Dear Mickey Mouse, You're Ruining My Life

Meet the Mickey Mouse Protection Act. 

Also known as the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, this loathsome piece of legislation represents a California Congressman's efforts to prevent Disney's miserable mouse from falling into public domain. Since its ratification, all works published before 1923 have become protected under US Copyright Law, and cannot be re-produced in new editions or translations.

The first four volumes of À la recherche du temps perdu-- Swann's Way, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, The Guermantes Way and Sodom and Gomorrah-- were publishd in 1913,1919, 1920 and 1920, respectively, rendering them unprotected. The next three volumes-- The Captive, The Fugitive and Finding Time again, were published afterwards, and cannot be reproduced in the US without considerabe expense to the publisher.

C. K. Scott Moncrieff, 
looking boyish and faintly
contemtuous.

This is going to be a problem.

There exist, of course, older translations of Proust, though they are generally acknowledged to be inferior to the more recently published ones-- which are not by any means modernized or simplified, but instead truer to the originals, divested of the previous english versons' bastardized, purple prose.

And so, it appears that I have several options, all of them more or less distasteful:

A. Reading the 1992 C. K. Scott Moncrieff editions-

Whenever I read a piece originally writtten in another language, I'm unusually scrupulous about finding the best or most correct translation, as I've had some truly horrific experiences in this area(for instance, below I link to a site that-- although offering free English translations of Rimbaud's poetry-- once translated his "shrinking violet" to a "smaller purple"). C. K. Scott Moncrieff's Proust reads very differently from the French, changing a more literal “the entrance to the Underworld” to "the jaws of hell," "oblivion," to "the waters of Lethe," and a simple "said" to "remarked," "murmured," "assured," and so on.

I'm not sure that I could bear seeing my beloved Proust so distorted, robbed of his clear-eyed wit. Below is are two translations of a line from the book's most famous scene (courtesy of readingproust.com):

Lydia Davis (Penguin edition)-
"It had immediately made the vicissitudes of life unimportant to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory, acting in the same way that love acts, by filling me with a precious essence: or rather this essence was not in me, it was me."

C. K. Scott Moncrieff-
"And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory--this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself."

See what I mean?

B. Waiting until 2017-

Maybe I'm showing my age, but three years seems a very, very long time. What will I be doing in three years? Certainly not waiting to finish A la recherhe du temps perdu.

C. Violating my personal Amazon boycott-

I was going to elaborate on this, but I don't think it really necessary. Basically, Amazon is on its way to definitively ruining the publishing industry, which is already about as ruined as it can get while still functioning (for more information on this, do a bit of research on the Amazon-Macmillian fiasco a few years back. It was nightmarish, I promise you.) Regardless, if I want to read the modern versions of the last volumes of À la recherche du temps perdu, I'll have to purchase them over Amazon UK, or else have a British bookstore ship them over the pond for $40 each. And, while I largely stand by my principles, I'm nothing if not thrifty.



D. Joining the cult of Proust-


Despite the fact that I have not yet read
Ulysses, I sort of want this t-shirt. It would
be absurdly amusing to wear it around
election day, and see how confused
bystanders react.

Given the numerous authors I'm obsessed with, I have a certain amount of familiarity with literary cults. T. S. Eliot fans, for instance, have some bizarrely competitive obsession with memorizing his poetry. Rimbaud fans assume that his "Letter of the Seer" is the prescription for following in the footsteps of the original infant terrible(and so pursue, with varying levels of success "a boundless, immense and systmatized derangement of the senses"). Ulysses fans-- well, they already have Bloomsday, which isn't really fair. Why isn't there a Marcel Day? 

Pehaps because-- instead of indulging in stereotypical Celtic revelry-- Proust fans generally sit down and write extremely long books about him, some of which are biographies. The very best-- and the longest to date-- is Jean-Yves Tadie's Proust: A life, weighing in at a truly massive 1052 pages and almost five pounds. I need, need, need to read it. 

On the other hand, I'm not really sure I have the time to sit down and read a thousand-page biography, however much I might want to. Usually, when adding another activity to my permenantly frenetic schedule, I remain fairly blase-- and sure, why not? I can always sleep when I'm dead, and I hardly sleep regardless. However, I've recently become so busy that I don't have a minute to spare, much less several hours.

Actually, that's not quite true-- I took the SAT this weekend, and I spent the rest of the afternoon-- four hours and one minute, to be precise-- doing nothing, a novel esperience. I know it was exactly four hours and one minute because I listened to this song 15 times:

Afterwards, I felt ridiculously guilty-- four hours wasted? How am I ever going to compete with all the other teenagers who spent those four hours in more productive ways, like getting perfect scores on their standardized tests and running every high school club and feeding the homeless and saving impoverished countries in Africa? How?

I'm going to end this post now, as it will otherwise devolve into a
near-hysterical rant about how College Board-- like its even eviller twin, Disney-- is brainwashing America's youth. And about how I'm the unfortunate poster child.