Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu (text established under the direction of Jean-Yves Tadié ©1987–1992): Book 6, Albertine disparue, the last pages of Chapter 1 to the first pages of Chapter 3 (pages 2000–2077)
I’m now well into the sixth and second-last book of À la recherche du temps perdu. This was published posthumously, and I gather that it’s the book that has generated most controversy about the correct text. Even its French title chopped and changed – evidently it was originally La fugitive, but had a name change to avoid confusion with someone else’s book of the same name. I mention this because this month I stumbled over a paragraph that’s in my book but not in C K Moncrieff’s translation or the French edition he worked from. So here’s a little tangential story.
As he struggles to come to terms with the loss of Albertine, Marcel’s grief gradually fades but his jealousy and his obsession with her amorous relations with other women persists. His investigations make it increasingly clear that these relations were not figments of his jealous imagination, and he craves to understand Albertine’s inner life in her Lesbian experiences. This narrative line is developed in painful detail, and goes to unexpectedly creepy places, including long interrogations of Andrée, who has been fancied by both Albertine and Marcel. On the way, Marcel hears of evidence from a blanchisseuse. Basic French vocab tells me that this is a washerwoman, or laundress. However, as blanchisseuses keep being mentioned as women who are available for casual sex I began to wonder if the word had a slang meaning. One online dictionary confirms my suspicion, suggesting that it has been slang for ‘prostitute’. After reading one particularly confronting passage, I went to the English translation to see if C. K. Scott Moncrieff found an equivalent euphemism.
He didn’t. His translation is ‘laundress’.
But here’s the thing. The passage that had sent me to Scott Moncrieff isn’t in his translation at all. I thought this might be a case of quiet censorship. After all, it’s not unheard of for translators to spare their readers bits they think will bore or otherwise alienate them. But then I discovered that this passage isn’t there in the only French version I could find online. So the absence wasn’t about sparing delicate English sensibilities. Maybe Proust thought better of it and took it out, only to have it reinstated by an editor/scholar 70 or so years after first publication. Or he intended to put it in, to push the envelope even further, but died before he could make his intentions clear – to have those intentions understood and implemented 70 or so years later.
In the passage in question, Marcel decides he wants to hear what Albertine would have sounded like when taking her pleasure with another woman, so he has two ‘little laundresses’ demonstrate for him. It’s a good example of Proust’s commitment to complexity, even when he’s being quite, well, pervy: while inviting us to imagine a Lesbian sex scene, he discusses the difficulty of interpreting sounds stripped of context and the impossibility of ever fully understanding another human being. Part of the passage and my attempt at a translation are at the end of his blog post.
Finally, in the last two days’ pages, Marcel has got out of his bedroom and is now in Venice with his mother, appreciating both of them, and once more going on the prowl for beautiful young women.
It’s been strange this month to settle down to a couple of pages of Proust each day, when so much other time has been spent doomscrolling, reading about world events where deep, slow, complex analysis of thoughts and feelings is almost impossible to imagine. Exasperating as Marcel’s relentless self-dissection may sometimes be, it’s immensely reassuring that this too is possible.
Here’s the passage with the ‘two little laundresses’
Dans un maison de passe j’avais fait venir deux petites blanchisseuses d’un quartier où allait souvent Albertine. Sous les caresses de l’une, l’autre commença tout d’un coup à faire entendre ce dont je ne pus distinguer d’abord ce que c’était, car on ne comprend jamais exactement la signification d’un bruit originale, expressif d’une sensation que nous n’éprouvons pas. Si on l’entend d’une pièce voisine et sans rien voir, on peut prendre pour du fou rire ce que la souffrance arrache à un malade qu’on opère sans l’avoir endormi; et quant au bruit qui sort d’une mère à qui on apprend que son enfant vient de mourir, il peut nous sembler, si nous ne savons de quoi il s’agit, aussi difficile de lui appliquer une traduction humaine, qu’au bruit qui s’échappe d’une bête, ou d’une harpe. Il faut un peu de temps pour comprendre que ces deux bruits-là expriment ce que, par analogie avec ce que nous avons nous-mêmes pu ressentir de pourtant bien différent, nous appelons souffrance, et il me fallut du temps aussi pour comprendre que ce bruit-ci exprimait ce que, par analogie également avec ce que j’avais moi-même ressenti de fort différent, j’appelai plaisir; et celui-ci devait être bien fort pour bouleverser à ce point l’être qui le ressentait et tirer de lui ce langage inconnu qui semble désigner et commenter toutes les phases du drame délicieux que vivait la petite femme et que cachait à mes yeux le rideau baissé à tout jamais pour les autres qu’elle-même sur ce qui se passe dans le mystère intime de chaque créature. Ces deux petites ne purent d’ailleurs rien me dire, elles ne savaient pas qui était Albertine.
(page 2018)
My attempt at a translation, resisting the temptation to break his long sentences up:
I had brought to a disorderly house [Scott Moncrieff’s polite term] two little laundresses from a suburb that Albertine used to frequent. Under the caresses of one, the other began to make a sound of which at first I could not make out the nature, as one never understands precisely the meaning of a new sound that expresses a sensation we don’t experience. If you hear it from a neighbouring room without seeing anything, you can hear as mad laughter that which is drawn from a patient being operated on without being put to sleep; and as for the sound that issues from a mother who is told that her child has just died, that might seem, if we don’t know what is happening, as difficult to translate into anything human as the sound that escapes an animal, or a harp. A little time is needed to grasp that those two sounds express what, by analogy with what we ourselves have felt, though quite different, we call suffering, and I also needed time to understand that this noise expressed what, similarly by analogy with what I had myself felt, though very different, I called pleasure; and the pleasure must have been very powerful to throw the person feeling it into such disarray and draw from the person this unknown language which seems to name and annotate all the stages of the delightful drama being lived by the little woman and being hidden from my eyes by the curtain lowered forever for anyone other than herself over what passes in the intimate mystery of each creature. These two little ones could tell me nothing. They didn’t know who Albertine was.
Me fail? I fly! 