The Poetry in the Art
Gate of Lilacs: A Verse Commentary on Proust
by Clive James
Picador, 2016, 75 pages, $29.99
At first glance Gate of Lilacs might seem a self-indulgence. Fifty pages of blank verse by a sick man about a notoriously long magnum opus by another, more-lengthily, sick man may seem a bit daunting. Our “Boy from Kogarah” (aka Clive James, the polymath) and Marcel Proust (“that droopy, wheezing dweeb”, according to Clive) are an unlikely pair. For most readers, however, whether or not they are familiar with Proust’s multi-volume masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu, James’s Gate of Lilacs will be a consistently interesting and often moving experience.
James claims to have learned French by reading the whole of Proust in the Livre de Poche original with the aid of a dictionary over some fifteen years. He has also read the English translations, particularly the early, and famous, Scott Moncrieff version.
As he read he also made notes in the end-papers and it is from…
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