Certain translations loom like monuments, venerable but crumbling with age. And the more imposing the structure the more such translations tend to overshadow their successors.

Every new translator of Kafka must labor in the shadow of Edwin and Willa Muir; their translations of “The Trial” and “The Castle” certainly have their flaws, yet they captured something about the originals that no later translator has succeeded in capturing. Somehow, despite Edwin’s faulty German, he and his indomitable wife learned to see through Kafka’s eyes, and in the end this counted more than mere lexical exactness alone.

The same could be said of H.T. Lowe-Porter’s renderings of Thomas Mann or Constance Garnett’s of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. These were the translations through which I, along with several generations of readers, came to love and admire their authors. When I compare these translators’ versions with the originals, which I came to read later, I marvelled at the felicity of their solutions and especially at their mastery of the subtlest tones and timbres.

Perhaps the greatest – and certainly, the most colossal – of these achievements of the dragoman’s art is C.K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Proust’s “A la recherche du temps perdu.” It is all too easy to fault this version; where Proust is sinuous and serpentine, Scott Moncrieff can be stilted and pompous. Nor did he have the benefit of a fully corrected and reliable French text, now available in the four stout volumes of the Pleiade edition, with their vast and maniacal appendices of variants and drafts. Even so, unlike more recent translators, Scott Moncrieff had an almost reverential respect for Proust’s original, usually following his word order and syntax to the breaking point. When I once asked a French professor about this translation, she remarked that I might as well read Proust in French, since Scott Moncrieff’s English was denser, more convoluted, and more bewildering than the original.

Here, for example, is the opening sentence of “Within a Budding Grove” in his translation (as reworked and revised by Terence Kilmartin and D.J. Enright, and available from Modern Library):

My mother, when it was a question of our having M. de Norpois to dinner for the first time, having expressed her regret that Professor Cottard was away from home and that she herself had quite ceased to see anything of Swann, since either of those might have helped her to entertain the ex-ambassador, my father replied that so eminent a guest, so distinguished a man of science as Cottard could never be out of place at a dinner table, but that Swann, with his ostentation, his habit of crying aloud from the housetops the name of everyone he knew, however slightly, was a vulgar show-off whom the Marquis de Norpois would be sure to dismiss as – to use his own epithet – a “pestilent fellow.”

This wonderful sentence reminds me of one of those nimble circus elephants that balance on tiny taborets in a center ring: It could be ponderous, but it isn’t, because something massive has been rendered unexpectedly light. If you check the French, you’ll see that Proust too began his sentence with “Ma mere.” Because of this emphasis, crucial to the novel, the sentence that ensues must cascade from clause to clause. In one sentence, Proust conveys the characters of his mother and father, as well as of Cottard, de Norpois, and the unfortunate Swann, not as they might be in themselves but as they are refracted in the exquisite social prism of French high society.

James Grieve’s more recent translation is at once freer and more literal; the book he calls “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower” (Penguin, 2002) begins thus:

When it was first suggested we invite M. de Norpois to dinner, my mother commented that it was a pity Professor Cottard was absent from Paris and that she herself had quite lost touch with Swann, either of whom the former ambassador would have been pleased to meet; to which my father replied that although a guest as eminent as Cottard, a scientific man of some renown, would always be an asset at one’s dinner-table, the Marquis de Norpois would be bound to see Swann, with his showing-off and his name-dropping, as nothing but a vulgar swank, a ‘rank outsider,’ as he would put it.

This reads very well, but notice how the translator has smoothed out and rationalized Proust’s imbricated clauses – and that fatal semicolon that he introduces alters the cadence of the sentence. The stress on “my mother” has also been lessened. To my ear this translation, good and accurate as it is, lacks that distinctive melange of the sly and the stately so characteristic of Proust; a melange which the older translation captures. Proust was himself a translator. Infatuated with John Ruskin, from whose books he imbibed his intense fascination for cathedrals, Proust toiled for several years to bring certain of his favorite Ruskin titles into French. This wasn’t easy, not only because of Ruskin’s impressionistic style but because Proust didn’t know much English. When, in 1902, a friend casually commented in public to Proust that his translation of Ruskin “must be full of mistakes, because you don’t really know English,” Proust was stung. In a letter he fired back:

I don’t know a word of spoken English and I don’t read English easily. But having worked on “The Bible of Amiens” for 4 years, I know it entirely by heart, and it has become so nearly assimilated, so transparent to me, that I am able to see not only the nebulosities resulting from the inadequacy of my scrutiny but also those resulting from the irreducible obscurity of the thought itself.

“I don’t claim to know English,” Proust wrote, “I claim to know Ruskin.” For four years he had made it his task to see the world and art through Ruskin’s eyes. A vibrant affinity bound him, heart and mind, to his chosen author. When Proust went on to say, “I learned [English] with my eyes,” he meant also that he had learned how to see the world afresh. And isn’t that in the end what a great translator does – give us new eyes with which to see the world?