Proust

>>9374167
Moncrieff's translation is the best by far. Just go ahead and read him now if you're interested in how work. It's not a particularly difficult work to make your way through, just long. In Search of Lost time is definitely one of my favorite works of literaure--Proust's descriptions are just godlike. If you think you'd enjoy beautiful descriptive sentences that last for pages, then go ahead.

How difficult is the original French text? I'd like to think my French is pretty good but I don't think I could handle a French Melville.

>>9374208
i think hes easier than flaubert for sure
t. read madame bovary but also read like the first 20 pages of a cote du chez swann or whatever one night b4 bed

>>9374167
You can read it if you're old enough to have regrets.

>be at least 40.
>avoid Moncrieff public domain shit if you have any sense. Proust literally trashed his translation.
>Read modern, corrected translations: Modern Library, Penguin, etc.

>>9374385
pleb

>>9374167
Wait until you're dead and then read it as a ghost over the shoulder of a man wearing a mauve smoking jacket in an ornate velvet chair by the fire. Occasionally moan thoughtfully to let him know he is truly spooked.

>>9374398
>triggered.

proust was just proto-knausgaard

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>>9374430

>>9374167
Do it now, before it's too late

Lydia Davis is the best

Moncreiff took too many creative liberties

>>9375212
Lydia Davis is master of the autistically sparse prose. I haven't read any of her Proust but, judging by her own writing, she seems like she couldn't be a worse match for the ol' purple-prosed rat-puncturing pederast.

>>9375496
There's no purple prose in Proust

>>9375541
I know, I was exaggerating to point out how different Lydia Davis's style is from his.

>>9375548
Well, it's far closer to the original.
Moncrieff's version is very interesting in its own right though.

>>9375496
Nah, she left all the good stuff in. She didn't start out writing those blunt Hemingway darts, she had to pare it down from something, so she knows what parts of a sentence are important, and in proust's case it's everything.

>>9375212
>>9375496
Davis' version is about 50,000 words shorter than Montcrieff's, just to show you how different it is. The original wordcount in French is closer to Montcrieff's, though I'm unsure if that means anything. I personally like Montcrieff's style better, but I couldn't tell you who is more accurate.

Wait?: No. Life's too short. Just try it now.
Best translation: the recent Viking Penguins

>>9375556
>>9375815
>>9375955
Anyone care to post pages to compare? Not sure what would be a key passage.

>>9375212
Lydia Davis has only translated Swann's Way. If I'm reading the entirety of ISoLT I'd rather just stick to the same translator throughout.

French isnt that hard lads lmao

>>9376003
The teacup passage from Swann's way would be a key passage to compare, but I only have the Moncrieff version on hand.

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>>9376779
This is the Davis version

>>9376003
>>9376779
The teacup passage in my edition--C. K. S. Moncrieff revised by Terence Kilmartin revised again by D. J. Enright:

Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, except what lay in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me, when one day in winter, on my return home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent for one of those squat, plump little cakes called “petites madeleines,” which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell. And soon, mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shiver ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had the effect, which love has, of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature. Where did it come from? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?

I started reading it in french, and then I thought it was too hard. So I started reading it in english, and I realized it was just as hard.

I'm just gonna wait til I'm overall smarter...

>>9377182
wow

>>9377168
>>9377182
Second part of revised Moncrieff, to cover the extent of the Davis text which anon has kindly provided:

I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third, which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its virtue. It is plain that the truth I am seeking lies not in the cup but in myself. The drink has called it into being, but does not know it, and can only repeat indefinitely, with a progressive diminution of strength, the same message which I cannot interpret, though I hope at least to be able to call it forth again and to find it there presently, intact and at my disposal, for my final enlightenment. I put down the cup and examine my own mind. It alone can discover the truth. But how? What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not yet exist, which it alone can make actual, which it alone can bring into the light of day.

>>9377182
>>9377216
>>9377168
OK, having read both, I, for one, can't decide. Davis is more condensed but some of her word choices seemed less clear. Moncrieff unwinds it slowly and analytically, he is more pedantic and poetic. We probably need the original to judge. And then there's this >>9376750

Proust has good Prose

go for it

>>9374181
>muh descriptions
Pleb.

Moncreiff took so many creative liberties with the text many scholars believe it as actually Moncreiff's work more than it is Proust's.

Of course, with any translation, you begin and end in failure, because you can never fully and completely capture the original, but Moncreiff really used his own aesthetic and creative concoctions.

Some people even comment that Moncreiff's version is even better than Proust, it is that different.

Davis' translation is a lot more exact and actually tries to capture the complete style of Proust.

Personally, I recommend Davis if you just want to read Swann's Way. She also has a great Madame Bovary translation.

>>9377909
>if you just want to read Swann's Way
why would someone do that?

>>9377959
Well it is a very long book, and Swann's Way is a good introduction into Proust

>>9374253
This.

>>9374400

Truly underrated post.
also
>4400

>>9374400

post references

I have literally owned a complete Moncrieff for about 15 years and I've never tucked in past the overture. The thing is now, I am less and less interested in fiction but I want to do certain memes on general principles. At least I'm reading again the past few years, but I always go for short books that I can actually finish. ah well.

>>9378567

whoops. the first paragraph was meant to indicate that the above poster was citing a cartoon of a slovenly man at his computer, over-shadowed by an erudite gentleman reading Kant and pufing his purple pipe (because said intellectually activity is what the foreground man is actually doing). This is the image which was cribbed/stolen by the above anon's verbage.

>>9374167
Learn french and read it m8.

>>9377909
Judging from just the fragments posted above, I don't see any of this.

i've read both the penguin/allen lane and the moncrieff and believe the latter to be superior.

>>9380231
Do you speak French too?

>>9377182

> what are dopamine receptors

durr HURR muh pholaphaziee

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>>9374167
It is meant to be read in a lifetime, marathoning it will just bring you to exhaustion quickly, unless you're a reading virtuoso.
Try to read it in 5 years, wait some time and start reading again. The more you'll read it the more you will consider it priceless. An entire lifetime is contained in these pages: this is the closer you'll ever get to know another person.

Source: Have read it already twice in the last 9 years

>>9377168
Completely out of context, without any previous bias and before reading the Moncrieff version, I can say I don't like this. It's overly technical, the diction too bland.


>>9377182
This I really like.

>>9383242
>judging translated prose when he cant even speak the original language

Nobody gives a fuck about your unedcuated opinion you utter pleb

>>9377216

I find the Moncrieff one too clinical. In the David text I felt the emotion and passion of the narrator, I could almost taste the tea. That said, I did read the David passage first so maybe it biased me towards it.

>>9383318
why do you assume that, lmfao? I was born in France, pleb

>>9374167
Read it now.
You'll want to read it again in a few years.

Besides, it's not as "cryptic" as Ulysses but quite the opposite. Go for it.