On Thu, 31 Jul 2008, Ulhas posted a Hindu reprint of a Guardian article:
> Wednesday, Jul 30, 2008
>
> Opinion
>
> What we lose in translation
> http://www.hindu.com/2008/07/30/stories/2008073055211100.htm
>
> Stuart Jeffries
> that fidelity to the spirit of the original may mean betraying it at a
> literal level. C.K. Scott-Moncrieff may have been thinking along these
> lines when he gave his English translation A la recherche du temps
> perdu a title the author hated, namely Remembrance of Things Past
> (which riffs on a line from Shakespeare), though why he left out
> Proust's rudery is less clear. Only 70 years later, in 1992, did Chatto
> put out an edition with the more literal title In Search of Lost Time
> and favour English readers with the smut.
There was nothing unclear about it! In the 1920s it would have been banned in a second. And Montcrief left in all the important scenes. But he had to change some titles to throw them off the track. The literal title of the fourth volume is Sodom and Gomorrah. His title, Cities of the Plain, was an inspired euphemism; the bible uses the phrases interchangeably, but nobody who didn't already know what it was referring to would notice. But if a novel came out called Sodom and Gomorrah, and you were self-respecting censor in the 1920s, you'd have *had* to read it. And fifty pages in you'd have found a scene of tumultous anonymous gay sex. Not to mention that, as the title indicates, male and female homosexuality is a major theme of the whole volume.
That would have gotten the entire series banned for decades. Miller's Tropic of Cancer didn't win its trial for obscenity until the mid 1960s.
That said, the new and improved translation that built on Montcrief and then built again on top of that is definately better.
Lastly BTW, sometimes his euphemisms are actually dirtier than the original. The original title of the second volume is Young Girls in Bloom. He completely threw people off the track with _In a Budding Grove_. But once you know what it's referring to I'm not sure that's not more explicit than the original.
Michael