ABSTRACT
The English translation of Marcel Proust’s novel was published in England under the title In Search of Lost Time. This chapter turns to symbiotic relations between translating and writing, exploring how Lydia Davis’s choices as a translator intersect and resonates with her work as a writer, whose terse and minimalist style harks back to Samuel Beckett rather than to the ample and melodious Marcel Proust. In order better to contextualize the new Penguin translation, it may be useful to recall the main facts in the history of English translations of Proust’s novel. Lydia Davis is quite forthcoming about her work as a translator. A peculiar fact about the new translation is that it was affected by a specifically American legal quirk, the Copyright Term Extension Act, known satirically as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act. Of particular concern to her is syntactic structure, since Proust’s dense and complex syntax offers a unique challenge for a card-carrying literalist such as Davis.
