The opening sentence of In Search of Lost Time has, as I understand it, been a bear to translate into English.
I read French passably, but have diddly knowledge of French grammar.
What’s up with this tense? And it really doesn’t lurk in English?
Thanks,
Leo
Passé composé, non? Past tense, in English. What’s held to be the difficulty with translating this passage?
Yes, but which past tense? In English it can be represented by the simple past (“I went to bed”) or the perfect (“I have gone to bed”), or various other things, depending on the original meaning. Here, it’s more like “for a long time, I would go to bed early”, I think.
It’s a sort of past tense, passée composé. The English equivalent would be “have been” - like “I’ve been sleeping happily for a long time”. (I think couche is “in bed”). As opposed to “I was happily sleeping” or “I am happily sleeping”. The implication is that it’s sort of in the past but also ongoing for a bit of time (maybe to the present). Another variant is (I think) slightly more emphatic - “je couchais”
French tends to use either “to have” or “to be” in that construction - e.g. “j’ai mangé” (I have eaten), vs. “je suis allée” (I have gone).
I forget the significance of adding “me” - certain verbs include an extra pronoun. e.g. “je me souviens” = “I remember”, sort of like “yeah, me myself and I remember”. “se coucher” is one such. “Je me couche, tu te couches, ils se couche”. I think the implication is something you do to yourself, vs. to another person.
Yes, that’s also how I’d translate the sentence in the title.
Seeing as it’s a past habit wouldnt it be “I used to go to bed early”?
“For a long time, I would go to bed early” suggests, without making it explicit, that it’s no longer the case. For that matter, “longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure”, despite being in the past tense, doesn’t explicitely say that it’s no longer the case either, but it does suggest that something happened since then.
It marks the verb as reflexive (i.e. it has a direct object and it is the same as the subject). French is more anal about explicitly marking reflexive verbs than english is. The example my teacher used was raser: raser means to shave as in what a barber in the 1920s would do with giant straight razors along with a haircut for two bits, while se raser means the shaving that normal people do these days.
Also, the passé composé for reflexive verbs always conjugates with etre instead of avoir.
Moncrieff, in the best-known translation, says, “For a long time I used to go to bed early.” For what it’s worth, I like yours a tiny bit better, though in terms of an idiomatic rendering, I consider both absolutely equal.
“My” translation is actually Ximenean’s, and yes, I agree that it’s stylistically a bit better.