Nelson and Watt are perfectly conscious of that, as the preface, notes, and introduction to The Swann Way show. Here, two elements merit our attention. On the one hand, they present a wealth of information. Nelson, who is responsible for translating both the first and last volumes of the novel, beautifully describes his goal to “recreate Proust’s voice in such a way that the translation creates the illusion that the reader is reading not a translation but the original”.

At the same time, Watt provides a well-informed and succinct introduction to Proust, covering the author’s life, how In Search of Lost Time was written, the themes and structure of The Swann Way and the novel as a whole, and its critical reception. Even before reaching the famous opening “For a long time, I went to bed early”, the reader is already rewarded with valuable material on Proust.

On the other hand, however, too little is said about the translation project as a whole. In a brief general editors’ preface they claim, for instance, that there will be “a different translator for each volume (except the first and last)″⁣.

The lack of details about the other translations and translators — theorists call this the ‘translator’s invisibility’ — is puzzling, especially in a note that is meant to present the project. A few paragraphs about these translators and their approach would help readers better understand what is effectively new about this particular translation.

Leaving that lack of information aside, the fact that Nelson will handle the first and last volumes is promising. Deviating both from the single-translator model and the shared translation projects (in which each of the seven volumes is translated by a different translator), this approach may spark new connections and ideas.

Furthermore, this choice also curiously resonates with Proust’s writing process since the initial and last parts of the novel were in place by 1910–11, therefore before the other five volumes were finished, as Watts explains. Functioning as fundamental pillars of the novel, these parts set the stage for the other volumes and for the novel’s two main poles of the “time lost” and the “time regained”. In this sense, I am looking forward to seeing if Nelson’s translations will, like the original, create a solid frame that will hold the entirety of this colossal project together.

It is difficult to predict how this new translation will look as a whole. However, this first volume delivers a lot in terms of readability, which is definitely a good indication. Many translators in the past have associated Proust with an excessively elevated and ornate language.

In my view, this perspective missed the point and intimidated readers. Since his translation of Un amour de Swann (Swann in Love), the mid-section of The Swann Way, published separately in 2017, Nelson had a clear sense that balancing clarity and elaboration is key to reading Proust in a foreign language.

In The Swann Way, Nelson retains Proust’s serpentine style without making it appear obscure. Take his rendition of the novel’s opening, for instance. He proposes: “For a long time, I went to bed early. Sometimes, my candle barely out, my eyes would close so quickly that I didn’t even have time to think: ‘I’m falling asleep.‴⁣⁣ In my opinion, alongside Lydia Davis’ translation, this version is more natural, while remaining closer to the original than James Grieve’s (“Time was when I always went to bed early. Sometimes, as soon as I snuffed my candle, my eyes would close before I even had time to think, ‘I’m falling asleep.“‘) or Scott Moncrieff’s (“For a long time I went to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say ‘I’m going to sleep”’).

Proust’s intricate enumerations and detours, carefully woven by the accumulation of words such as “and”, “which”, “where”, “as”, and “when”, can be particularly difficult to translate. Nevertheless, Nelson masterfully navigates some of those labyrinthic moments, notably in the passage of “Combray” where the narrator describes, in a 522-word-long sentence, a sequence of rooms that fleetingly appear in his half-awake mind.

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Moreover, Nelson is able to seemingly transition between Proust’s wide range of voices, from the more reflexive, introspective passages (“this essence was not in me: it was me”) to the maxim-like formulations (“all the feelings aroused in us by the joys or misfortunes of a real person are produced only through a mental image of those joys or misfortunes”), or the powerfully crafted images (“houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years”).

Directly competing with many other translations, such as Lydia Davis’ The Way by Swann’s (Penguin, 2002), William C. Carter’s edition of Scott Moncrieff’s translation (Yale University Press, 2013), or the recently republished James Grieve’s Swann’s Way (NYRB, 2023), Nelson’s The Swann Way is a good addition that may expand readers’ perceptions of Proust in English. His approach, supported by effective and precise explanatory endnotes, makes this version a compelling introduction to Proust’s masterpiece.

Considering the plethora of options available now, it seems that we may soon reach the point when selecting which translation to read will become one of the challenging aspects of reading Proust. Maybe then we might allow ourselves to forget Proust a little bit.

Yuri Cerqueira dos Anjos is author of Marcel Proust et la presse de la Belle Époque (Honoré Champion, 2018) and senior lecturer in French at Victoria University of Wellington.

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