La Bible d’Amiens [The Bible of Amiens]
S.l.n.d. [circa February 1903]. 12 p. in-8, mounted on paper to form a large 49 x 130 cm sheet, bearing around 90 autograph corrections, as many typographical corrections.
Rare proofs of passages from La Bible d’Amiens, for publication in the literary journal La Renaissance latine on February 15, 1903.
Numerous autograph corrections, including several previously unpublished variants, testify to Proust’s meticulous attention to detail in this translation, the success of which encouraged him to take up the exercise a second time with Le Sésame et les Lys two years later.
We apologize for the imperfect translation generated by Deepl for the purposes of the show.
Marcel Proust began to take an interest in Ruskin’s works in the autumn of 1899, as soon as he returned from Evian-les-Bains, immersing himself in the intensive reading of the man he called “this great man” after discovering the chapter entitled “The Lamp of Memory” in The Seven Lamps of Architecture. A few months later, he learned of the death of the art critic in the Figaro of January 21, 1900. He immediately wrote to Marie Nordlinger, an English friend from Manchester and cousin of Reynaldo Hahn, expressing not only his sadness, but also his desire for the continuity of the writer’s works: he then prepared several tributes to Ruskin in the form of obituary articles and notes which would become, with amplified modifications, the peritexts of his future translation of the Amiens Bible. The first – and only – extracts appeared in February and March 1903, a year before the publication in volume.
It was a difficult task since Marcel Proust hardly knew English: his mother did the “word by word”, which he reworked with the advice of Marie Nordlinger and Robert d’Humières, Kipling’s translator. At the end of these long years of hard work and personal commentary on art and creation, Proust finally completes his preface, translation and notes, some of which extend over several pages.
The present pages evoke episodes of the hagiography of Saints Martin, Genevieve and Jerome, and appeared in the literary review La Renaissance latine (issue of February 15, 1903) of the Prince of Brancovan, in spite of the reticence of the latter who still mocked him, the previous month, for his translation that he judged “light”. Proust gave him this beautiful answer: “I believe that this translation – not because of my talent, which is nil, but because of my conscience, which has been infinite – will be a translation like very few others, a true reconstruction […]. By dint of studying the meaning of each word, the scope of each expression, the connection of all the ideas, I have arrived at such a precise knowledge of this text that whenever I have consulted an Englishman – or a Frenchman who knows English thoroughly – about any difficulty – he was usually an hour before he saw the difficulty and congratulated me on knowing English better than an Englishman. In which he was wrong. I don’t know a word of spoken English and I don’t read English well. But for the four years that I have been working on the Amiens Bible, I have known it entirely by heart and it has taken on for me that degree of complete assimilation, of absolute transparency, where only the nebulae are visible, which are due not to the insufficiency of our gaze, but to the irreducible obscurity of the contemplated thought.
