Restraint, Enigma, and "The fragrance of the air": Proust, Moncrieff, and Wang Wei

 

Restraint, Enigma, and "The fragrance of the air": Proust, Moncrieff, and Wang Wei

 

I love when cross-course connections arise. In one of our poetry workshops, restraint, enigma, and evasiveness came up in relation to discussed poems. I was able to mention Lydia Davis’s essay, “Loaf or Hot-Water Bottle.” In a description of the self-imposed rules Davis used while translating the first book of In Search of Lost Time, Davis discusses Moncrieff’s evasion of “Proust’s deliberate repetitions, which [Moncrieff] may hear as inelegant.” Davis gives the example of Proust’s “bonne” (good); Moncrieff often changes “the air’s good smell” to “the fragrance of the air”, as if to suggest that Proust’s initial word choice was ineffective. Davis notes that “[t]here is something very strong and elemental about the repetition of the word ‘good’ that I would not want to lose.”

Restraint and flatness are sometimes necessary in pieces of writing that explore emotionally charged ideas. I can’t help but think of a piece of advice I sometimes gave my precocious, thesaurus-crazed middle-schoolers (I should add that this advice was often given to me when I was a precocious, thesaurus-crazed middle-schooler): sometimes the simplest word is the best word. The cadence evoked by a repeated “plain” word, like “good”, adds to the landscape of the poem/prose. We often associate repetition with unoriginality, sometimes resulting in the over-inflation of language, which can harm the writing or the idea it is attempting to communicate. This is a good (haha) thing to keep in mind while translating – while the texture of certain words may be appealing, we should explore the hierarchies we impose on language. Why are some words “interesting” and others “too plain”? How does a string of interesting (or “spicy”) words serve, or harm, the text?

This sentiment is echoed in Adam Watt’s introduction to Brian Nelson’s The Swann Way – Moncrieff “tended to make Proust sound precious and flowery, whereas Proust’s style is not the least affected or ornate. His prose is precise, rigorous, exact.” It seems Moncrieff, despite being the first and most famous translator of Proust, is not all that popular amongst translators (though, this may be a wide/sweeping statement to make).

Regardless, the comments re: flatness and plainness support the commentary and variations provided in 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei. I’m thinking about the Furious Professor’s translation (“antistrophic lights-and-shadows” caused me to close the book, sigh, and stare off into space for about thirty seconds in complete disappointment and confusion).

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