Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even: first sketch of complete perspective layout, 1913 by Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968)
Author: Biblioklept
James Grieve’s translation of Proust’s Swann’s Way (Book acquired, 19 March 2023)
This May, NYRB will publish a “new” translation of the first volume of Marcel Proust’s longassed novel In Search of Lost Time.
The translation, by James Grieve, is not actually new. It’s actually like half a century old.
The NYRB jacket copy states that “James Grieve began his career as a translator of Proust in the early 1970s, driven by his dismay at how many readers deemed In Search of Lost Time to be too difficult for them to take on. Grieve’s artful and celebrated version of Swann’s Way—only now available outside his native Australia—shows that this is hardly the case.”
I was unfamiliar with Grieve’s translation. As I admitted on Twitter, I’m not really a Proust Guy. I read Lydia Davis’s translation of Swann’s Way a decade ago, and thought it was Okay and decided it was also Enough. Many, many people replied to my tweet that C.K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation was the way to go. Author and translator Daniel Mendelsohn told me that I’d “read the wrong translation!” — but I’m okay with that.
Here is the I-guess famous opening line of Moncrieff’s 1922 translation:
For a long time I used to go to bed early.
Here is the Modern Library’s 1992 translation, crediting Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright:
For a long time I would go to bed early.
Here is Lydia Davis’s translation (2002) of the opening line:
For a long time, I went to bed early.
And here is James Grieve’s translation:
Time was when I always went to bed early.
There were a lot of opinions on Grieve’s rendering of this particular line floating around Twitter.
I have no dog in this race, but the voicing here strikes me as, I dunno, very, uh, colloquial? Almost like Huck Finn or something?
Proust’s original, by the way:
Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.
I muddled my way through a few years of college French, and have no real strong opinions here, but the phrase bonne heure is the most interesting to me. When I read it in French, I read it as something like, “a good hour,” or “the right time.”
Translation is about feeling and tone and vibe and mood as much it is about (the attempt for) precision, so I suppose each translator brings their own sense of the narrator’s voice to their translation, a voice that may or may not sync with what those other translators, the readers, hear in their mind’s ear.
Untitled (Elsa in Blue) — Dominic Chambers
Untitled (Elsa in Blue), 2020 by Dominic Chambers (b. 1993)
Hawthorne is a writer | From Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School
Hawthorne is a writer
Writers create what they do out of their own frightful agony and blood and mushed-up guts and horrible mixed-up insides. The more they are in touch with their insides the better they create. If you like a writer’s books read his books, the books aren’t pure suffering; if you want to publish/help the writer, do it business-like, but don’t get into the writer’s personal life thinking if you like the books you’ll like the writer. A writer’s personal life is horrible and lonely. Writers are queer so keep away from them. I live in pain, but one day, Hawthorne said, I’m going to be happy I’m going to be so happy even if I’m not alive anymore. There’s going to be a world where the imagination is created by joy not suffering, a man and a woman can love each other again they can kiss and fuck again (a woman’s going to come along and make this world for me even though I’m not alive anymore).
From Kathy Acker’s novel Blood and Guts in High School.
Repo — Marcos Carrasquer
Repo, 2020 by Marcos Carrasquer (b. 1959)
Untitled — Nahum Tschacbasov
Untitled, 1947 by Nahum Tschacbasov (1899–1984)
“Clearly Spring Must Be Resisted Or” — Elena Wilkinson
Nerves — Stephanus Rivierius
Nerves, c. 1530-45, attributed to Stephanus Rivierius (c. 16th century)
Father Fairing’s Sewer Rat Parish | Thomas Pynchon
They were entering Fairing’s Parish, named after a priest who’d lived topside years ago. During the Depression of the ’30s, in an hour of apocalyptic well-being, he had decided that the rats were going to take over after New York died. Lasting eighteen hours a day, his beat had covered the breadlines and missions, where he gave comfort, stitched up raggedy souls. He foresaw nothing but a city of starved corpses, covering the sidewalks and the grass of the parks, lying belly-up in the fountains, hanging wrynecked from the streetlamps. The city—maybe America, his horizons didn’t extend that far—would belong to the rats before the year was out. This being the case, Father Fairing thought it best for the rats to be given a head start—which meant conversion to the Roman Church. One night early in Roosevelt’s first term, he climbed downstairs through the nearest manhole, bringing a Baltimore Catechism, his breviary and, for reasons nobody found out, a copy of Knight’s Modern Seamanship. The first thing he did, according to his journals (discovered months after he died) was to put an eternal blessing and a few exorcisms on all the water flowing through the sewers between Lexington and the East River and between Eighty-sixth and Seventy-ninth Streets. This was the area which became Fairing’s Parish. These benisons made sure of an adequate supply of holy water; also eliminated the trouble of individual baptisms when he had finally converted all the rats in the parish. Too, he expected other rats to hear what was going on under the upper East Side, and come likewise to be converted. Before long he would be spiritual leader of the inheritors of the earth. He considered it small enough sacrifice on their part to provide three of their own per day for physical sustenance, in return for the spiritual nourishment he was giving them.
Accordingly, he built himself a small shelter on one bank of the sewer. His cassock for a bed, his breviary for a pillow. Each morning he’d make a small fire from driftwood collected and set out to dry the night before. Nearby was a depression in the concrete which sat beneath a downspout for rainwater. Here he drank and washed. After a breakfast of roast rat (“The livers,” he wrote, “are particularly succulent”) he set about his first task: learning to communicate with the rats. Presumably he succeeded. An entry for 23 November 1934 says:
Ignatius is proving a very difficult student indeed. He quarreled with me today over the nature of indulgences. Bartholomew and Teresa supported him. I read them from with me today over the nature of indulgences. Bartholomew and Teresa supported him. I read them from the catechism: “The Church by means of indulgences remits the temporal punishment due to sin by applying to us from her spiritual treasury part of the infinite satisfaction of Jesus Christ and of the superabundant satisfaction of the Blessed Virgin Mary and of the saints.”
“And what,” inquired Ignatius, “is this superabundant satisfaction?”
Again I read: “That which they gained during their lifetime but did not need, and which the Church applies to their fellow members of the communion of saints.”
“Aha,” crowed Ignatius, “then I cannot see how this differs from Marxist communism, which you told us is Godless. To each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities.” I tried to explain that there were different sorts of communism: that the early Church, indeed, was based on a common charity and sharing of goods. Bartholomew chimed in at this point with the observation that perhaps this doctrine of a spiritual treasury arose from the economic and social conditions of the Church in her infancy. Teresa promptly accused Bartholomew of holding Marxist views himself, and a terrible fight broke out, in which poor Teresa had an eye scratched from the socket. To spare her further pain, I put her to sleep and made a delicious meal from her remains, shortly after sext. I have discovered the tails, if boiled long enough, are quite agreeable.
Evidently he converted at least one batch. There is no further mention in the journals of the skeptic Ignatius: perhaps he died in another fight, perhaps he left the community for the pagan reaches of Downtown. After the first conversion the entries begin to taper off: but all are optimistic, at times euphoric. They give a picture of the Parish as a little enclave of light in a howling Dark Age of ignorance and barbarity.
Rat meat didn’t agree with the Father, in the long run. Perhaps there was infection. Perhaps, too, the Marxist tendencies of his flock reminded him too much of what he had seen and heard above ground, on the breadlines, by sick and maternity beds, even in the confessional; and thus the cheerful heart reflected by his late entries was really only a necessary delusion to protect himself from the bleak truth that his pale and sinuous parishioners might turn out no better than the animals whose estate they were succeeding to. His last entry gives a hint of some such feeling:
When Augustine is mayor of the city (for he is a splendid fellow, and the others are devoted to him) will he, or his council, remember an old priest? Not with any sinecure or fat pension, but with true charity in their hearts? For though devotion to God is rewarded in Heaven and just as surely is not rewarded on this earth, some spiritual satisfaction, I trust, will be found in the New City whose foundations we lay here, in this Iona beneath the old foundations. If it cannot be, I shall nevertheless go to peace, at one with God. Of course that is the best reward. I have been the classical Old Priest—never particularly robust, never affluent—most of my life. Perhaps
The journal ends here. It is still preserved in an inaccessible region of the Vatican library, and in the minds of the few old-timers in the New York Sewer Department who got to see it when it was discovered. It lay on top of a brick, stone and stick cairn large enough to cover a human corpse, assembled in a stretch of 36-inch pipe near a frontier of the Parish. Next to it lay the breviary. There was no trace of the catechism or Knight’s Modern Seamanship.
“Maybe,” said Zeitsuss’s predecessor Manfred Katz after reading the journal, “maybe they are studying the best way to leave a sinking ship.”
The stories, by the time Profane heard them, were pretty much apocryphal and more fantasy than the record itself warranted. At no point in the twenty or so years the legend had been handed on did it occur to anyone to question the old priest’s sanity. It is this way with sewer stories. They just are. Truth or falsity don’t apply.
From Thomas Pynchon’s 1963 novel V.
Uninvited Guests — Ruby Swinney
Uninvited Guests, 2020 by Ruby Swinney (b. 1992)
Ktitor’s Guilt — Dragan Bibin
Ktitor’s Guilt, 2019 by Dragan Bibin (b. 1984)
Solitary Loop — Jason Herr
Solitary Loop, Jason Herr
Study for Hotel by a Railroad — Edward Hopper
Study for Hotel by a Railroad, 1952 by Edward Hopper (1882-1967)
There is a little tale about man’s fate, and this is the way it is put | Joy Williams
There is a little tale about man’s fate, and this is the way it is put. A man is being pursued by a raging elephant and takes refuge in a tree at the edge of a fearsome abyss. Two mice, one black and one white, are gnawing at the roots of the tree, and at the bottom of the abyss is a dragon with parted jaws. The man looks above and sees a little honey trickling down the tree, and he begins to lick it up and forgets his perilous situ- ation. But the mice gnaw through the tree and the man falls down and the elephant seizes him and hurls him over to the dragon. Now, that elephant is the image of death, which pur- sues men, and the tree is this transitory existence, and the mice are the days and the nights, and the honey is the sweetness of the passing world, and the savor of the passing world diverts mankind. So the days and nights are accomplished and death seizes him and the dragon swallows him down into hell and this is the life of man.
This little tale with its broad and beasty strokes seems to approximate man’s dilemma quite charmingly, with the caveat that it also applies to the ladies (“she” being “he” throughout here, the writer’s woes not limited by gender; like Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit, the writer knows there’s no enjoyment to be had in this life). This is the story, then, pretty much the story, with considerable latitude to be had in describing those mice, those terrifying mice. But it is not for the writer to have any part in providing the honey—the passing world does that. The writer can’t do better than that. What the writer wants to be is the consciousness of the story, he doesn’t want to be part of the distraction; to distract is ignoble, to distract is to admit defeat, to serve a lesser god. The story is not a simple one. It is syncretistic and strange and unhappy, and it all must be told beautifully, even the horrible parts, particularly the horrible parts. The telling of the story can never end, not because the writer doesn’t like the way it must end but because there is no end to the awareness of the story, which the writer has only the dimmest, most fragmentary knowledge of.
From Joy Williams’ essay “Why I Write.” Collected in Ill Nature.
The American novel starts off with Hawthorne, Melville, Poe—and it’s not a novel, it’s a reaction to the novel | Kathy Acker
BODDY: In In Memoriam you speak of Faulkner as “the American writer.” What is it about Faulkner that makes him “the American”?
ACKER: First of all, there weren’t any novelists around then who weren’t just realists. The way I see it is that it starts off with Hawthorne and Melville—you have Cooper on one side, the realist telling fairy tales (realism has always looked like fairy tales, even Dickens). For me, the American novel starts off with Hawthorne, Melville, Poe—and it’s not a novel, it’s a reaction to the novel, it’s a romance. The novel, as Roland Barthes would say, is deeply about bourgeois life. Hawthorne and Melville and Poe are revolutionaries in lots of ways. So you have the novel in America starting off being radical, not being real. Just in literary terms, the fight is against realism. Moby Dick is not a realist novel, and Pierre just makes fun of the whole idea—it’s the first genre-fuck novel. But then you don’t really have the tradition continuing. You go through a lot of radical writing that is mainly poetry. And nobody is that interesting until Faulkner, who just shines. He does something interesting—he does a novel that is both realist and radical. He keeps narrative, and yet it’s absolutely radical. What I take to be radical is that interest in America in something called guts—a heart. What does Poe say? That if you wrote the truth of the heart you’d set the whole world on fire. It’s like fuck you, the rules, that’s what you do. That’s what Faulkner did.
From a 1997 interview with Kathy Acker, conducted by Kasia Boddy.
Tassel Shade — Aglaé Bassens
Tassel Shade, by Aglaé Bassens (b. 1986)
Utopia — Benny Andrews
Utopia, 1975 by Benny Andrews (1930-2006)
Biblioklept 