M. Swann, Imprisoned By Sonny Bono
Posted by Paul Musgrave on 3 March 2005 | 4 responses
J. Bradford DeLong mentions that the final three volumes of the new, and by all accounts superior, translations of Proust’s A la recherche de temps perdu can’t be released in the United States until 2018 under the terms of the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension and Consumer-Exploiting Act. (Actually, that may not be the Act’s real title. But it did involve both.)
Elsewhere, Timothy Burke notices another blow to high culture thanks to information property walls.
4 Responses to “M. Swann, Imprisoned By Sonny Bono”
I always refer to it as the Mickey Mouse Copyright Protection Act, since the first period in which copyrights are greatly extended under this law just happens to be when Steamboat Willie came out, thus preventing Mickey from going into public domain. Coincidentally, I’m sure.
Disney didn’t even deny backing that bill heavily with its full lobbying arm. Nothing overtly shady with that, other than congress extending copyrights for a company that made a large chunk of its money off of public domain works and a character for which they dont even have proper ownership.
Which version are we talking about? Don’t know about copyright law, but can ease your woes if you mean the recent Penguin version with multiple translators.
It’s available in the UK of course.
The (revised) Moncrieff seemed to me to be much better. When starting out on the new one, I promised myself I wouldn’t attempt any comparative textual analysis, so I can’t give any examples. My view remains, however, that in Moncrieff as the translator of Proust English literature found the most extraordinary beneficence. The achievement is not likely to be replicable. As a contemporary, Moncrieff’s English had the tone of the era.
Oh dear. I’ve never read Proust in English.
I understand that Poe is even better in French, however: Baudelaire did the definitive translations, which I have yet to read.