THE LATE ARRIVAL OF ‘DER DEUTSCHE PROUST’: TRANSLATING A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU INTO GERMAN

Abstract

Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, an unparalleled chronicle of European modernity's transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, was published between 1913 and 1927. It was not until the 1950s, however, that a complete German translation of the novel appeared. Earlier attempts did not get far: Rudolph Schottlaender's 1925 translation of the first volume was critically panned, and the subsequent translation of the next two volumes by Walter Benjamin and Franz Hessel was unfortunately curtailed by the rise of Nazism and these writers’ untimely deaths. A full rendering into German of Proust's magnum opus was only completed between 1953 and 1957 by Eva Rechel-Mertens. Reconstructing the upheavals of the translation history of Proust's Recherche into German, this article also draws on archival research into Rechel-Mertens’ literary estate, held at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, to ask to what extent it was already too late for a German readership to be introduced to a German Proust, as Peter Suhrkamp once wrote to Rechel-Mertens. Examining behind-the-scenes correspondence between publishers, translators and critics, this essay investigates the seemingly random and turbulent history of the late emergence of a ‘deutscher Proust’ and the implications of this for modern German – and, indeed, European – literature.