Proust is scary. Those convoluted phrases... Well, it must be irony, because readers keep reading it and there is a demand for new translations. Yes, well, when we say Marcel Proust, whose death is a hundred years old on the 18th, we are referring specifically to In Search of Lost Time, of which the author had published the first four of the seven titles when he died. , and finished the seventh a few months before he died.
The history of the Spanish edition has been abundant in translations, such as the classic one by Pedro Salinas –which José María Quiroga Pla continued and Consuelo Berges finished–, or that of Carlos Manzano in Lumen. Now, the Sevillian publisher El Paseo has started the edition of the heptalogy with a new translation by Mauro Armiño, who had already done it for Valdemar. They will start with the first two volumes, By Swann's Part and In the Shadow of the Blooming Girls, and will include commentary and a dictionary of the characters and places to make reading easier. The project foresees a book every six months, and to have it finished in 2024. For Eriño, the title has to be translated as In search of lost time, leaving the consensus.
And it is that the desire for precision in Marcel Proust's work pushes us to try to refine the language as much as possible. In fact, some of the books have different titles depending on the translations, as is also the case in Catalan with El cantó de Guermantes for Josep Maria Pinto, or El costat de Guermantes for Valèria Gaillard.
Alba also signs up for the new editions, and publishes these first two books in a single volume by María Teresa Gallego Urrutia and Amaya García Gallego, and they hope to have the following ones ready over the next year. In her case, the first book is called Where Swann Lives.
Until now, there had only been Jaume Vidal Alcover's in Catalan, but the project of the Vienna publishing house, led by Josep Maria Pinto, has just come to fruition with the second part of El temps retrobat, which completes its fourteen books – the editorial has divided the seven originals by two–, while Valèria Gaillard's version in Proa continues its course and in a few months she has to deliver the fifth volume, La presonera –a little less than a year ago she published the previous one, Sodoma i Gomorra.
Without intending to publish all the books, Nordic has drawn from its collection of illustrated Combray, which is like the prelude to the great novel, also in translation by Ermiño and illustrations by Juan Berrio.
Ermine himself has been responsible for translating Escrito. Writings on art and literature (Foam Pages) from the canonical editions that have been published, especially in France, from his articles and essays, but also from the texts found in his notebooks.
And to get to know the intimate Proust, Cliff publishes Selected Letters (1888-1922), a selection of his correspondence with nearly 200 missives, some unpublished, arranged by subject. The edition, prologue and notes are by Estela Ocampo, and the translation is by José Ramón Monreal.
And even more news: the Seven Lectures on Marcel Proust by Bernard de Fallois (Ediciones del Subsoil) with the dual aim of convincing proustians and at the same time acting as a guide and initiation for new readers. And if we have talked about a guide, there are books that have the explicit will, such as the book by another of the international experts on the French genius Alberto Beretta Anguissola, Proust: guide to the 'Recherche' (Elba).
In any case, for the Vienna publisher Imma Monsó, the work is "a cathedral of time, and for the translator, a monument to patience, perseverance and rigor", in which to learn that "it makes a description of the reality more precise than the reality that you can often grasp.
Pinto, who has finished this task after 15 years, points out that “Proust is not that complicated, you just have to have the right disposition. We have to dedicate hours to it, we have to unlearn how to read fast”. It is then that you can access the "encyclopedic portrait of his time", and also when you discover that "once you enter, he has an obsessive point". But no, fear is not.
Catalan version, here
