Pendant quelque temps fonctionna le système des « fournées », qui permettait, grâce à des fêtes sur lesquelles on faisait le silence, de convier les réprouvés à venir se divertir entre eux, ce qui dispensait de les inviter avec les gens bien.
-- Proust, Sodome et Gomorrhe
[Scott-Moncrieff renders:
For some time the 'batch' system was in operation, which enabled her, thanks to parties over which a veil of silence was drawn, to summon the ineligibles separately to entertain one another, which dispensed her from having to invite them with the nice people.]
Depuis ces beaux jours, ce mot de … a fait fortune -- ou plutôt infortune, dans l’arène politique hexagonale. A propos de laquelle, motus; sauf dans ce coin obscure, de philologie appliquée :
https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/06/f-word-of-day-fournee.html
Moncrieff's translation is clumsy and even ungrammatical from the get-go. "...which enabled her..." he writes, ignoring the impersonal quality of "permettait" in this context, and inserting a useless pronoun with a faraway antecedent, meanwhile laying the foundation for another crashing moment of "did this guy miss the lesson about impersonal verbs?"
ReplyDeleteProust writes "ce qui dispensait de les inviter" and Moncrieff translates "which dispensed her from having to invite them." But it was the inviting rather that the "having to invite them" that was dispensed with, the ruthless society entrepreneur Mme. de Saint-Euverte never "had to" invite anyone anywhere, and when she threw some ancient duchess out of her salon, no amount of pleading by high-society friends and relatives could get the old girl back in.
"Mme de Franquetot tenta une démarche en faveur de sa cousine qui aimaittant la musique. Mais comme elle ne put pas obtenir pour elle uneréponse plus explicite que ces mots: «Mais on peut toujours entrer écouter de la musique si ça vous amuse, ça n'a rien de criminel!» Mme de Cambremer ne trouva pas l'invitation assez pressante et s'abstint."
Always merry and bright!
Ah, maître, mais vous êtes sévère pour le pauvre traducteur!
DeleteMoi perso, ch’suis pas à la hauteur …
"Ch’suis pas à la hauteur," sounds like a child who can't get on a roller coaster, because you have to be at least four feet tall.
DeleteAlong with the same metaphor, do you know why they won't let babies on rollercoasters, even if their mommies are holding them in their arms? Because the mommies will INEVITABLY lose their grip on the babies when they go off the first big drop. Babies flying around in zero gravity! Einstein would love it!
In “Peripheral Proust” (The New Yorker, May 10, 2021), Adam Gopnik writes: “Proust’s still-peerless original translator, C.K. Scott Moncrieff”.
DeleteIf you can't read, write, speak, or understand spoken French, I guess you have to rely on endorsements from mass-circulation magazines to "prove" the greatness of Scott-Moncrieff, otherwise known only as the author of a weepy memoir about multi-generational homo-hypocrisy at a thinly disguised version of Winchester College.
DeleteIMHO some of Scott-Moncrieff's clunky syntax probably arises from his concentration on Anglo-Saxon rather than French in the dismal halls of the University of Edinburgh. Poor fellow, he died at the age of 40, but at least he died in Italy, instead of Scotland, and that's a feather in his cap.