Proust’s Translations of Ruskin: Generative Degeneration

Abstract

What have John Ruskin and Marcel Proust to do with decadence and translation? The latter protested ‘je ne suis pas décadent’ [I am not decadent], the former that he was ‘entirely opposed to translations.’ Proust associated the decadent sensibility with ‘insincérité […], la religion des belles formes de langage, une perversion des sens, une sensibilité maladive qui trouve des jouissances très rares dans de lointaines accordances, dans des musiques plutôt suggérées que réellement existantes’ [insincerity […], worshipping beautiful forms of language, a perversion of the senses, a sickly sensitivity which relishes in esoteric pleasures of distant harmonies or in music which suggests rather than actually exists]. Although he equated the decadent sensibility with an excessive aestheticism, Proust’s translations of Ruskin can be associated with another aspect of decadence, namely degeneration. As he had not studied English, he relied on his mother and his English-speaking friend Marie Nordlinger for a first draft of the translation, which he then improved stylistically. This collaborative work resulted in error and attrition as his translation was not just second, but third hand. Proust also deformed the Ruskin original with his overpowering peritext comprising numerous notes and a long introduction in which he relocates Ruskin’s work in a contemporary French context. At the same time, Proust’s critical apparatus enriches Ruskin’s text and illustrates George Steiner’s point that ‘[t]he work translated is enhanced’. Proust’s translations of Ruskin comply with Steiner’s definition of translation as ‘a mirror [that] not only reflects but generates light’, even if the light projected casts shadows of decadence. The aim of this essay is to examine in what ways Proust’s translation produced a degenerated version of Ruskin, while at the same time having a generative impact on his own writing.