In 1913, a Parisian man in his early forties, known primarily for a handful of literary pastiches and a perceived habit of social climbing, self-published his first novel after it had been rejected by several major publishers. Du côté de chez Swann (most commonly rendered in English as Swann’s Way, less commonly as The Walk by Swann’s Place or The Way By Swann) entered the world as one among many books by authors considered unpromising, but was quickly acclaimed by contemporaries, including André Gide, who had earlier rejected the manuscript for publication. Swann’s Way inaugurated the multivolume novel À la recherche du temps perdu (literally In Search of Lost Time, but given the title Remembrance of Things Past by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Proust’s first English translator) that was only half published when Proust died in 1922 at age 51. By then, though, the author and his work had attained modernist canonical status.
That acclaim has only grown since Proust’s death, as has what Edmund White called the Proust-Industrial Complex. There are biographies ranging in size from White’s short entry in the Penguin Lives series to the hefty, comprehensive tomes of William Carter, Ronald Hayman, and Jean-Yves Tadié. There are study guides, field guides, and reader’s guides to Proust. There are books on living and dying with Proust, the world according to Proust, how Proust was a neuroscientist, Proust among the stars, how Proust can change your life, how Proust met Joyce, Proust and squids, and even on an obsessive collector’s search for Proust’s overcoat. Like the universe itself, Proustiana continuously increases in size and mass.
Into this crowded field comes James Grieve’s English translation of Swann’s Way from NYRB. Grieve began translating Proust in the 1970s when, as a professor of French language and literature at Australian National University in Canberra, he was dissatisfied “with the old Scott Moncrieff version,” which was the only English translation available until the publication of Terence Kilmartin’s revised version in 1981. In 2002, Penguin published Grieve’s translation of Proust’s second volume, À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, as In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (previously given the title Within a Budding Grove). When Grieve died in 2020, he had translated only the first two volumes so, unfortunately, a complete Proust-by-Grieve is not to be.
The reader comes to know Grieve primarily through his reticence. This volume contains only a handful of footnotes, pointing out possible errors or contradictions in the manuscript (such as whether the house in Combray belongs to the narrator’s grandfather, great-aunt, or aunt), providing historical context, or explaining untranslatable jokes (such as the punning on the names Cambremer and Cambronne and the vulgarity merde). There is no introduction at all and the translator’s note, a section wherein methods and choices are generally explained, consists of only a half dozen sentences. There is something refreshing in this minimalism and the way it permits the reader to encounter the novel as a self-contained fictional world, much as the first readers would have, rather than as a small component in a vast corpus of primary, secondary, and tertiary literature. This is a Swann’s Way unburdened of canonical status and cultural prestige, presented as just itself. In his sly, chiasmic dedication, Grieve offers his work to “all those who once read [Proust] in the belief he was abstruse” and “to those who, in the same belief, never read him,” a subtle jab at snobbery in keeping with the spirit of the book.
Since NYRB published Swann’s Way without any indication that the other six volumes would follow, perhaps the most important measure of this translation’s success is whether it can be read as a standalone work. Like certain overtures or symphonic movements, Swann’s Way may be fruitfully considered in isolation — and the 200-page “Swann in Love” section is itself nearly self-contained — but does feel incomplete. Of the distinction between the Swann and Guermantes families that structures much of the Search, which this first volume introduces, only the former receives significant attention. And the final pages, as Grieve remarks in one of the few footnotes, “makes more sense if read in its original place” as part of the opening to the second volume. This admission does seem to be somewhat at odds with the remark in the short “Translator’s Note” that “Proust originally wrote À la recherche du temps perdu as a single novel,” though whether “novel” in this use refers to Du côté de chez Swann only or not is unclear.
“Time was when I always went to bed early.” With these words, Grieve’s translation begins. Compare this to the opening line in the Scott Moncrieff-Kilmartin-Enright version available from Modern Library Classics: “For a long time I would go to bed early.” Lydia Davis’ opening is similar: “For a long time, I would go to bed early.” While Grieve’s colloquial opening sounds odd at first, its phrasing somehow better captures the sense of lost time and the narrator’s circuitous way of approaching subjects; there is something of the invocation in Grieve that is absent from the plainer alternatives. That ability of Grieve to achieve accuracy in both information and tone seems to hold throughout, including in his decision to capture the lower class accent and malapropisms of Françoise the housekeeper with Cockney English. There will always be compromises and disagreements regarding translation choices, but Grieve’s Swann’s Way reads well without — and this is important — calling attention to itself through obtrusive anachronisms or other choices that cloud the intended view of the work. In 2000, Proust scholar Roger Shattuck laconically described Grieve’s translation as “reliable.” André Aciman, in his review of Grieve’s In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, excoriates Grieve, seemingly even more attached to the first Scott Moncrieff translation than to Proust himself. Short of learning French and skipping translations altogether, Grieve is a fine place to start with Proust or to revisit him. The only real issue with this volume is that, at least in the first printing, poor copy editing has left the text littered with errors, a shortcoming that may yet be remedied in subsequent printings.
Proust’s continued relevance to readers in part consists of the many affinities of the Search with contemporary literature. The Search’s digressiveness, its seeming lack of structure, its emphasis on movement of consciousness rather than plot, its blurring of the distinction between author and narrator, its autobiographical basis, its nested recollections and narratives, and its central, recursive concern with the author-narrator’s coming to write the novel in hand are all hallmarks of what is now known as autofiction. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-part My Struggle, for example, resembles Proust in its profusion of detail as well as the way a small number of episodes in the narrative present prompt prolonged ruminations on the past. Readers interested in autofiction would do well to turn to Proust to understand better this form’s origins and lineage, and the still vibrant delights to be found there. Writers in particular will find in Proust the paradigmatic description of their vocation’s simultaneous dreaminess and attention to detail (as in the descriptions of meals, of light through stained glass, and subtle social cues and missteps in Swann’s Way), its fundamental concern with looking backward in an attempt to memorialize the past and all that was lost and, of course, the long doubtful period of becoming a writer that precedes being one.
In addition to the many literary merits that make the Search worthwhile, there is also the existential aspect. In the books Proust and the Squid and Reader, Come Home as well as other articles and interviews, cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf makes frequent reference to Marcel Proust’s work as typifying the kind of deep reading presently endangered by our electronic environments’ perpetual distractions. To devote oneself to reading intensively rather than skimming, scrolling, swiping, and surfing is to more deeply inhabit one’s consciousness and the world. Proust’s narrator, too, describes a life of immersion in the word, as in the first paragraph of “Combray I” detailing the dreams that transpire when one falls asleep reading. He later recalls one of his childhood walks along the Méséglise way, or the path by Swann’s place, and wishing he “could sit down and read away the rest of the day” while listening to the tolling of the bells of Saint-Hilaire. Such experiences, and even the desires themselves, are becoming increasingly rare, and Swann’s Way, and the Search as a whole, present an opportunity to live deeply by reading deeply.
The publication of James Grieve’s translation of Swann’s Way by NYRB constitutes a welcome addition to the options for reading Proust in English. Its minimalist approach to textual notes allows readers to encounter Proust unimpeded by excessive critical apparatus, even though more detailed remarks from Grieve on his translation practices and the particular shortcomings in Scott Moncrieff he aimed to rectify would have been welcome. This volume gives readers new to Proust an approachable point of entry — a moderately long book not excessively bogged down in announcements of lofty cultural importance — and longtime readers a new position from which to interact with Proust. That NYRB seems not to have plans for the rest of the Search constitutes the only real disappointment which, given the richness of the reading experience available in this Swann’s Way, can be forgiven. Here is a Swann’s Way that functions as a Search sampler plate: the mildly curious will find their appetites sated and the intrepid literary explorers will find theirs whetted.
[Published by New York Review Books on May 23, 2023, 464 pages, $18.95 paperback]