12

Marcel Proust wrote a seven-volume French novel called A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. The original French title of the last volume was Le Temps Retrouvé.

It seems to me that in these titles Proust intended an allusion to one of the aphorisms that Ben Franklin included in his book Poor Richard’s Almanac:

Lost time is never found again.

In the French translation of Franklin's book, Feuillets du Bonhomme Richard, this aphorism is translated as:

Le tems perdu ne se retrouve jamais.

All of the important words in this translation also appear in Proust’s titles, and the meaning of the titles seems to resonate the meaning of the aphorism. This supports the conclusion that Proust was alluding to Franklin’s words as they appeared in the Feuillets du Bonhomme Richard.

If that’s right, and Proust intended to allude to Franklin’s words, then it would seem natural that the English translations of the titles should revert to Franklin’s words. The titles should be translated The Search For Lost Time and Time Found Again.

Why should they be? Suppose that a French author wrote a book called The Sound And The Fury, and that an English translation was to be published. It would be common sense to call the English translation The Sound And The Fury rather than Noise and Rage, even if Noise and Rage was an equally accurate translation of the French title. The reason it would be common sense is that the French title suggested to French readers some connection to Macbeth's lines, and the best English title would preserve this suggestion, as The Sound And The Fury does, but as Noise and Rage fails to do. Of course other titles might actually be chosen, and perhaps for good reason; but common sense would suggest The Sound And The Fury.

In the case of Proust’s books, common sense did not prevail. In English translations published over the years Proust’s last title, Le Temps Retrouvé, has been rendered variously:

This strikes me as strange. Why did the English translations not use Franklin’s words?

One possibility is that they did not believe, and perhaps did not even consider, that Proust was alluding to Franklin. Another possible reason would seem to be that they did believe that Proust was alluding to Franklin but thought other phrases made better titles.

Apparently, evidence relevant to this question might include:

  • logical reasoning
  • the words of Proust and his editors, translators and publishers, perhaps expressed in diaries, correspondence or even advertising
  • similar words attributed to other authors before Franklin's time, or contemporary with him, suggesting that the idea (that lost time cannot be found again) was already a commonplace and that the similarity in wording (between Franklin’s aphorism and Proust’s titles) is a meaningless coincidence
Chaim
  • 604
  • 4
  • 7
  • 1
    If you change the title of the whole series to "Remembrance of Things Past," haven't you already jettisoned the Ben Franklin quote (if that's what the title was based on) and doesn't "Time Found Again" stop being meaningful? – Peter Shor Jan 08 '18 at 22:24
  • Is there any chance that Franklin was paraphrasing something from Seneca? – kimchi lover Jan 08 '18 at 23:27
  • 1
    @Peter Shor Yes, that original English title was deliberately different from the French one. It's a quote from Shakespeare (whom Proust loved, by the way) with resonances all its own. Personally, I think it was a good title, apparently chosen by Scott-Moncrieff. The English titles of the last volume, though, seem to be literal translations of the French, which is in turn a literal translation of the English words of Franklin. – Chaim Jan 09 '18 at 12:53
  • 4
    I think you need to have a stronger case that Proust was alluding to Franklin before you are allowed to be surprised. – kimchi lover Jan 09 '18 at 22:25
  • 1
    As I remarked in my first comment, I don't see any reason for a translator who uses Remembrance of Things Past to stick with something close to the Franklin quote. And Googling, the Finding Time Again title, which as you say is really close to Time Found Again, seems to be the only one associated with the overall English title of In Search of Lost Time. – Peter Shor Jan 09 '18 at 22:34
  • @Peter Shor I don’t follow that; the last title still seems just a mistranslation of Proust's, not justified by any artistic purpose, regardless of the series title. But D. J. Enright translated Proust for the Modern Library; he called the series In Search of Lost Time and the last volume Time Regained. Like all other translators (regardless of series title) he seems to have been simply unaware of any connection to Franklin. Do those examples suggest (as kimchi lover might think) that Franklin has nothing to do with it? – Chaim Jan 09 '18 at 23:04
  • 1
    Somewhat, but not enough to be anywhere convincing. Franklin rehashed lots of stuff: Seneca, Virgil, who-knows-what, drawing from the same cultural heritage that Proust too drew from. Perhaps Franklin's French translators recognized some of Franklin's classical borrowings and translated them the way they had previously been translated, which were also known to Proust in that form. And so on. Put it another way: the question "did Proust borrow his title from Franklin?" is more interesting and important than your question "is Proust mistranslated?". – kimchi lover Jan 10 '18 at 01:16
  • Are you saying that retrouvé never means regained? That's not true at all. See dictionary. You mean that retrouvé doesn't mean regained in this particular title? Book titles sometimes have more than one possible meaning. How do you know Proust didn't intend Time Regained to be one possible meaning of the title of this book? – Peter Shor Jan 10 '18 at 04:33
  • @Peter Shor No, I simply mean that the use of Franklin's words as the English title is appropriate because Proust intended (in his French title) to quote Franklin; and this latter fact, that Proust intended to quote Franklin, is suggested by the fact that his titles use all of the important words in the Franklin quote as it was probably available to Proust, in French. – Chaim Jan 10 '18 at 12:29
  • @kimchi lover And you're just throwing this up as a possibility -- that Franklin rehashed Seneca, Virgil, and who-knows-what, drawing from the same cultural heritage that Proust too drew from; and Franklin's French translators recognized some of Franklin's classical borrowings and translated them the way they had previously been translated, which were also known to Proust in that form. – Chaim Jan 10 '18 at 12:32
  • 2
    @Chaim Before I accept the premise of your question, that P was quoting F, I'd like to have such possibilities as the one I threw up put to rest. There is a sly rhetorical trick, of converting a hypothesis into a fact by restating it in various ways until the audience is lulled into acquiescence and then into belief. As in, "Why haven't you stopped beating your wife? Wife-beating is a widespread practice, deplored by all people of good will..." Insinuation, I think it's called, and I'm trying to use it here. – kimchi lover Jan 10 '18 at 13:02
  • 1
    I like your current rewrite. I would (if I were a French lit scholar, which I'm not) look for standard French translations of Virgil's fugit inreparabile tempus (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempus_fugit for work & locus). It seems more likely to me that Proust referred to Virgil than Franklin. – kimchi lover Jan 10 '18 at 19:28
  • 1
    @kimchi lover: Googling for "temps perdu ne se retrouve", "la recherche du temps perdu", and "Franklin" doesn't seem to return any relevant results. So even if Proust did base his title on Franklin's quote, nobody seems to have discussed this online in French. – Peter Shor Jan 10 '18 at 20:02
  • 1
    @PeterShor Yes: this has occurred to me, too. Of course, some good ideas are actually new,... – kimchi lover Jan 11 '18 at 00:14

3 Answers3

2

TLDR: Why is the last volume of Proust's masterpiece Le Temps retrouvé not consistently titled Time Found Again in English? Essentially, because if you change the title of the series from In Search of Lost Time to (say) Remembrance of Things Past, then there's no point to titling the last volume Time Found Again, because this title only makes sense in conjunction with the main title of the series being In Search of Lost Time.

Before I can explain this, I need to say a few things.

First, a deleted answer claimed that Franklin's aphorism “lost time is never found again” has nothing to do with Proust's title. This seems very unlikely. By looking at Google Ngrams, one can see that when Proust wrote the book, the adage “le temps perdu ne se retrouve jamais” was a current saying in French, and this is clearly Franklin's aphorism in French. And further, both the series title and the title of the last book are a play on words referencing this aphorism.

So Proust based his titles on the French adage le temps perdu ne se retrouve jamais. Was this a translation from Franklin's adage? It's not clear. In French, the adage has evolved. From the Ngram, it started in the early 18th century in the form

le temps perdu ne se recouvre jamais,
wasted time is never recovered.

(In French, “temps perdu” can mean either “wasted time” or “lost time”.)

It then evolved to

le temps perdu ne se retrouve jamais,
wasted (lost) time is never found again,

which has a nice play on words with “lost” and “found”.

And it is now most often found in the form

le temps perdu ne se rattrape jamais,
wasted (lost) time is never found again,

which is maybe a slightly nicer play on words, since “rattrape” can also mean “made up for”.

Was Franklin's aphorism translated into French, or did the French saying Le temps perdu ne se recouvre jamais evolve into Le temps perdu ne se retrouve jamais independently, or did Franklin simply steal his aphorism from the French? I don't know. The earliest I can find the exact saying le tems perdu ne se retrouve jamais in French on Google books is in the book Le Grelot, by Paul Baret, Part 1 which was published in 1754, several years after Franklin printed it in Poor Richard's Almanac in 1747, and which makes no reference to Franklin. Furthermore, you can find similar expressions in French (with “retrouver”) well before Franklin. However, it didn't become widely known in French until shortly after it had appeared in Franklin's book La Science du Bonhomme Richard in 1795 and in the French translation of Franklin's autobiography, in 1797.

The overall title of Proust's series, À la recherche du temps perdu, contains a bit of wordplay, with “temps perdu” meaning either “wasted time” or “lost time”. If you're a translator, and the title you're translating contains a play on words, it is generally impossible to translate it faithfully, so translators often replace titles containing plays on words with completely different titles. The original translator, C K Scott Moncrieff, did this with Remembrance of Things Past, which is a quote from Shakespeare's Sonnet 30.

Furthermore, once you've changed the main title, translating the title of the last book, Le Temps retrouvé as Time Found Again is kind of pointless, because if the main title doesn't contain the words “Lost Time”, it makes it difficult for the readers to associate Time Found Again with Franklin's aphorism. Scott Moncrieff died before he could translate the last volume, but two translations of the last volume came out shortly after he died, and these were titled Time Regained, by Stephen Hudson, and The Past Recaptured, by Frederick Blossom. I think these are both reasonable translations of Le Temps retrouvé.

It wasn't until 2003 that an edition was titled Finding Time Again, which I hope is a title the OP would find satisfactory, as it references Franklin's aphorism; this was translated by Ian Patterson as part of a Penguin edition of Proust titled In Search of Lost Time. See Wikipedia for the various editions and titles of English translations.

Finally, let me note that the OP's suggestion for the title: The Search for Lost Time, is an incorrect translation. This would be correct if the title of the French was La Recherche du temps perdu, but the actual French title is À la recherche du temps perdu. With the preposition à being the first word of the title, a more accurate translation is In Search of Lost Time, which is indeed the title of the 21st century Penguin translation.

Peter Shor
  • 12,408
  • 2
  • 32
  • 78
  • Such deductions from the Ngram in question are not justifiable or logical. See my answer. – mike rodent Jan 27 '24 at 13:26
  • Could you provide a link to your finding concerning "Le Grelot" (Paul Baret)? I looked on Google Books but couldn't find it. – mike rodent Jan 27 '24 at 13:55
  • @mikerodent: It's here. – Peter Shor Jan 27 '24 at 14:16
  • Thanks. Now that is intriguing! 1754, compared to 1747, it appears, for Franklin's Almanack. So that to me quite strongly suggests that Baret borrowed that phrase, and I reasonably surmise that the precise phrase, expressed in that precise way, may have grown in France from that point. However, I question the Franklin's originality. In particular I'd point to many people in many cultures expressing similar ideas: from Vergil to a French writer such as Villon ("Les neiges d'antan"). – mike rodent Jan 27 '24 at 14:34
  • In fact, if that is how this phrase entered French, for me it is so banal as an idea that I think Baret was well within his rights not attributing it to Franklin at the time. He probably assumed that Franklin got it from someone else. Or indeed that it was expressing a commonplace. And Franklin may have got it from someone else. We'll probably never know. – mike rodent Jan 27 '24 at 14:45
  • @mikerodent: From Ngrams, It looks like this precise phrase grew in France starting with the publication of Feuillets du Bonhomme Richard, in 1773. But it wouldn't surprise me if Franklin was inspired by the earlier French aphorism "le temps perdu ne se recouvre jamais." – Peter Shor Jan 27 '24 at 14:48
  • Are you referring to "Oeuvres de M. Franklin, docteur ès loix", from 1773? This appears to be a multi-volume book, so I assume it includes Feuillets. Had no idea that Franklin was so popular in France. But yes, that earlier phrase you've found confirms the unoriginality of Franklin's phrase ultimately. – mike rodent Jan 27 '24 at 15:01
  • You're right ... I thought it was Feuillets du Bonhomme Richard, the translation of Pages of Poor Richard's Almanac, which appeared in 1773. But it didn't appear until 1845. – Peter Shor Jan 27 '24 at 15:36
  • Got it. But we do still have Baret apparently injecting a literal translation of the Franklin phrase (unattributed) as far back as 1754, but possibly aware that the idea had nothing original about it. Of course there is a small possibility that Baret may just have rephrased the French aphorism you found, which by chance made it look as though he had read Franklin's phrase! Lost in the mists of time in all probability. – mike rodent Jan 27 '24 at 15:58
  • Even if it's a problem to translate puns, that was Proust's problem and not Scott-Moncrieff's, That's my point, isn't it? Scott-Moncrieff could have retained the original phrasing, not because it was exactly like Proust's titles grammatically but because it seems to have been Proust's intention. 2. Isn't the wordplay only in phrasing that suggests an object lost and found? 3. I see that you've been explaining for five years that the horse had left the barn once S-M chose the title "Remembrance of Things Past." So maybe I'm uneducable on that point and we should try to work around.
    • – Chaim Jan 30 '24 at 23:43
  • You also say: Furthermore, you can find similar expressions in French (with “retrouver”) well before Franklin. Can you tell me more about this? – Chaim Jan 30 '24 at 23:45
  • @Chaim: Just google retrouver and temps perdu. You get, for example, this sermon from 1678. "Il n'y a que le temps qui ne retourne point, on trouvera plûtôt la pierre philosophicale que de retrouver le temps perdu"; meaning something like "it is only time that does not come back, one would sooner find the philosopher's stone than find lost time." – Peter Shor Jan 31 '24 at 00:09