Replanting Hawthorns: Towards a Diachronic Translation of À la recherche du temps perdu

A novel as long and complex as Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu poses a challenge of methodology to its translators: how should one proceed with rendering its unique style, its bifurcating sentences, its aesthetic philosophy, and the interplay between content and form? What should one prioritize? This dissertation proposes a method of translation that gives priority not only to sentence structure, as most English translators of the novel have done, but also to the repetition and diachronic development of images, themes, and phrases in order to capture and recreate certain recursive effects of the novel’s form. It focuses especially on the passages relating to hawthorns in Du côté de chez Swann, examining their central importance to the architecture of La Recherche as a whole, analyzing how imagistic and sonic themes are developed in them, and assessing how previous English translations have rendered these passages. Guided by this analysis, it also attempts a translation of its own.