Swann's Way - Hardcover

Proust, Marcel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 067003245X ISBN 13: 9780670032457

Publisher: Viking Adult, 2003

Synopsis

A new translation of the first volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time follows a sensitive boy's impressions of his family and neighbors; and includes the novella, Swann's Love. 17,500 first printing.

About this title

About the Author:

Lydia Davis was awarded the 2003 French-American Foundation Translation Prize for her translation of Marcel Prousts Swann's Way and was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Government for her fiction and her translations of such modern writers as Maurice Blanchot and Michel Leiris. She is the author of one novel, The End of the Story, and several volumes of stories, including Varieties of Disturbance, a National Book Award Finalist, and Cant and Wont, a New York Times bestseller. In 2009 her stories were brought together in one volume, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, which was called a grand cumulative achievement and one of the great, strange American literary contributions by James Wood in The New Yorker and one of the great books in recent literature by Dan Chiasson in The New York Review of Books. A MacArthur Fellow, Davis lives near Albany, New York.

From Publishers Weekly:

Relax: it's fantastic. There's no question that Davis's American English is thinner and more literal than C.K. Scott Montcrieff's archaically inflected turns of phrase and idioms, at least as revised by Terence Kilmartin and later by D.J. Enright. The removal of some of the familiar layers of the past in this all-new translation gives one a feeling similar to that of encountering an old master painting that has just been cleaned: the colors seem sharper and momentarily disorienting. Yet many readers will find it exhilarating, allowing the text to shed slight airs that were not quite Proust's and making many of the jokes much more immediate (as when he implies that sense-organ atrophy in the bourgeois is a defense mechanism and the result of hardening unarticulated feelings). As accomplished translator and novelist Davis (The End of the Story) notes in her foreword, she has followed Proust's sentence structure as closely as possible "in its every aspect," including punctuation, word order and word choice. To take just one case, where Montcrieff/Kilmartin describe Mlle. Vinteuil finding it pleasant to metaphorically "sojourn" in sadism, Davis has the much more definitive "emigrate." Proust's psychological inquiry generally feels much sharper, giving a much more palpable sense of Freud and Bergson-and of the young Marcel's willful (if not malefic) manipulations of those around him. For first-timers who don't have French and are allergic to the slightest whiff of euphemism, this is the best means for traveling the way by Swann's.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 067003245X
• ISBN 13: 9780670032457
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 496