- Jean-Yves Tadié’s biography Marcel Proust: A Life (1996; Penguin, 2000) is excellent on Jean Santeuil’s strengths and weaknesses: ‘he was quite able to describe his life and his feelings between the ages of twenty-five and thirty; but he was not capable of giving them an overall structure or any organizational basis. Jean Santeuil is neither the story of a life resurrected through memory, nor is it that of a vocational calling: memory and literature are not singled out here; they are merely themes like any others. Finally the sentence structure is tentative and does not have the fine classical style’ of his later masterpiece (p. 284). Tadié later says that Proust’s translations were what transformed his style, ‘impregnating’ it with ‘the structure of Ruskin’s sentences, which were long, rich in incident and imagery, supple and musical, and [influenced by] the King James Bible’ (p. 368). Further citations of Tadié, or of others as quoted by Tadié, will be made in the text.
- ‘John Ruskin’, in Contre Sainte-Beuve, précédé de Pastiches et mélanges, et suivi de Essais et articles (Gallimard: Pléiade Edition, 1971), p. 439; first published 27 January 1900, a week after Ruskin’s death.
- This is a good place to mention the translation problem posed by the word esprit and its related form spirituelle. Proust’s entire essay hinges on the nature of this interior realm but I could not translate esprit consistently: ‘spiritual’ sometimes sounded too religious, ‘intellectual’ too academic, ‘mental’ too cognitive. I have used all these terms, as well as ‘inner’, ‘[life] of the mind’, and others, and tried to convey in other ways the unity and consistency of Proust’s argument.
- This crucial term — mémoire improvisée in French — has repeatedly been translated into English as ‘improvised memory’, which I think gets it wrong. As the context (p. 95) makes clear, the connotation is not of spontaneity or creative virtuosity, like a jazz solo, but of being thrown together or hastily whipped up as a partly effective substitute for the real thing; in a draft passage, Proust calls it ‘a kind of fake memory [mémoire factice], full of the sensations Ruskin has produced’ (quoted in Contre Sainte-Beuve, Pléiade Edition, p. 723). The English translation ‘improvised memory’ appears in Jean Autret and Phillip J. Wolfe’s translation in On Reading Ruskin, p. 6; Euan Cameron’s translation of Tadié, p. 357; etc.
- Already he had called translation ‘tedious in many ways,’ ‘not real work’ (Tadié 398). In a letter of 1904, after the publication of La Bible d’Amiens, he wrote: ‘I still have two Ruskins to do and after that I shall try to translate my own poor soul, if it hasn’t died in the meantime’ (Tadié 433).
- Contre Sainte-Beuve, Pléiade Edition, p. 303.
- Tadié 368; Nordlinger from Rusholme: Richard Macksey, introduction to On Reading Ruskin, p. xxii, n. 10. Nordlinger is thanked in Proust’s first note to Sesame and Lilies; he had suggested to her that they sign the contract together and share the royalties, but she refused (Tadié 436). In fact, in the episode mentioned above of Proust reading Ruskin in St Mark’s in 1900, it was she who read it with him – ‘He was strangely moved and overcome with a kind of ecstasy,’ Nordlinger later said; ‘by the text,’ Tadié adds a little wickedly, ‘not by Marie’ (Tadié 348).
- E.F.N. Jephcott makes this point in Proust and Rilke (London: Chatto & Windus, 1972, p. 191). The same book (pp. 103 ff.) also draws the parallel between Ruskin for Proust and Rodin for Rilke that I made above.
- Cf. Proust’s note 50 (p. 84, n. 50) on the last word of Ruskin’s preface to The Queen of the Air: Proust ending his preface to La Bible d’Amiens with ‘tomb’ was surely significant.
On Reading Translator’s Preface to Sesame and Lilies1
To Princess Alexandre de Caraman-Chimay, whose Notes on Florence would have delighted Ruskin, I respectfully dedicate, as a token of my deep admiration for her, these pages that I have gathered together because they pleased her. M.P.
This translation into English is dedicated to Danielle, as a souvenir of our own travels, fondly remembered, among the canals and convents of Holland, the Hôtel-Dieu in Beaune, and family meals in central France. D.S.
There are perhaps no days of our childhood that we lived as fully as the days we think we left behind without living at all: the days we spent with a favourite book. Everything that filled others’ days, so it seems, but that we avoided as vulgar impediments to a sacred pleasure – the game for whose sake a friend came looking for us right at the most interesting paragraph; the bothersome bee or sunbeam that forced us to look up from the book, or change position; the treats we had been forced to bring along but that we left untouched on the bench next to us while above our head the sun grew weaker in the blue sky; the dinner we had to go home for, during which we had no thought except to escape upstairs and finish, as soon as we were done, the interrupted chapter – our reading should have kept us from perceiving all that as anything other than obtrusive demands, but on the contrary, it has graven into us such happy memories of these things (memories much more valuable to us now than what we were reading with such passion at the time) that if, today, we happen to leaf through the pages of these books of the past, it is only because they are the sole calendars we have left of those bygone days, and we turn their pages in the hope of seeing reflected there the houses and lakes which are no more.
Who does not remember, as I do, this vacation-time reading that you tried to tuck away into one hour of the day after another, into every moment peaceful and inviolable enough to give it refuge. In the morning, after coming back from the park, when everyone had left ‘to go for a stroll’, I would slip into the dining room where, until lunch, still such a long time away, no one would come in except for old Félicie, who was relatively quiet, and where my only companions, very considerate of my reading, were the painted plates hung with hooks on the wall, the calendar whose previous day’s page had just been torn off, and the grandfather clock and the fire, both of which talked without asking you to answer them, and whose gentle speech, empty of meaning, never replaced, as people’s words do, the meaning of the word you were reading. I settled into a chair near the little wood fire, about which my uncle, a gardener and an early riser, would say: ‘No harm in that! We can certainly stand a little fire in the fireplace; it was pretty cold in the kitchen garden at six o’clock, let me tell you. And to think, only a week until Easter!’ Before lunch, which would, alas, put an end to my reading, still lay two long hours.
From time to time you could hear the sound of the pump when the water was about to come out, which made you look up and out at it through the closed window, there, right nearby, on the only path in the garden, one which gave the beds of pansies a border of bricks and half-moons of pottery: pansies gathered, it seemed, from skies too beautiful to hold them, skies variegated as if reflecting back the windows of the church you could sometimes see between the roofs of the village, sad skies that appeared before a storm, or afterwards, too late, when the day was almost done. Unfortunately, the cook would come in long before lunch, to set the table; if only she could do it without talking! But she felt obliged to say, ‘You must not be comfortable like that, should I move the table a little closer?’
And merely in order to answer ‘No, thank you’ it was necessary to come to a dead stop and bring back your voice from afar, the voice within your lips that had been swiftly and silently repeating all the words your eyes were reading; you had to bring that voice to a stop, send it out of your mouth, and, to manage a respectable ‘No, thank you’, give it a semblance of ordinary life again, the tone of communication and interaction it had lost.
The hour went by. People often began to arrive in the dining room long before lunch, either the ones who had gotten tired and cut short their walk, had ‘taken the Méséglise way,’ or the ones who had not gone out at all that morning, because they ‘had some writing to do’. They would say the requisite ‘I don’t want to disturb you’ but immediately start to go up to the fire, look at the clock, announce that they wouldn’t be sorry to see lunchtime arrive.
The one who had ‘stayed home to write’ would be met with a peculiar deference, and people would say ‘So, you’ve attended to your little “correspondence”?’ with a smile in which there was respect, mystery, indulgence, and consideration, as though this ‘little correspondence’ were at one and the same time a state secret, a royal prerogative, a stroke of luck, and a touch of illness.
Some people, without waiting any longer, sat down early in their place at the table – a devastating development, because it set a bad example for the others coming in, made them think it was
