Translating Transgression: discrepancies in representations of social taboo in Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu

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My research is focused on the area of literary translation and adaptation studies, and the question of whether translators can act as tacit censors. In my DPhil project, I am examining the translation of socially taboo topics in English versions of Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927). This text depicts topics that have been the subject of significant social taboo from the date of this seminal modernist text's publication to the present day, including homosexuality, sadomasochism, and sex work. However, there exists no full-length study examining the process of representing these aspects of the text in English. This is despite the fact that translations and adaptations of the text have been created in markedly different social contexts across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in eras of wide-ranging attitudes towards censorship and sexual practices considered socially taboo. Examining how depictions of controversial topics differ in the English and French versions of the text therefore has the potential to shed light on how these discrepancies reflect conditions of censorship and wider social moeurs. I aim to broach the gap in criticism I have identified by applying this critical approach to the Recherche, in order to examine what deviations in representations of socially taboo topics in English translations and adaptations can tell us about the influence of cultural context on the dissemination of the text. My project, which unites comparative literary translation studies and with the study of literary censorship, will focus on the idea that censorship is not always an issue of imposing legislation, but is instead a complex process in which social convention affects what can be produced by the author, the publishing house, and, subsequently, the translator. By applying this critical perspective to the Recherche, I aim to provide examples to illustrate the idea that censorship is not always an explicit process, but one often conducted tacitly or implicitly as a result of cultural context. In order to demonstrate this, I will analyse translations of depictions of homosexuality, bisexuality, adultery, prostitution, sadomasochism, and female desire in a number of different English-language translations and adaptations of the Recherche. Over the course of my projects, I aim to assert the importance of the comparative study of translation in examining how ideas about sexuality and taboo are formed through culture and language, as the impact of social context inevitably becomes clear through the differences between original text and translation. Additionally, I intend for my project to have contemporary cultural relevance by asking broader questions about how and why texts are published, and how language and culture shapes the way we communicate.