For a long time, I went to bed late. But that was before I began hosting the world’s worst public access television show, beginning at 5:30 a.m. It’s a Charlie Rose-type set-up insofar as there’s a table, artificial light, and one guest, always the same guest, Marcel Proust. My mise-en-place consists of two ancient Bic #2 mechanical pencils with 0.5mm German lead, notes of conjugations for French modal verbs (as well as for avoir and être), a Pink Pearl eraser, and a notebook. I find that German lead is the silkiest, while still leaving a strong-enough imprint. I’m fairly agnostic about the notebook, though I like for them all to be the same. I first filled seven unlined Hay journals; Hay having since discontinued this arguably shoddy product, I am now working on my sixth gridded Baron Fig. In addition to a copy of the volume of À la recherche du temps perdu I’m working on in French and its corresponding English translation from the new Penguin series edited by Christopher Prendergast, I periodically consult either the Oxford French Dictionary, or, shamefully, Google Translate.

For the last four or so years, thus have been my matins, Marcel and the sun rising to greet me.  

I begin making a dent in my enormous Bodum jar of coffee while listening to Mmes Pomme or Vincens^[1] read in French for five minutes, roughly equal to forty minutes of translating. I am in the fourth of seven volumes, Sodome et Gomorrhe, which means I’ve spent some one-hundred-plus sonic hours with either Madame. I can identify, maybe not in a crowded room, but certainly in a still, dark, empty one, the sound of either of them catching their breath. At first, I could manage a fraction of a sentence in an hour, though that’s not very indicative given the length of some sentences (Alain de Botton, in his customary continental twee fashion, notes that Proust’s longest sentence could encircle the base of a wine bottle seventeen times). I used to have to look up every single word, which is itself difficult if you also don’t know the grammar. Now, I have to look up four to five words per reading, though far more if the narrator is talking plants or buildings — frequent — in which case I usually have to look up the English meaning, too.^[2]

As Mme Pomme reads, I follow along in the text, pausing to repeat to myself the especially impossibly pronounced words. Sometimes I try to just listen to see if I can follow; sometimes I can, sometimes I can’t. I then stop the audio, mark the relevant time stamp, and write down what I’m reading. My first attempt at the opening line was: “For a long time I went to bed at a good hour.” It’s hard to learn idioms!^[3] Once I’ve translated, I read the passage I’ve just worked on in the Penguin, in this way consuming the book times three. My English copies are full of notes and appendages from various readings, and I sense that by the end of my life, more of the book than not will be underlined.

Like many bookish girls, I first seriously encountered Proust in college, but I was busy with the Classics. I had Xenophonto bore me to death; I didn’t need a French modernist to add another nail. For years, I simply couldn’t make it past those opening pages narrating someone falling asleep while reading — until graduate school, when I TA'ed a course on Proust and Woolf, and it became my literal job to read the book. I dedicated one hour a day, allowing no distractions. As with any physical conditioning, my body and brain adapted to the task. I found myself able to increasingly suspend all expectations from a lifetime spent in novels — expectations as to what grammar does, what sentences do, what characters, narrators, and plots do — and I read the book.^[4] Swann’s Way, then In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, then (my favorite) The Guermantes Way (the party scene?!?!?!), and so on. Let me tell you, I got a bit bogged down in The Prisoner. But I read it.

Once, as I was reading about Vronsky’s face moving into sunlit gaps and then back into the shade of lindens while he walked with Dolly in Anna Karenina, water splashed lightly on the pages. Only when I reached up to touch my face did I realize I was the source of the water. It wasn’t that something sad was happening, not at all (Nabokov would, I think, say it’s simply evidence of the maestro’s inimitable ability to make the passage of lived time match the passage of the novel). It was more that I didn’t have full control over my body, or I had given that control away. Once you have given yourself over, all of reading Proust is a bit like that; I once dreamed Swann’s dream, the one that closes out Swann in Love, and I know it was my brain attempting to give me his correlating conclusion — all that for a woman who wasn’t even my type! Has a book ever completely ruined your life, I thought, and then wrote, once I understood that even my dreams weren’t my own. But ruined in the way that a young coed is ruined by a semester abroad, as she sees everyone around her taking naps at 4 p.m. and thinks I can’t go back.
‍
This mania is well-known. Anne Carson documents the steps in a now out-of-print book, The Albertine Workout, that I characteristically and unfortunately gave away. I’ll have to paraphrase: you read Proust, you get to the end, you’re devastated, you realize you’re at the beginning, so you read Proust again, then you read everything that’s been written both biographically and critically (even, for better or worse, I would add, fictionally, and whatever this is), and then you feel stripped of any meaning and purpose on earth. Woolf: “My great adventure is really Proust. Well— what remains to be written after that?” At that point, you do something weird. Maybe you read Proust aloud on the subway or plan trips of remembrance; perhaps you write a quite popular book of self-help or invest yourself in another, non-representative artistic medium like macramé. You wake up at the crack of dawn, again and again, to peer into the original text.^[5]

Because I was trained in the Classics, I have a very specific idea of what translating involves. You spend myriad hours deciding whether it’s an aorist indicative or optative -mi verb, and what that might (rather imperceptibly) mean for the English translation. You split hairs, then split those hairs, and if you’re lucky and have found a friend, you laugh, and split those split hairs some more. Whatever it is I do each morning is not this exacting version of translation (it’s more like going to see an ok Luther Vandross impersonator, which I have also done). But there is something to be said for doing something every day at which you aren’t very good, and at which you steadily improve but will never be as good as you know the task deserves. Proust is a possessive, appetitive, funny writer, and I am an unattached, also hungry, love-to-laugh reader. And my own neuroses make me a reader particularly suited to Proust’s. I am trying to read him as closely as he wrote, holding the page up to his nose in the obscurity of his night-to-dayroom lined in cork, which Cocteau describes as a cathedral in which Proust had made wild roses grow. ^[6]

I had reached the end of Proust in his entirety for the second time when the pandemic hit. As I again neared those cobblestones on which the aged narrator stumbles in the Guermantes’ courtyard at the end of Finding Time Again — and the spoon ringing on the plate, the starched napkin, the water pipes, all of which enable the narrator to finally get outside of Time — I dreaded being away from him, and the thoroughness of his ability (his literary superpower, if there’s such a thing) to relentlessly describe, even my own dreams. I remembered the saying that reading the Bible in translation is like kissing a bride through her veil, and I thought to myself Well what if I hog-carry the bride out of the cathedral! The idea to read Proust in French made such sense to me that it seemed immediately unlikely that I hadn’t yet been doing it. I didn’t know any French, which could be construed a hurdle — like the cracker might not appear to be the body of Christ to the one not taking Communion. Just you wait, you infidels!

I understand my privilege and bounty when I say this, but: lockdown time was some of the best time of my life. The only thing I love more than canceling plans is not making them at all. And so, I got a conversational German tutor, free money from the government, and dedicated myself to finally becoming the Renaissance jester I know myself to be. And what kind of jester can’t noodle about in French? Though my pedigree might suggest otherwise, modern languages often evade me; French’s willy-nilliness completely escapes me. A college professor once thoughtfully ripped a piece of turkey jerky with his teeth while telling me (somewhat) gently that the language’s jouissance might not be for me. I pondered in what sense he meant the term and quit the language. When I thought of French, I would think Qu’est-ce que c’est — What is it that that is?

Early on, I paid someone on the internet to go over the text with me and answer questions, the majority of which were Qu’est-ce que c’est? It’s not entirely beside the point that I fell somewhat in love with this person, as the book creates a superfluity of raw emotion worthless to try to describe (Marcel would’ve done it better, and somewhere in those five thousand pages likely did). Like classic cathexis with a therapist, I loved this person for talking about what I wanted to talk about and glossed over the payment aspect. One of the first passages for which I sought his help was the narrator’s early rhapsodic description of his childhood church in Combray. Lydia Davis’s rendering of the section most plaguing me reads: “Its tombstones, under which the noble dust of the abbots of Combray, who were buried there, formed for the choir a sort of spiritual pavement, were themselves no longer inert and hard matter, for time had softened them and made them flow like honey beyond the bounds of their own square shapes, which, in one place, they overrun in a flaxen billow, carrying off on their drift a flowery Gothic capital letter, drawing the white violets of the marble; and into which, elsewhere they had reabsorbed themselves, further contracting the elliptical Latin inscription, introducing a further caprice in the arrangement of those abridged characters, bringing close together two letters of a word of which the others had been disproportionately distended.” Les pierres? I asked him helplessly, sont du miel??

Sometimes, I cry. Sometimes, especially if I’m in a Dreyfus Affair section, I’m confused and also bored. But for that first hour of my day, I really try not to do anything else. Part of my actual life, some of most of its mornings, is spent in communion with this book, and then within that communion, I’m immersed in whatever is happening in the Proustian world at that moment. This is, I think, a phenomenon with which every true reader is familiar. To the observer, there you are, in your customary pose, reading. You yourself are indeed there, in your customary pose, reading, but so too are you in that linden grove, on the heath in the storm with Lear, with Mrs. Dalloway as she goes to buy the flowers herself. Just one of the party scenes in The Guermantes Way is one-hundred-and-forty-four pages, which means that I was roaming around Oriane’s glorious apartment for an hour or so every morning for well over two months. For the rest of my real, away-from-the-book day, I feel myself suspended. Part of my mind is always in a fictional world, waiting to go back to the Guermantes’s, waiting on the train platform as le Baron de Charlus pauses in his approach, hideously painted and fat, until I can find him again the next morning and set his waddle back in sway.

It’s a book that reads not as unedited, but as ongoingly edited with endlessly minute intaglios, like Proust’s famous letter to a friend inquiring after a left-behind umbrella, with the postscript that he has found his umbrella. Different lines strike me in French than in English — sometimes, like above, for their incredible complexity, and sometimes, like the lovely moment when the narrator waits for his mother’s kiss, for their startling simplicity. Ce qui avait besoin de bouger, quelque feuillage de marronnier, bougeait — Whatever needed to move, some leaves of the chestnut tree, moved. It’s a book in love with (or obsessed with, synonymous in the Proustian world) writing and communication. Loving Proust, like loving the narrator, means allowing no others, or certainly no others above him. I am faithful with a kind of lunatic dedication, having, like a nun, created my own confines and strictures as to what it might mean to also be married to a book. I am one of La Recherche’s many anchoresses within those gorgeous hôtel particulier walls.

All translation is a form of devotion. And almost all aspects of it have religious parallels: as act of transformative fidelity; as offering; as allowing oneself to be the cypher of a word not yours — a word that, in its movement through you, does not become inflected by you, but rather you by the word. My devotion, like many, is born of desperation to not lose a feeling of connection and wholeness, after having glimpsed a coherent and beautiful sense of order. Like any totalizing ideology, Proust opens onto a whole world, one governed by the possible comprehensiveness of perception — what Benjamin called Proust’s web, which could never be woven tightly enough, never be durable enough. And my faith, also like many, is that the self-same source of my despair might ultimately offer salvation. I must take the wafer on the tongue, internalize the Sacred host of those intricate arabesques lit at night by artificial illumination, so that I never have to leave the Proustian world full of mistakes, misjudgments, loving the wrong person, loving the same person, but so too full of endlessness — other shoes dropping unexpectedly, belatedly, even almost magically. How no idea, opinion, feeling, judgment is final, other than the fact that there will ultimately be one last one. So too is my project endless, infinite, if I let it be. There are worse things, though, to do with oneself than listen, read, and write, and then read again, as the sun comes into the sky.

‍

‍

‍

‍

Notes:

[1] Unsatisfied by this nomenclature, I made an account on Libri Vox to inquire as to the identity of this reader in particular (one of these two women has been the voice of every volume thus far). The moderator responded very quickly to say that she, the moderator, was also the reader, Pomme. Tangentially, this means that I am now subscribed to the comments section of a fairly out-of-the-way audio recording of Sodome et Gomorrhe, in which things recently heated up over the comment ‘Beethoven’ ne se prononce pas ‘bitovèn,’ proving that there really are trolls for every niche activity on the internet.

[2] In some building interlude or another, I had to look up the French vasistas, which is a transom, or fanlight window. Intrigued by the Germanic sound of the word, I looked up its etymology, to find that lexicographer Émile Littré attributed the word to German soldiers during the Franco-Prussian War, pointing to transoms and saying Was ist das? — What is that? I recently told this to a friend over dinner, who not unkindly replied that I’d told him this etymology before. I beamed at him. “Thank you for letting me tell it again!”

[3] Swann’s Way’s famous opening, “For a long time, I went to bed early” is rivaled in its oft-citedness and shorthand for the beginning of something immense only by “Call me Ishmael” and “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

[4] I was lucky enough to read the new Penguin series for my first (real) time, though I’d started out with Moncrieff in earlier tries. As readers who began this series between 2003 and January 8, 2019, know, there was a fifteen-year delay between S & G and The Prisoner. This is because of the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, spearheaded by Cher’s lesser half to ensure that all things published between 1923 and 1978 — i.e., Mickey Mouse, whose public domain was imminent — be copyrighted for ninety-five years (instead of the usual life of the author, plus seventy years).

[5] I swear I did this before learning that Carson, fellow (real) classicist and barrette-enthusiast, does the same.

[6] Cocteau recounts hearing Proust read from his work at the novelist’s apartment: “Proust would start anywhere, would mistake the page, confuse the passage, repeat himself, begin again, break off to explain that the lifting of a hat in the first chapter would reveal its significance in the last volume, and he would titter behind his gloved hand, with a laugh that he smeared all over his beard and cheeks. ‘It’s too silly,’ he kept saying, ‘no… I won’t read anymore. It’s too silly.’”