mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, July 08, 2009 - 12:27 pm: | |
I started reading the new penguin version of volume 2, called In the Shadow of Young Girls, it seemed well translated for about its first half: quite jolly and very funny and also painfully sad and it flowed very well. A greater sense of clarity it seemed. Then the translation - I think - the language - began to bore me. It was too stripped of the bourgeous manners of that age, the perpetual inderection, and above all Proust's serenity. Proust's long sentences began to seem a pointless drawing out of things already said. So I reverted to the modernised Terence Kilmartin edition. A relief! The manners of the books are intrinsic; convey the sense of that time; so that being made too direct, too modern, too functional, the book's soul vanishes. |