In search of a negotiated translation of Proust

Marcel Proust, a 20th-century French novelist, is renowned for his long endless sentences. His sentences sometimes exceeding ten lines are part of his style. The worldwide reputation of Proust's seven-volume novel In Search of Lost Time prompted many Iranian translators to translate this novel However only one translation manages to take up the challenge and present the Persian version and this novel after more than seventy years from the publication of the original version. Indeed the simple syntax and the clarity of the Persian are opposed to what is recognized as the style of the writer. In other words transferring the Proustian complex sentences to simple Persian sentences would go against the style of the source text and saving these sentences would give rise to unusual and incomprehensible sentences in the target language. The objective of this research is to identify the strategies that make it possible to respect the principles of Persian language while remaining faithful to the style of the writer. This being so we adopt the notion of “negotiation” in translation, proposed by Umberto Echo, and initially study the role of the language of origin and that of the language of arrival in this negotiation, as well as the grammatical differences between these two languages. Secondly after having identified the components of Proust's style we examine their transfer to the translation of the translator Sahabi. Certainly, the determination of the elements of the writer's style promotes all possible safeguards, in the "negotiation" between the two languages.