The art of translation is usually a semi-invisible one, and is generally thought better for being so. One key exception to this rule is C. Everybody tries to climb Mt. Proust, though many a stiff body is found on the lower slopes, with the other readers stepping over it gingerly. Scott Moncrieff, Soldier, Spy, and Translator. These men were inside the closet, certainly, but it was a bigger and better panelled one than many before or sinceβand a closet that big and that well panelled is really more like a private club.
It is good to be reminded, too, that the mood and spirit of the circle was not remotely radical but rather cautiously reactionary and happily militaristic: the alternative to Uranian love was not socialism but Catholicism, of the kind to which Wilde himself succumbed in the end. The link lies in aestheticism: if you live for lovely, the Catholic rite has all others beat. The rules of the game were as complex, to an outsider, as the rules of cricketβbut they knew how to play that game, too.
On the other hand, Moncrieff fled to Italy in part because he wanted sex without the police. In a spirit very nearly casual, he interspersed his translations of the later volumes with a great deal of other work. What made his Proust translation so superiorβso much so that Joseph Conrad could actually say that he thought Moncrieff was a better translator than Proust was a writer? Moncrieff, though off, is actually on, and on without being too self-consciously poetic in the pursuit.
And I say that with a due sense of my doubtless now appearing to empty it into these pages. What did the stacked boxes and baskets of our youth represent but the boundless fruitage of that more bucolic age of the American world, and what was after all of so strong an assault as the rankness of such a harvest?
With admiring eyes I saw, luminous and imprisoned in a bowl by themselves, the agate marbles which seemed precious to me because they were as fair and smiling as little girls, and because they cost fivepence each. Gilberte, who was given a great deal more pocket money than I ever had, asked which I thought the prettiest. They were as transparent, as liquid-seeming as life itself. James needs to put such human elements more elusively, in inverted commas, and so, delicately, does Moncrieff.
