In Proust's first full English translation (Scott-Moncrieff's) the title was rendered as "Remembrance of Things Past," taken from Shakespeare's Sonnet XXX:
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste: Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow, For precious friends hid in death's dateless night, And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe, And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight: Then can I grieve at grievances foregone, And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan, Which I new pay as if not paid before. But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, All losses are restored and sorrows end.
As far as I can tell no scholar's presented strong evidence for Proust consciously echoing the second line -- not in any of his letters, diary entries, working notes, does he mention a Shakespeare connection to his work. I've read variously that somewhere out there is a pre-twentieth century French translation of the sonnet wherein Voltaire/Hugo (maybe more potentials) rendered "remembrance of things past" as "à la recherche du temps perdu" and Proust - coughing delicately into his handkerchief after tormenting himself with the alluring smell of hawthorns which always ended inevitably by troubling his lungs - found in it the key to his whole work. Et voilà, he had his title.
This illusive translation (I haven't been able to fix exactly who began the rumor of its existence) is probably sitting patiently beside "the detailed history of the future, Aeschylus' The Egyptians, the exact number of times that the waters of the Ganges have reflected the flight of a falcon, the secret and true name of Rome, the encyclopedia Navalis would have constructed, my dreams and half-dreams at dawn on August 14, 1934, the proof of Pierre Fermat's theorem, the unwritten chapters of Edwin Drood, those same chapters translated into the language spoken by the Garamantes, the paradoxes Berkeley invented concerning Time but didn't publish, Urizen's books of iron, the premature epiphanies of Stephen Dedalus, which would be mean ingless before a cycle of a thousand years, the Gnostic Gospel of Basilides, the song the sirens sang" collecting dust (Borges, "The Total Library").
Even if Proust didn't have it in mind and the influential translation was due to the "sense" Scott-Moncrieff felt was conveyed by the original title, Sonnet XXX still manages to capture the spirit of à la recherche. This folkloric anecdote of literary heritage reminded me of another writer who we know for a fact used a poem to encapsulate a longer piece of writing. On October 19, 1907, Rilke who was working on The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge wrote to his wife Clara that within Baudelaire's "Une charogne" lay "the whole development toward objective expression," the poetics of truth and reality, Dinggedicht, that Rilke would strive to achieve in his writing for the remainder of his life. The poem/its "objective expressions" helped him clarify his own work's purpose: "... The book of Make Laurids, when it is written sometime, will be nothing but the book of this insight."
A Carcass
My love, do you recall the object which we saw, That fair, sweet, summer morn! At a turn in the path a foul carcass On a gravel strewn bed,
Its legs raised in the air, like a lustful woman, Burning and dripping with poisons, Displayed in a shameless, nonchalant way Its belly, swollen with gases.
The sun shone down upon that putrescence, As if to roast it to a turn, And to give back a hundredfold to great Nature The elements she had combined;
And the sky was watching that superb cadaver Blossom like a flower. So frightful was the stench that you believed You'd faint away upon the grass.
The blow-flies were buzzing round that putrid belly, From which came forth black battalions Of maggots, which oozed out like a heavy liquid All along those living tatters.
All this was descending and rising like a wave, Or poured out with a crackling sound; One would have said the body, swollen with a vague breath, Lived by multiplication.
And this world gave forth singular music, Like running water or the wind, Or the grain that winnowers with a rhythmic motion Shake in their winnowing baskets.
The forms disappeared and were no more than a dream, A sketch that slowly falls Upon the forgotten canvas, that the artist Completes from memory alone.
Crouched behind the boulders, an anxious dog Watched us with angry eye, Waiting for the moment to take back from the carcass The morsel he had left.
— And yet you will be like this corruption, Like this horrible infection, Star of my eyes, sunlight of my being, You, my angel and my passion!
Yes! thus will you be, queen of the Graces, After the last sacraments, When you go beneath grass and luxuriant flowers, To molder among the bones of the dead.
Then, O my beauty! say to the worms who will Devour you with kisses, That I have kept the form and the divine essence Of my decomposed love!
— Translated by William Aggeler
Add to this company George Eliot:
"All the women who cannot find what Maggie and Romola and Gwendolen seek, 'something to guarantee [them] from more falling' (MF, VII, chap. 2), are driven by their anger to murderous thoughts and acts, as George Eliot shows in Adam Bede (1859), a revision of one of Wordsworth's ballads: the thorn that knocks on the window as an omen of Thias Bede's death, the round pool where Hetty Sorrel wishes to murder herself or her child, her degeneration into a wandering, sorrow-crazed madwoman--all are clues that point to the ways in which this novel can be viewed as a retelling of "The Thorn."
Gilbert and Gubar, "George Eliot as the Angel of Destruction," Madwoman in the Attic.
The Thorn | The Poetry Foundation
