“For a long time, I went to bed early.”

With these words (in Lydia Davis’s translation), Marcel Proust began his exploration of memory and perception now known as In Search of Lost Time, formerly titled Remembrance of Things Past.

The two titles bookend a similar concept: was he actively seeking time that had somehow escaped, or was he more calmly remembering things that were simply no longer? Or was he splitting the difference: thinking his way out of the mirror dividing the two positions?

The past, it is said, is another country. Is translation, then, a form of time travel?

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Proust describes the luxuriant way in which he slid from wakingness to sleep, trying to detect, while awake, the moment in which he fell asleep, or – in a dream state – convinced that it was now time to go to sleep, and thus wakening. A perfectly ordinary thing becomes a touchstone of memory. A madeleine dunked in tea or a child falling asleep can open some kind of door.

Ordinary details, the punctuation of narrative, are, in a sense, the bread and butter of translation, the bridges between one language and another, one culture and another. They separate worlds and keep them together. More.

See: Asymptote

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