Translating Proust

I appreciated Davis’s detailed walk-through of her approach to a close translation of Proust’s behemoth novel. I was interested in her strategy of a blind translation—that is, beginning without having read the novel in full. She seems to be interested in leaving behind as much context as possible for her first draft, which makes sense for a close translation. To me, her first draft seemed closer to a trot, keeping both words and word order as literal and close to the original as possible, even keeping ill-fitting cognates. For example, she kept “aurora” for dawn and “disorbited” for désorbité, changing the latter in revision. This strategy of a blind first draft and a contextualized revision made sense to me and prevents preemptively changing a text. However, many of the goals she identified for her translation seemed like they would hinder an English reader’s experience. When admitting most readers would have to look up words she used in service of a close translation, she writes “I don’t mind that, of course.” If a French reader would not look up oiseuse, then it seems like translating it as “otiose,” which many English readers would, is not serving to close the gap in experiencing the text but rather to widen it.

Emerson