Volume 28, Number 11 · June 25, 1981
Kilmartin's Way
By Roger Shattuck
BOOKS ON PROUST MENTIONED IN THIS ESSAY
Remembrance of Things Past
by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, by Terence Kilmartin, by Andreas Mayor
Random House, 1,128 pp., $25.00 each
Marcel Proust's Grasset Proofs: Commentary and Variants (distributed by the University of North Carolina Press)
by Douglas W. Alden
North Carolina Studies in Romance Languages and Literature,, 561 pp., $23.50
Proust and the Art of Love: The Aesthetics of Sexuality in the Life, Times, and Art of Marcel Proust
by J.E. Rivers
Columbia University Press, 440 pp., $22.50
Proust's Recherche: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation
by Randolph Splitter
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 148 pp., $20.00
Proust dans la recherche littéraire
by Sigbrit Swahn
CWK Gleerup, Liber Läronedel Lund (Berlings, Lund, Sweden), 168 pp., 58 Swedish crowns
Proust's Additions: The Making of 'A la recherche du temps perdu,'
by Alison Winton
Cambridge University Press, 2 vols, 393 and 209 pp., $68 the set
Around 1907, before he had chained himself for good to an 800-page book that would ultimately grow to 3,000 pages, Proust wrote a letter to Robert de Billy to scotch a rumor that he was translating Praeterita. The rumor had merit. Ruskin's three-volume autobiography of a self constantly unwoven and rewoven in the writing is closer to A la recherche du temps perdu than any novel in English. Proust had already published two passionately annotated translations of Ruskin's essays. He had read Praeterita. The characteristic sinuosity of his style and the remarkable concision of thought it embodies developed in great part during the five or more years he spent in the closest of all embraces with Ruskin's English. What concerns us particularly here is that the whole complex problem, tactical and technical, of transmitting a work of literature from one language and culture to another was familiar ground to Proust.
Review, 3200 words
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