Translated material
Marcel Proust a hundred years later
On the centenary of the publication of the first volume of Marcel Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time, we received this book: Marcel Proust. Towards Swann / Per. from fr. E. Baevskaya. — M.: Inostranka, Azbuka-Atticus, 2013. So, now we have Russian Proust: not “Proust in Russian,” but an adequate and harmonious translation of the first volume of the great novel into modern Russian.
“Proust in Russian”, starting from the 30s, was available in translations by A. Frankovsky and Andrei V. Fedorov and, starting from the 70s, in translations by N. Lyubimov. Those who knew French—and who were by no means specialists in Proust—simply did not want to read Lyubimov’s translations: the text was perceived as an imitation of conversations about “foreign” life. A French author of the early 20th century could not write like this.
In the early 50s, as a student at the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University, I nevertheless read in the original a small fragment of the first volume of Proust’s novel in the reading room of the then All-Russian State Library of Lithuania, which was still located on the current Varvarka Street. Proust's syntax, no matter how complex it was, could be understood with some stubbornness, but my vocabulary was too small.
We had to wait until 1970, when the volume “Towards Swann” was published in Progress. Now my French was enough to read Proust without a dictionary, but what I lacked was knowledge of the realities of this particular “foreign” life. I note that I still lack this knowledge today, although I have been to France and - it would seem! — wandered along the same streets. So my special thanks to the translator and commentator Elena Baevskaya.
So, for a long time, “Towards Svan” (translated by A. Frankovsky, 1934) and “Under the Canopy of Girls in Bloom” (translated by Andrei V. Fedorov, 1935) were relatively accessible in Russian; I don’t think I met people who read “Germant” (translated by A. Frankovsky, 1936) and “Sodom and Gomorrah” (translated by A. Fedorov and N. Surina, 1938) in Russian until the end of the 1990s.
I remember how in the early 60s “Frankovsky” (that is, the 1934 edition) was found in one house where there was a really large library, but, of course, I did not dare to ask to read the almost museum volume of Academia.
Two years ago I found the full text of Proust on the Internet, part of which, in the absence of a reader in the required format, I read from the screen [1]. Now I have a 9-inch reader, so for the first time in my life I have access to the entire text of the novel at once, as well as the early texts of Proust available on the Internet.
It must be said that from the reader’s point of view - and after all, Proust, opening his soul, was not at all addressing future researchers of his work - not all parts of the novel are equally interesting; Moreover, they are intelligible to varying degrees. So I read “Sodom and Gomorrah” to the end, as they say, out of principle, remaining rather indifferent to the “message” of the author, which, apparently, I was never able to decipher.
Once upon a time, my friend, the famous psychologist Peeter Tulviste, having learned that I was re-reading “Man Without Qualities” by Musil, noticed that Germans and Austrians generally do not read this novel in a row, but, having torn up their paperbook, re-read their favorite fragments. Apparently, it would be worth reading Proust in the same way - provided that at least once this volume was read in its entirety.
Readers who have not “caught” Proust in the original usually refer to his language, meaning the richness of the vocabulary. In fact, these not at all imaginary difficulties are due not so much to the dictionary as to Proust’s syntax. However, it is enough to understand how a randomly chosen phrase is constructed, often occupying almost a page of text, to see that Proust’s syntax is quite normative and, except perhaps for a good knowledge of the conjugation of French verbs, requires some diligence from the reader - but that’s all.
Is it possible to read Proust without much reflection, without thinking that we have “joined”, “touched”, etc? I’ll answer with a question: is it possible to directly watch films of an aesthetically bygone era - I don’t mean monumental films like “Chapaev” by the Vasilyev brothers or “The Kid” by Charlie Chaplin, but, for example, “Equay of Fogs” by Marcel Carné?
According to legend, the typist who was typing the manuscript of Thomas Mann's "Joseph and His Brothers" said, "Now I know how it really happened." To imagine what it might actually be like, watch Volker Schlöndorff's film Swann's Love (1984). By the way, Schlöndorff left us a wonderful story about how this film was created.