Eating well is a portal into Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” | Hacker News Reader

Eating well is a portal into Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time”

electricliterature.com

38 pointsCaiero27 comments

"In Search of Lost Time" feels like such a rubbish translation, goddamnit. Where'd the "re" go? C'mon man. And surely "temps perdu" has a connotation of this being some actual period of subjectively experienced time, now past, however brief - something that "lost time" absolutely fails to capture. "Lost time"? Insofar as the phrase actually makes any sense, it's the sort of thing you might see on the letter you receive when you get fired from your retail job for spending too much time on the toilet.

Wikipedia says: "first translated into English as `Remembrance of Things Past'". Much better.

It does sound kind of prosaic now that you point it out but I think thats why titles are so often changed in translation. The French Rechercher apparently is a stronger form of searching/seeking chercher similar to English research but without the narrow somewhat technical connotation the English has, so I’m not sure what word would be better to express searching strongly.

“Lost time” falls particularly flat to my ear because it sounds like some trivial day to day time, not a lost era or lost memory. I would prefer “time long past” but I tend to err on the side of sentimentality, like the great 19th-early 20 translators, though the modern trend seems to be avoiding injecting anything not original even at the risk of sounding totally boring and ordinary.

I’ve always thought of it as “Remembrance of Things Past.”

Always figured it was a reference to Ecclesiastes - “there is no remembrance of things past.”

Maybe I’m remembering wrong.

It's from Shakespeare, Sonnet XXX. https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1041/pg1041.txt

Edit: I've always supposed it was from Shakespeare. I don't know Ecclesiastes well.

Wow there are quite a few parallels between Sonnet XXX and Ecclesiastes.

There's a phenomenon where people (like me) who have read half of In Search of Lost Time start reading books about In Search of Lost Time in order to put off reading the rest of it. Technically, you haven't given up, you're just doing research to better appreciate it. I feel like this article may be about one of those books.

“Food writing today recognizes our connections to food as legitimate, and recognizes food for all the varying things it can be…”

So before 2022, no one liked to eat and it was all ham sandwiches

Cringe

Ya but, what's wrong with ham sandwiches?

No onions or peppers!

Wait, do you want onions on a ham sandwich? Peppers I could fuck with.

I remember asparagus jokes in the first volume, and beef-in-aspic in (I think) the second. But I do not remember that much about food. Actually, I probably remember more about food from Homer than from Proust.

Yes, OK, madeleines. I think that A.J. Liebling said something to the effect, If he could do that with madeleines, just think what he could do with cassoulet. (My copy of Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris was recently damaged in a flood, and has not yet been replaced.)

I tried to read this 3x. He lost me after 2-3 pages of describing what it’s like to wake up suddenly.

I guess because the book is famous you’re supposed to slog through boring starts but I couldn’t do it.

I had the same problem trying to get through the first 10% of War and Peace. Seemingly dozens of characters standing around at a dinner party with no discernible plot.

Try this version of War & Peace. Beautifully made and gets the core concepts across nicely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_%26_Peace_(2016_TV_series)

Now to wait for the same of Proust..

I got through the first slog in this book, but the most unbearable one for me was Moby Dick. At some point I took a multiyear long break from it after getting 75% of the way in, and finally finished it off for completions sake. I was pretty young when I dug into it so maybe that was it, but I couldn't stand the random chapters that just talked about whales and didn't have much to do with the plot

I don't like Proust, but I'll play devil's advocate.

Overly long meandearing sentences are very much the point of those books. The form and content reflect each others.

War and Peace is also just a style exercise fashionable at that time among russian (and elsewhere) literary authors.

It's like a fantasy author writing an "epic fantasy", what makes it "epic" compared to regular, largely it's the number of words.

Yeah, Proust's works are almost meditations. For me it took a concerted effort to get into his rhythm and not tire, but once I did, I found it more rewarding than most of the fiction I've read. There's a deeply personal effect to following him interrogate, for pages and pages, the experience of a fleeting sensation we're usually only subconsciously aware of. I think about this[0] passage a lot.

[0] http://art.arts.usf.edu/content/articlefiles/2330-Excerpt%20...

It’s a book written for a world that doesn’t exist anymore

It’s not worth the struggle if you have the movie

Did you read in English? I read it in french and loved it, then looked at Montcrief's translation - I would not have made it through. Montcrief turned Prousts clear and precise (but long) sentences into a kind of esoteric word puzzle. Lydia Davis' translation looked much better.

For War and Peace, I didn't know russian, so I tested different translations before going ahead. The translator makes a big difference, I found some translations hard to read.

I had your feeling with Ulysses, though. No translation issue there. Couldn't make it very far.

Very insightful comment. If possible, always read the original, otherwise look for a translation that fits the style or sentiment of the original.

For example, Don Quixote, ideally read it in Spanish, but otherwise look for a translation that is funny in the language that you are reading it in.

Which translation do you recommend? I'm 40% of the way through the Ormsby one and I find it pretty funny.

It lost me at riverrun.

Wrong book.

My French is simply not up to it. A neighbor said that he tried reading Proust in high school French class (Richmond, Virginia, many years ago), and only at the end of the year realized that the kids who got As had used cribs.

But Nancy Mitford wrote about how much better Proust is in French.

Recently the English expression "Save the Day!" struck me, what does it mean? How can you save a day? They all go by.

The answer of course (?) is : Saving the day, is the opposite of wasting the day. So don't waste the day. That's how you save it.

I really enjoyed this article and more generally this site. Are there other similar literature sites people can recommend?

https://www.theparisreview.org/

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