[COMPLETE] The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust translated by CK Scott Moncrieff - tg

[ADKreader1122]

Hi Michael,
In section #24, at 1:03:06, please check me but I think there are some missing words.
Between ..."replaced..." and "...only an associate..." please add, "had, once he had left them, and to express derision of them..."

Thank you,
Lora

[MOKelly]

Thank you Lora, I will check this out and upload a corrected copy - that will probably be next weekend.

Meanwhile, I have prepared the next Section, now uploaded. The salon chat continues. There is an interesting bit at the end where the narrator cannot help getting poetic about Mme de Guermantes' language and the landscape in her eyes, having just picked many of her traits apart in the previous pages - it seems that the narrator hovers between being an observer of social insects and a Cinderella marvelling at the prince and the palace.

I note that in the Gutenberg version of this latest section, near the beginning, lines seem to have been mixed up when scanning. The original (1925) text from which the Gutenberg comes reads

"Several Deputies then crowded round the Ministerial bench. The Under-Secretary of State for Posts and Telegraphs, without rising from his seat, nodded his head in the affirmative."

while the Gutenberg reads

"Several Under-Secretaries of State for Posts and Telegraphs without Deputies then crowded round the Ministerial bench. Then rising from his seat, nodded his head in the affirmative."

The Gutenberg does not make sense - for example there would not be more than one Under-Secretary of State for Posts and Telegraphs - and I have used the sentence from the 1925 source of the Gutenberg here.
-Michael

[ADKreader1122]

Good morning, Michael,
Good decision on the choice of text--it does make more sense. How interesting it would have been to sit in on the salon! PL Okay for this section.

Thanks,
Lora

[MOKelly]

Thank you Lora.
I have a cough/sore throat at the moment so there will be a delay in correcting that previous Section, and in uploading the next one. It shouldn’t be more than a week or so.
-Michael

[ADKreader1122]

Thanks for letting me know; hope you feel better soon.

L.

[MOKelly]

Thank you for the PLs.

Voice not so bad today - I have uploaded a corrected MP3 for Section 24. I plan to upload Section 26 within the next fortnight.

-Michael

[ADKreader1122]

PL Okay for the corrected section #24. Looking forward to the next piece, as always. Thank you.

L.

[MOKelly]

Thank you.
I have just posted Section 26. More dubious wit from the Duchesse de Guermantes.

The narrator risks (again) exposing some of their less attractive side, e.g., when stating his fierce enmity with the Duc d'Agrigente merely because the Duc asked for some of the narrator's pearjuice/cherryjuice; and when with apparent smugness he explains that his patronage by the Guermantes was such that "there was not one among (their friends) who would not have felt himself to be failing in his duty to the Duke and Duchess if he had given a ball without including my name on his list".

As with much of Bloch, the story of how Bloch exclaims in distress at not recognizing a Rothschild has the air of something that actually happened to Marcel Proust - especially the detail that the incident "kept him from sleeping for at least a week afterwards".
-Michael

[ADKreader1122]

Hello Michael,
PL Okay for section #26. Well done!

Lora

[MOKelly]

Thank you again for the PL.

I have just uploaded Section 27: more talk at the party.

There is a nice example of the narrator's own idea being stolen by the Duchesse de Guermantes - the idea about how it takes many years for the fore-runners in art to be appreciated; and there is a helpful summary of the narrator's evolving feelings about the name of Guermantes vs. the reality of his genial Guermantes hostess; his consequent disappointment; and his being consoled by the "herbarium" constructed through the Duc and the General's long gossip about pedigree.

It is difficult to like the narrator's self-serving comment on his own alleged guilelessness regarding Norpois ("I did not do what a man of the world would have done"), when as a narrator "Marcel" does not spare Norpois in his prose.

Whether we like all of it or not, this Section seems vintage Proust to me: wafer-thin subtleties in sub- and sub-sub-clauses, flatteringly confided to the reader by a craftsperson whose own portrait in the story seems alternately that of dissecting surgeon and spoiled child.

It is possible that the most gripping drama in The Remembrance of Things Past is the reader's own struggle to know how to feel about the narrator. It would be nice to know whether Proust planned it that way.
-Michael

[ADKreader1122]

Yes, Michael, it would be wonderful to know the author's true intentions. PL Okay for section #27.

Thank you,
Lora

[MOKelly]

Hello Lora,
In working on the next Section, I found out that the "s" in "Nesles" is silent. I had therefore mispronounced "Nesle" in the Section you had just proof listened. I have corrected this mispronunciation, which occurs at 9:53 in Section 27; and I have re-uploaded the .mp3 and marked that Section 27 for a spot check - I hope that is OK. I re-recorded from "had one offered..." at 9:53 to "...Brabant" - about 10 seconds.
Best wishes,
Michael

[ADKreader1122]

Good morning, Michael,
That spot in section 27 is PL Okay; you have done an excellent job with pronunciation throughout the work!

Best,
Lora

[MOKelly]

Great Lora, thank you.

I have just uploaded Section 28. Section 28 is a little shorter than usual, in order to allow for two normal-sized chunks at the end covering the end of the visit to M de Charlus and then lastly the episode of the red shoes.

The narrator's account of the two forces of pleasure in contemplation ("one rises in ourselves...the other comes to us from without") is gripping. The account of how one might replay the incidents of a party in the carriage afterwards is very good: "...as I repeated to myself, with the Prince's German accent, the story of General Botha, I laughed out loud, as though this laugh, like certain kinds of applause which increase one's inward admiration, were necessary to the story as a corroboration of its comic element." A surgically accurate evocation of our little human ways.

It is interesting to see the narrator's angle on the Duchesse de Guermantes play out in his thoughts in the carriage, wavering between dismissal ("pronouncements which had struck me as being stupid") and what the reader might hear as sentimental snobbery ("we are glad to remember in after years that we owe our knowledge of it to a stately mansion of the great").
-Michael

[ADKreader1122]

Hello Michael,
Two notes for this section:
--at 17:06 you may want to change "names" to "faces" for the meaning of the text's description.
--at 31:53 please add these missing words between "gig" and "painted--" "from which I had seen"

Thanks,
Lora