Charlus’s “desire to be chained and beaten betrayed, in its ugliness, a dream just as poetic as other men’s desire to go to Venice or to keep a mistress.”
The war represents a watershed, and the narrator’s final return is marked by a quality of retrospection that culminates in the recapitulatory sequence of involuntary memories that makes up the substance of the episode in the library of the Prince de Guermantes. In these epiphanic moments, from his stumbling on the paving stones in the courtyard, through the sound of the spoon to the starch in the napkin and the copy of François le Champi, he experiences a joy which prompts renewed investigation (or “recherche”) into the meaning of these “impressions” and the purposes to which they can be put in his attempt to write his book. But instead of offering memories for his disposal in the traditional way, their effect is so powerful as to make him start to doubt the coherence of his own sense of self, and it is this that now dominates his quest to turn the experience of lost time into a way of writing his book. The “inner book of unknown signs,” as he calls it, “the most painful of all to decipher, is also the only one dictated to us by reality, the only one whose ‘impression’ has been made in us by reality itself.” “The writer’s task and duty are those of a translator,” he writes, in what is a prolonged autobiographical essay on the role of writing and memory in making sense of a life; the material is all there, and only the framework, the work of selection and the sense of purpose need to be found. When he is finally ushered into the afternoon party, it is his first extended impression that all the guests are wearing makeup to make themselves look old. Only as it dawns on him that they really are old, and that he is too, does he gradually come to recognize the foundational importance of the element of time in his life and all the lives around him and, despite his age and poor health, is overwhelmed with the need to devote himself at last to the task of writing the book whose shape and purpose he can now finally discern. His only worry, as the last volume of this work comes to its close, is that he should have sufficient time to complete it, an anxiety which itself points up the significance of the place we all occupy in Time.
The title Le Temps retrouvé appears for the first time in a letter Proust wrote in the autumn of 1912, and at that time designated what was to be the concluding (second or third) part of the novel; the first was to be called Le Temps perdu (Lost Time). Between then and its first publication in 1927, five years after Proust’s death, the projected novel underwent a series of changes, additions, alterations and rewriting, changing and developing almost out of recognition. Some things, however, did not change. The heart of this last volume, the chapters known as “Perpetual adoration” and the “Bal de têtes,” were already quite extensively drafted by 1910. When Proust died in 1922, the manuscript of Le Temps retrouvé was complete, and at least to some extent revised, but it had not yet been typed. It contained contradictions, mistakes, repetitions and omissions (some of which are indicated in the notes to this translatio n), as well as the immense difficulties created by Proust’s corrections and alterations, both in the text and its margins and on the additional pieces of paper glued to the edges of pages, or interleaved between them. It fell to his editors—his brother, Robert, and Jean Paulhan (who had succeeded Jacques Rivière as editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française in 1925)—to produce a coherent text for publication, which they achieved with a certain amount of cutting and pasting, omitting illegible passages, and adjusting many of the points where repetition or inconsistency occurred. Consequently, the text published in 1927, and translated into English in 1931, was not entirely an accurate presentation of what Proust had written. When Clarac and Ferré published their revised text in 1954, they made a number of changes and corrections, most noticeably in the starting point for the book, which they moved back some seven pages to the beginning of the narrator’s stay at Tansonville. (The 1988 Pléiade edition under the general editorship of Jean-Yves Tadié restores the original beginning, on both internal editorial and aesthetic grounds.) A massive and lengthy process of reevaluation of all Proust’s manuscript corrections, insertions, additions and probable intentions resulted in the 1988 edition of the text with its variants, along with a great number of preliminary draft sketches, and although this text itself is not uncontroversial, it has provided the basis for all editorial decisions in this translation.
The translation history of Finding Time Again differs considerably from that of the earlier volumes. C. K. Scott Moncrieff died in 1930, before he was able to begin translating it, and the task was taken on by Sydney Schiff, a wealthy patron of the arts, a novelist under the pen name of Stephen Hudson, and a friend of Proust. (His grief at Proust’s death was so demonstrative, and his devotion to Proust’s memory so well known in Paris, that he was nicknamed “la veuve Proust,” Proust’s widow.) For copyright reasons, his translation, though, was not published in America, where a separate translation was made by Frederick A. Blossom, a professor of French. In 1970 Chatto published a new translation, based on the 1954 Pléiade edition, by Andreas Mayor, and it is this translation which was reprinted unrevised in the Terence Kilmartin edition, and again, lightly revised by D. J. Enright, in 1992. Mayor had planned to make a complete revision of Scott Moncrieff’s translation, but died before he was able to do so: his preparatory notes provided the basis for Kilmartin’s revision. Although the revisions were ostensibly done in order to take account of the 1988 Pléiade edition, there are numerous points at which no alterations were made or where errors were allowed to stand uncorrected. The most noticeable difference is in the division between The Fugitive and the last volume, where both Mayor and his followers retained the 1954 division, beginning Finding Time Again with the narrator’s visit to Tansonville, rather than dividing that episode in two, as the first edition did and as the 1988 edition, on persuasive evidence, also does. I have followed the 1988 edition in reinstating the original opening. Mayor also did quite a lot of unacknowledged editing of his own, transposing the order of sentences or omitting words or phrases, occasionally sentences. Enright did not correct all these. Another characteristic feature of Mayor’s translation is that he persistently extends or enlarges what Proust actually wrote in order to interpret or clarify his sentences. Sometimes this entails inserting some explanatory reference, sometimes spelling out a metaphor, sometimes expanding a pronoun into a recapitulatory phrase, sometimes merely varying nouns or verbs where Proust uses the same one a number of times. There is hardly a sentence without at least a trace of the rewriting of Proust’s text. Allusions are spelled out, lexical neutrality (Proust’s frequent use of avoir, “to have,” for example) abandoned in favor of greater specificity. While this can occasionally be helpful, the cumulative effect is to add a layer of rather pedantic information, often too ornately phrased, which obscures the idiosyncratic precision of Proust’s own style. In this translation I have tried to aim for equivalence rather than explanation.
Equivalence is a mark of recognition of the endless possibilities of interpretation, a quality that is inherent in both the thought processes and the writing of the novel. The narrator’s encounter with the Baron de Charlus on his way to the Guermantes’ stands at the gateway to the novel’s climax. It marks his first profound encounter with the process of aging, which, as Walter Benjamin pointed out, is the external counterpart to the interior process of remembrance. “To observe the interaction of aging and remembering means to penetrate to the heart of Proust’s world, to the universe of convolution. It is the world in a state of resemblances, the domain of the correspondences; the Romanticists were the first to comprehend them and Baudelaire embraced them most fervently, but Proust was the only one who managed to reveal them in our lived life.” He is filled with the insight that none of us has time to live the true dramas of the life that we are destined for. If it is the writer’s task to translate his “book of inner signs,” it is the translator’s task to render it correctly: Mayor, Kilmartin and Enright departed from earlier versions by turning those signs, quite wrongly, into “symbols,” but they have to be signs.
Questions of vocabulary are not, in the end, all that difficult to resolve. And much of Proust’s curious syntax, with its sinuous sideways movements into a series of digressions, each one displaced by the next, reminiscent of his beloved Arabian Nights in miniature, can be more or less adequately imitated. What remains a constant frustration, for this translator at least, is the near impossibility of conveying the more detailed pleasures of Proust’s writing, its poetic features, alliterations, anagrams and paragrams, and everything that Malcolm Bowie has described as “the rhythm of concentration and dispersal in which Proust’s details are caught.” It would take another lifetime of translation to find a way of doing that.
Translator’s Acknowledgments
My first debt is to Jean-Yves Tadié and the editors of the Pléiade edition, for their meticulous scholarship: I have drawn on their work for some of the notes, and have made constant use of it in the process of translation. I would also like to thank Christopher Prendergast, and the other translators, and those who answered specific queries, especially Christine Adams, Martin Crowley and the late Tony Tanner. I would also like to thank Jenny Diski for her patience and her advice as I forced her to listen to drafts of paragraphs, pages and chapters when she had many better things to do.
Ian Patterson
A Note on the Translation
The present translation came into being in the following way. A project was conceived by the Penguin UK Modern Classics series in which the whole of In Search of Lost Time would be translated freshly on the basis of the latest and most authoritative French text, À la recherche du temps perdu, edited by Jean-Yves Tadié (Paris: Pléiade, Gallimard, 1987–89). The translation would be done by a group of translators, each of whom would take on one of the seven volumes. The project was directed first by Paul Keegan, then by Simon Winder, and was overseen by general editor Christopher Prendergast. I was contacted early in the selection process, in the fall of 1995, and I chose to translate the first volume, Du côté de chez Swann. The other translators are James Grieve, for In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower; Mark Treharne, for The Guermantes Way; John Sturrock, for Sodom and Gomorrah; Carol Clark, for The Prisoner; Peter Collier, for The Fugitive; and Ian Patterson, for Finding Time Again.
Between 1996 and the delivery of our manuscripts, the tardiest in mid-2001, we worked at different rates in our different parts of the world—one in Australia, one in the United States, the rest in various parts of England. After a single face-to-face meeting in early 1998, which most of the translators attended, we communicated with one another and with 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, such as retaining French titles like Duchesse de Guermantes, and leaving the quotations that occur within the text—from Racine, most notably—in the original French, with translations in the notes.
