You’ve never read Proust? What never? Ever?

The following is in response to a comment left on my previous post by a Michael P Bowles who asked me, in view of my views on Hemingway, what I thought of Marcel Proust. I trust he doesn’t mind me leaving it as an entry, but as it is already public (as my published response . . .) Oh, and what with writing ‘essays for my Hemingway blog, this blog has had less attention, and I’ve very conscious of that.

I’ve never read Proust, whether in French (I don’t speak and thus don’t read French) or English. The only French novels I’ve read have all been English translations. And as far as translations are concerned, I now tread a little more carefully.

I am half-English and half-German, and my German mother spoke only German with me when I was very young and young. When I was nine, we moved to Berlin because of my father’s job, and I and my older brother were immediately sent to German schools. So now in addition to understanding German as well as English, I learned to speak German, and eventually became bi-lingual.

A few years ago, I read - in German - Der Untertan by Heinrich Mann. It is a sharp satire on hypocrisy and provincial life in Wilhelmine Germany and it is sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. I was living in London at the time and wondered just how well the humour had travelled to Britain.

So I went to a local Pan bookshop and dug out Man Of Straw (the title of the English translation). I looked up different passages, and they were as flat as a pancake if no a great deal flatter. The nuances, the subtleties, the satire and the humour had simply gone missing.

That was when I realised that ideally we should read an author in her or his original language. But, of course, for many if not most that just isn’t possible. I would even venture to suggest that folk who have learned a country’s language and speak it well, but are not necessarily as familiar with its culture as a native, might miss not just a little but quite a bit.

For example (and I shan’t go into too much detail), there is a line in Der Untertan where the main character, Diederich, who has discovered he has made his girlfriend pregnant, ends the relationship (on the grounds that he couldn’t marry a woman who had pre-marital sex). But he is nevertheless heartbroken and returns home and (writes Mann) ‘und am Abend spielte er Schubert’ (‘and that night he played Schubert’).

In context that is a laugh-out-loud line, funny as hell. In English? What the fuck is pfg powell talking about? Jesus! Funny? Those Krauts just don’t have a sense of humour!

Actually, they do have a sense of humour, and a very good one (though you can find as many humourless gits in Germany as in Britain (I married one. though she is not German). But it’s a different kind of humour. (Perhaps a 

good indication of how these things don’t necessarily work as we expect is that ‘ironisch’ in German is more ‘sardonic’ than ‘ironic’.

I later did the same with one other book I was reading, though it was not a satire: Ungeduld des Herzens by Stefan Zweig becomes Beware Of Pity in its English translation (and though that English title does more or less ‘sum up’ one theme of the novel, it is nowhere near as sharp as Ungeduld des Herzens, The Heart’s Impatience/Impatience Of The Heart/An Impatient Heart/take your pick - works far better in German.)

That novel, too, suffered in translation because various subtle, but telling details did not carry over. Shame really, though no translator can be blamed. (I once did a lot of translating for a friend who was writing a biography of the violinist Adolf Busch, translating all kinds of things into English - letters, feature articles, reviews, documents - and there is always a trade-off of some kind. Perfection is - as usual - impossible.

So, no, I don’t have a view on Proust because I haven’t read any Proust.

One last point: one major point I make in my Hemingway ‘essays’ is that unlike in mathematics (say), in ‘the arts’, specifically ‘literature’ all judgments, views, analyses etc are not subjective and, even more to the point, there can be no objective however much academics and critics might like to persuade us otherwise.