Janet Haven

As noted earlier, I'm in the middle of a group read of Don Quixote. The translation was selected by our good professor, Micheal Miller; many chapters in, I learned that it was a particularly well-regarded translation, new, by Edith Grossman. Lucky us, I thought, failing to realize that Professor Micheal had obviously done a little research on the topic to get us to such a happy place.

While I was in New York in December, I loaded up all the empty crevices of my suitcase with books to replenish our stocks in Budapest. At the Columbus Circle Barnes and Noble, I lingered in front of a shelf of Proust, and finally selected a copy of Swann's Way much as I would choose a California pinot gris: the packaging was pretty, with a sort of festive shiny purple swoopy deal on the front. And feeling in the holiday season, that seemed like a better choice than the somewhat mournful Currier & Ives-type print on the front of the other translation. Besides, the Penguin translation I bought was new, and I decided that in the world of translations, new was probably superior to the creaky old one-- otherwise, why would Penguin have gone to the trouble and expense of forking out?

(Actually, it turned out it be a marketing trick of the academo-geekiest sort: they had each volume of In Search of Lost Time translated by a different person, and re-released the whole thing. Which, by the way, used to be translated from À la recherche du temps perdu to Remembrance of Things Past , if you read it long ago in college).

A kind but mildly punitive reader friend pulled up for me a December article from the New York Review of Books on the very volume that I hauled back to Europe in my bag. If you're one of those interested in various translations of Swann's Way, I encourage you to read it: it's very good, and it makes clear why I made a tragic mistake in choosing Lydia Davis' plodding and earth-bound translation of Proust because of its Christmas-paper-wrapping cover over the emotionally honest and spiritually rewarding versions by Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. Oh, the folly of shiny baubles!

The moral of this story, however, is one that you probably already know, but perhaps like me, you ignored. More Pinot Gris, less Proust. No, that's not it. Research your translation if you're reading in second language! Books aren't cheap, and I'm now stuck with the sorry choice of either consigning my copy of SW to the guiltily-abandoned pile of never-to-be-read brand-new books by the side of the bed (someday I'll post a list of those for public excoriation) OR ploughing through the damn thing, knowing that I'm missing out on soaring prose and emotional reward in spades. As Proust himself opined, "The only paradise is paradise lost." Woe is me.