R., following your concerns over the translation of the short extract from Proust’s The Guermantes Way used in my previous post, I have decided not to replace the translation, but at least to offer a direct comparision as a supplement to the original post.

As you’ll remember the extract I used is an episode in which the narrator is awaiting a telephone call from his grandmother. I used a fairly recent translation by Mark Treharne for a 2002 Penguin Books publication, which reads as follows:

The dear one, the voice of the dear one speaking, are with us. But how far away they are! …I could feel more acutely how illusory the effect of such intimate proximity was, and at what a distance we can be from those we love at a moment when it seems we have only to stretch out our hand to retain them. A real presence, the voice that seems so close – but is in fact miles away! But it is also a foreglimpse of an eternal separation! Many times, as I listened in this way without seeing the woman who spoke to me from so far, I have felt that the voice was crying out to me from depths from which it would never emerge again, and I have experienced the anxiety which was one day to take hold of me when a voice would return like this (alone and no longer part of a body which I was never to see again) to murmur in my ear words I would dearly like to have kissed as they passed from lips forever turned to dust.

You are quite right that it reads very differently from the much earlier translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (which I print below from the 1981 Chatto & Windus publication). I had placed in brackets at the end of the above extract in my previous post  a simple note of authorship: (Proust) – but of course your reasonable query into the tone of the translation only serves to highlight the naviety of such an appellation. So, rather than now disrupt the flow of my previous post, I offer here, by printing the earlier translation, a form of correction or at least supplment (your thoughts as ever are gratefully appreciated, as is your continued viligance):

It is she, it is her voice that is speaking, that is there. … I felt more clearly the illusoriness in the appearance of the most tender proximity, and at what a distance we may be from the persons we love at the moment when it seems that we have only to stretch out our hands to seize and hold them. A real presence, perhaps, that voice that seemed so near – in actual separation! But a premonition also of an eternal separation! Many were the times, as I listened thus without seeing her who spoke to me from so far away, when it seemed to me that the voice was crying to me from the depths out of which one does not rise again, and I felt the anxiety that was one day to wring my heart when a voice would thus return (alone and attached no longer to a body which I was never to see again), to murmer in my ear words I longed to kiss as they issued from lips for ever turned to dust.