Adrian Antonovich Frankovsky’s “Clever Diction” in His Translations of Marcel Proust’s Works

• Published in: Literaturnyĭ fakt Vol. 3; no. 33; pp. 8 - 69
• Main Author: Baskina (Malikova), Maria E.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Russian Academy of Sciences. A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature 01.09.2024
• Subjects: adrian frankovsky; marcel proust; philosophical perspective on translation; syntactical literalness in translation
• ISSN: 2541-8297; 2542-2421
• DOI: 10.22455/2541-8297-2024-33-8-69

The article discusses Adrian Frankovsky’s method in his Marcel Proust translations in the 1920s–1930s. We analyse translations, their drafts, and Frankovsky’s forewords which were never republished and translation synopses preserved in his archive. The traditional rebuke of Frankovsky for literal rendering of Proust’s syntax is counterposed with a view on the task of translation as hermeneutical, as a “critical mime” of the original (Friedrich Schlegel) that precisely for this reason requires “literal rendering of syntax” (Walter Benjamin) and “supra-philological exactitude” (Gustav Shpet). Frankovsky’s philosophical education and translating experience preceding Proust project (modern German philosophy, Descartes, Oswald Spengler, Heinrich Wölfflin, Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, contemporary French prose, primarily Henri de Régnier) made him the adequate and essentially modern Russian translator for Proust. His paratexts to translations reveal his specific approach to fiction: Frankovsky was interested in the lucid, analytic manner of thought, intellectual humour, and irony, i. e., features primarily represented in syntax and historically underdeveloped in the Russian language. His other reference point was the idea of “noble clarity” coined by Mikhail Kuzmin, who appealed to Russian prose writers to learn “the laws of lucid harmony and ordonnance” in the “construction of periods and phrases” from European literature. Underlining in Proust’s prose similar qualities of “amazing, incredible precision,” “extraordinary precision,” “unprecedented precision,” and “the desire to achieve the most possible precision,” Frankovsky parted with the mainstream Proust criticism of his time that focused on the French writer’s minute analysis of involuntary psychological movements and sided with (or, rather, followed) Ernst Curtius and Vladimir Vejdle’s approach focused on intellectual lucidity of Proust’s style. The article presents Frankovsky’s translation method through the analysis of his synopses for four books of À la recherche du temps perdu, which are condensed and purified semantic skeletons of the original and a stylistic prototype of the translation.