From Ruskin’s Amiens to Proust’s Venice

Reflections on the Diapered Screen

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Abstract

The paper focuses on the first of Ruskin’s two translations into French, La Bible d’Amiens (published in 1904, followed by Sésame et les lys in 1906), and on how Proust reshaped Ruskin’s work in his lengthy introduction and copious footnotes. Proust chose to translate The Bible of Amiens in order to acquaint a French readership with Ruskin’s only full-length study of France and French Gothic architecture, and also because Ruskin considered the work to be representative of his entire ‘system’. This paper examines how Proust appropriates Ruskin’s text, making it his own through the addition of his invasive critical apparatus. The fact that Proust started to work on La Bible d’Amiens when he was in Venice in 1900 casts an Italian hue on his version, which emphasizes the parallels Ruskin drew between the Venice of Picardy and the Queen of the Adriatic.


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Published Dec. 15, 2020 | Language: en

Keywords Marcel Proust • French Gothic architecture • The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin • La Bible d’Amiens

Copyright © 2020 Emily Eells. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-487-5/018


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