A complete German translation of Marcel Proust’s ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’, originally published in French between 1913 and 1927, was not completed until the end of the 1950s, following various false starts, unforeseeable hitches, and changes of circumstance on the part of publishers and translators alike. Reconstructing the upheavals of this translation history, this talk draws on unpublished archival material held at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv to consider the formative role of ‘der deutsche Proust’ in postwar German literary culture.

 

Ian Ellison is a DAAD PRIME post-doctoral fellow at the University of Kent and the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. He holds an MPhil from Bristol and a PhD, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, from the University of Leeds. He was previously a post-doctoral researcher at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach. His book, 'Late Europeans and Melancholy Fiction at the Turn of the Millennium', was published by Palgrave Macmillan earlier this year.