I’ve enthused at least a couple of friends about a Proust reading group (Remembrance of Things Past, which I read recently was considered a bad translation from the French because it loses the sense of both search and research from la reserche as well as the temporal dimension from le temps perdu – but I guess we’re stuck with it and its Shakespearian overtones). We’re going to try to meet to talk about the book, but anyone interested in an online discussion circle? Proust and Ulysses are gaping holes in my reading of modernist classics, and since I doubt that I’ll find the time to either remind myself how to play classical guitar or brush up on Latin this year, it’s the must do cultural project for 2007. In pursuance of this aim, I was duly given the first two volumes for Christmas.
<img src="http://larvatusprodeo.net/wp-content/uploads/2006/12/proust.jpg"
Don’t do it, Mark! –unless you want all of 2007 to turn into temps perdu! (oh, and btw, happy new year!)
In a way, yr problems with the title’s translation sort of sez it all: like Mallarme and a lot of Flaubert, Proust should probably be either read in French, or not at all. In a way, at least in English, the guy succeeded in writing the World’s Greatest Bathroom Book for Litterateurs: sipping a page or two of ‘Combray’ from time to time the way you’d sip a decent cognac is I think more rewarding and enjoyable than chugging the whole damn bottle in a sitting; or plodding yr way through the whole friggin’ book. There’s something that I think is sort of unknowable about Proust in English, which is why I find it more fascinating to hunt and peck… and it saves an awful lot of time — time better spent, say, reading Ulysses, shopping for Hello Kitty merchandise, or playing classical guitar. Or even just listening to Black Sabbath.
Now, ‘Ulysses,’ — well, *that’s* a book! Wackier, weirder, denser (and shorter!), more beautiful, looking forward as it looks back, written expressly for the genius of English, and much, much funnier (and featuring numerous proto-Python comedic romps… “Several paupers fall off a ladder.” Indeed.) If you want some help deciphering Mister Jimmy, give me a holler and I’ll set you up. But with Marcel Baby… well, grand good luck to you, and enjoy. Encore, encore les mots…
But I must say, if you can do it, re-discovering classical guitar may be the way to go…
To play
Segovia
Upon waking
Is the highest I
Might ever aspire to…
–Jim Carroll
Either way, Happy New Year!
This is sticking my neck out but I heard somewhere – sorry can’t remember where that Ulysses is better heard than read. The critic suggested this allows the listener access that reading doesn’t.
Happy New Year.
I disagree, j_p_z. If you’re going to read it, don’t just sip at it, dive in. As for the inferiority of Proust in translation, the standard translation (Moncrieff/Kilmartin) reads better than most French-to-English works, indeed better than many native English works. Then again, if I could read more than the first sentence of Du cote de chez Swann in French I might think different. Anyway, I say go for it, Mark, and count me in for the online discussion circle.
I did a whole subject just on Ulysses in uni ’cause I knew I’d never get around to do it otherwise. The first third in particular is about as good as you’ll ever read.
Cool, thanks, TimT. Any other takers?
Can we not commit now, but maybe join up later? I’m interested but I don’t want to say I’ll do it and then prove myself to be hopelessly unreliable.
I was hoping to do it in such a way that people could participate at different times and in different stages. Still working out how though
Tim Sterne — Well, odds are good that you’re the one who’s right and not me; mine was just one reporter’s opinion, and a cranky one at that. Besides, my real, hidden agenda here is to convert Mark to the dark forces of ‘Ulysses’. Oh well; he who fights and runs away, and so forth. Anyway, good luck with the discussion group!
[So, the guy eats a pastry, and it gives him an acid flashback that goes on for numerous volumes.
Shorter Proust: "Donuts. Is there anything they *can't* do?"]
polluted skies: “I heard somewhere… that Ulysses is better heard than read”
Just as a seasonal coincidence, that remark reminded me of an old New Year’s Eve tradition in NYC that’s bitten the dust, like so much else… every New Year’s Eve there used to be a marathon public reading of ‘Finnegans Wake’ at this art gallery in SoHo (I think it was Mary Boone, but I’m not quite sure). Some years I think they read the other interminable incomprehensible door-stopper of the period, Gertrude Stein’s equally stupefying ‘The Making of Americans’. Anybody could sign up to read a few pages, then hand off the baton. It used to be sort of a gas to stumble in there around 3 or 4 a.m. in between parties, crash on a cushion on the floor, and listen to an hour or so of beautiful gibberish alongside a random assortment of half-drunk partied-out denizens, while regaining your senses prior to moving on. I wonder if they were ever able to get thru the whole thing in just 24 hours. They probably do the thing now in some tiny place in Williamsburg that I’m just not cool enough to know about any more.
Anyway, enough. Good luck with the Proust plan!
That does sound rather cool, j_p_z.
Perhaps Ulysses is on the agenda for 2008!
Exactly how many volumes of Temps Perdu were you planning to read?
I always thought “In Search Of Lost Time” was a much more reasonant title.
And speaking of Joyce, there’s a probably apocryphal story of a US airman who bales out of a burning bomber over Japan and parachutes DOA into a small fishing village on the Inland Sea. Being Shinto-Buddhists and pretty untouched by the war, the villagers thought it would be fitting to bury him according to the customs of his culture. And so they did, using as their guide a Japanese translation of the only book they had to hand about western funeral customs – ‘Finnegan’s Wake’.
Ah, you could hold a summarize Proust competition.
Two!
“Ah, you could hold a summarize Proust competition.”
Or a textor version comp.
In Search of Lost Time
Marcel Etz madeleine & rememebers how remMbR 3 familes he knew.
and why stop there?
Ulysses
Leo hz breakfast & thN goes dwntwn 2 hang w Hs homies. cumz bak & stRtz macking w Molly.
The Bible
Light n d beginN. thN a lot of fussing, f’n & feuding untl som bloke sAz we shud luv EchuthR. He gitz killed & cumz bak. d nd.
War ânâ Peace
Boney puts d muvs on Russia. Pierre, Natasha & Andy pRT on untl dey realise how Cres Lyf iz. Boney gitz frozen out.
The Naked Lunch
Lee bugs out n d interzone w lots of innsect SX. interzone w lots of innsect SX. Lee bugs w lots of. out n d . out n d interzone. innsect SX. Lee bugs out. _
Hamlet
Hamletâs dad gitz whacked. Hamlet sAz â2 b o not 2 beâ?, plAz a w a skull & thN goes apeshit. evry1 dies n d nd, thR plots foiled.
Lord of the Flies
som boyz crash on an island, w/o SMS. dey go wilding untl d Royal Navy rescues dem.
Day of the Triffids
DIS mega-weed springs ^ & evry1 gitz totally blnd, except 4 som ppl hu travel rownd d UK arguing w othRz bout how 2 stA str8.
Lord of the Rings
Sauron GIVz som plARz a ring & dey go bad. Lots of battles rage ax d Middleearth az som peewees w furry feet hed 4 Sauronâs crib 2 dump Hs vidphone n a volcano.
Howardâs End
2 familes connect Ovr ideas & fight Ovr property. thN som guy n a tail coat gitz killed by a bookcase.
The Magus
WTF wz dat aL bout?
Wow, does that take me back to my exam-marking days or what?
And speaking of getting killed by a bookcase, yes Mark, all right, I’m in. I ‘did’ Swann’s Way for English Hons back in the mists of time and can remember none of it except this bit. Petite madeleine, anyone? Tasse de thé?
Excellent!
I might be in too, though I’d need some lead time to get hold of the books.
Oh, and start reading too, of course.
I’ll give some thought to how we should actually organise it. Any ideas?
Maybe we need to begin with a pre-reading-group reading group to get through the debates about the translations.
The most accessible edition is probably whatever the current Penguin is, thought there may be more than one of those as well. But I do think we ideally ought all to be reading the same translation, n’est-ce pas?
Totally!
My copy of Vol 1 is the Moncrieff translation, latest Penguin edition.
En ce cas, on devrait le lire en français, n’est-ce pas?
I strongly doubt my high school French is up to it!
Nor mine either, Mark, but I thought I might see if I could do a sort of parallel French reading and see how long I lasted. (*Predicts: 3 minutes*) Seems a shame to waste the high school French, considering the torture involved at the time.
Is your Penguin version the original Moncrieff translation, or one of the Moncrieffs-with-improvements (eg the Moncrieff/Kilmartin that T Sterne mentions)? What’s the date of the edition?
I was thinking about that too, PC. We read Camus’ L’etranger in senior (22 years ago!) and of course he was renowned for sparse prose.
I told a lie, actually – it’s not a Penguin at all – it’s “Wordsworth Books” – I was misled by the black cover! It’s a 2006 edition and a Moncrieff/Kilmartin.
Recent editions of the Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation feature revisions by D.J. Enright that (supposedly) improve the text. Note that “supposedly” – I don’t wish to give the impression that I actually know what I’m talking about.
The newish Penguin edition wasn’t particularly well received, mainly because each volume has a different translator with predictably varied results. According to this brief guide, the best volumes of this edition are Swann’s Way and The Fugitive. Given it is widely available and gets the thumbs up from various learned Proustians, I reckon the Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation, with or without Enright, would be the best choice.
I’m interested in this. I did some research on the internet and found that the Proust Society of America, Boston Chapter, reads 100 pages of Proust per month and then is lead in discussion by a scholar of Proust. They “encourage” the use of the Moncrieff/Kilmartin Vintage 3 vol. paperback. Also Google “Waggish Reads Proust.” This blogger also uses the Moncrieff/Kilmartin, pre-Enright edition and journals his impressions on various themes.
In my MFA program we were expected to fly through many classic works, which just about killed me, as I had other things going on. I am interested in the stimulation of a book discussion group, however, and one that has realistic goals. One hundred pages a month might be a little slow, but then again, this is Proust.
I found the Moncrieff/Kilmartin Vintage 3 vol. paperback on Buy.com for $41.44. I’ll be curious to see what you finally decide.
Wishing you well.
I’ve read Vols 1 and 2 of the Penguin edition (up to “Cities of the Plain”), I have to say I don’t know why so many people are terrified of Proust. I found it quite soap opera-y and a good yarn. Yes, there are some long passages about aesthetics which I didn’t terribly much want to bother with, but I liked the social-commentary aspect of it (e.g. the class implications with the Guermantes family)
But then, I enjoy fiction of that era which many people now don’t.
I read Ulysses when at Uni and discovered that if you pore over it and try to decipher every sentence it’s fatal. If I read quickly and let it wash over me then I could (sort of) understand it.
Not sure about Proust, but I think Ulysses is best appreciated in quote form. That’s due to the extreme density of Joyce’s prose: if you try it in paragraph form or chapter form, it ends up making no sense at all. A quote of a phrase, or a sentence, or a few sentences is just enough. As a book, Ulysses is often quite dull; as quotes, it can be entertaining. (Hence the festival known as Bloomsday.)
Agree with Helen that you can’t pore over Ulysses, it’ll drive you crazy that way. You kind of have to treat it like you’re watching a movie or a play in a sense; he makes these big structural, gestural style choices for each chapter, and then plays by the rules of each choice for that chapter. It’s a little like a movie where the production design is different for each part of the film: one part styled like “The Matrix,” another part styled like “Casablanca,” and so on. If you click with the rules of the style choice for a chapter, then you start to enjoy all the fun he’s having with what he’s doing. One chapter, for instance, is written like it was a woman’s weekly magazine. One is written as a hallucination. One is a catechism. It’s a very funny book. It’s not like he’s cryptically hiding The Meaning of Life in between sentence 9,581 and 9,582; if you read it that way you soon go berserk.
Plus, come on, Molly’s monologue just slays. It’s worth wading through the whole damn thing just to get to that!
Also, of course, it helps a lot to have read The Odyssey.