Which translation is superior? Scott Moncrieff? Kilmartin? Lydia Davis's "Swann's Way"?

And those flowers aren't even giant or carnivorous.

Why expend the effort learning some third-tier language spoken only by some Euro country and a bunch of savages in Africa?

And Canada, parts of Switzerland and Belgium

Canada, Switzerland, Belgium

the point still stands.

>Canadian French
>In any way similar to France French

Kek. No.

Canadian French is what happens when French is allowed to go its own way, without any Académie Française to keep it in check. It's clipped as fuck.

this discussion - yet again.

Can we just agree you plebs will have to learn French?

Marcel Fucking Proust

Its not similar sure, but they're regional differences.

They're functionally french and can understand basic sentences.

>Davis>that stupid different-translator-for-every-volume project
Isn't Davis part of that project? By the way, is there any other translation out there? All I ever hear about is these two.

you know davis is the first volime of that project right

way to prove you're a pseud who knows nothing

>thinking about shit he remembered
lol'd

The Moncrieff/Kilmartin/Enright edition is the only way to go.

t. never read Davis

aww did sweety not get past the first volume?

oh sorry i forgot about seeing some lesbian on a beach and dedicating 4 more books to it

I mean, that's literally the meaning of the title. Searching for his memories. Why are you laughing at someone who knows what the goddamn title means?

She only translated Swann's Way (I assume OP wants to read the entire novel), and I picked up a copy of it right when it was released.

"Frogs and snails and puppy-dogs' tails,
And dirty sluts in plenty,
Smell sweeter than roses in young men's noses
When the heart is one-and-twenty."

And you wanna criticize this?

Moncrieff.

Canadian French can sound quite puzzling when they go full hillbilly; but when they talk normally it's 99% regular French.

Here is the famous teacup passage in the Moncrieff/Kilmartin/Enright edition:

Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, except what lay in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me, when one day in winter, on my return home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent for one of those squat, plump little cakes called “petites madeleines,” which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell. And soon, mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shiver ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had the effect, which love has, of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature. Where did it come from? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?

Continued:

I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third, which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its virtue. It is plain that the truth I am seeking lies not in the cup but in myself. The drink has called it into being, but does not know it, and can only repeat indefinitely, with a progressive diminution of strength, the same message which I cannot interpret, though I hope at least to be able to call it forth again and to find it there presently, intact and at my disposal, for my final enlightenment. I put down the cup and examine my own mind. It alone can discover the truth. But how? What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not yet exist, which it alone can make actual, which it alone can bring into the light of day.

Same page in the Davis translation.

Sorry, I was being lazy. Meant that I thought that Lydia's volume was pretty okay, but that, as a whole, the project didn't work (for me).
Admittedly, I dropped my reread partway through The Guermantes Way, but I flicked through the later volumes. And it's fine for a reread; a different spin, or if you only plan to read one volume before dropping, and want something a little less floral than Moncrieff, but if it's OP's first time with Proust, and they intend to read the whole thing, then it's gotta be Moncrieff.
I guess in reality, the project is probably 'okay', but having by then spent something like 5 thousand pages with Marcel, it's just jarring to having the language shift between translators. Counterpoint: maybe that's a way to show his changing as he grows - but it's all reflection, so I disagree.

Anyway whatever, yeah I'm a pseud.

So, what do you say, Veeky Forums?

I liked Moncrieffe's a lil more but I haven't even read Swann's Way lmao