Proust: La Traduction du Sensible

The relationship between Marcel Proust and John Ruskin has always attracted interest. However, the influence of the English art critic was seen essentially in terms of cultural inputs. At the same time, as a translator, Proust was not taken seriously: 'Au fond vous ne savez pas l'anglais et cela doit etre plein de contresens' said to him the Prince de Brancovan. Proust's irate response was that perhaps he didn't know the English language, but he profoundly knew his Ruskin. In fact, his translations were unanimously well received. In her original work, Nathalie Aubert demonstrates that the reason why Proust embarked on his translations was that he had experienced the inadequacy of his own language, forcing him to abandon his first novel. She shows that the obscurity of Ruskin's text helped him to establish in La Recherche a constant tension between insignificance and meaning. Informed by phenomenology, she points out that this tension is a temporal process, due to the complexity of the Visual and that the structural link between translation and metaphor is a bridge between text and reality via the Visual.