Style as Vision: On Translating Proust | With Brian Nelson

The task of the translator is to capture a writer’s style and the ways in which that style expresses meaning. If you don’t get the style, you miss the vision. Literary translation is intrinsically a form of close reading and critical interpretation. Brian Nelson's aim in this talk is to bring out the inseparability of translation and criticism, with reference to his experience as general editor (with Adam Watt) of the new, seven-volume Oxford World's Classics edition of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (2023–27) and translator of three of those volumes: The Swann Way, The Fugitive, and Time Regained. His discussion of issues involved in literary translation will necessarily involve an evocation of essential features of Proust's writing.
Brian Nelson is Emeritus Professor of French at Monash University, Melbourne, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His publications include The Cambridge Introduction to French Literature, The Cambridge Companion to Zola, Zola: A Very Short Introduction, Zola and the Bourgeoisie, and translations of Zola's Germinal,The Assommoir, The Fortune of the Rougons, The Belly of Paris, The K*ll, Pot Luck, The Ladies’ Paradise, His Excellency Eugène Rougon, and Earth (with Julie Rose) for Oxford World’s Classics. He is the general editor (with Adam Watt) of the new Oxford World’s Classics edition of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.
Join Brian at the Afterword Cafe.
Tickets available on Trybooking:
https://www.trybooking.com/DNBWL