I’d go to sleep, and sometimes I’d have just a moment’s stirring, time enough to hear the woodwork creak, organic, to open my eyes and steady the kaleidoscopic dark, to taste in a flicker of consciousness the sleep that swallowed the furniture, the room itself, the Everything, of which I was a tiny part and whose senseless state I’d soon rejoin. Or while sleeping I had found, without seeking, an age forever lost from my primitive life, rediscovered my infantile terrors, like when my grand uncle would jerk me by my curls, a terror that evaporated one day when – for me the birth of a new era – they were cut off. I’d forgotten this event while deep asleep, I’d met the memory again just as I managed to wake myself to escape the hands of my great uncle, but out of caution I wrapped my head completely with my pillow before returning to the world of dreams.
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Je me rendormais, et parfois je n’avais plus que de courts réveils d’un instant, le temps d’entendre les craquements organiques des boiseries, d’ouvrir les yeux pour fixer le kaléidoscope de l’obscurité, de goûter grâce à une lueur momentanée de conscience le sommeil où étaient plongés les meubles, la chambre, le tout dont je n’étais qu’une petite partie et à l’insensibilité duquel je retournais vite m’unir. Ou bien en dormant j’avais rejoint sans effort un âge à jamais révolu de ma vie primitive, retrouvé telle de mes terreurs enfantines comme celle que mon grand-oncle me tirât par mes boucles et qu’avait dissipée le jour,—date pour moi d’une ère nouvelle,—où on les avait coupées. J’avais oublié cet événement pendant mon sommeil, j’en retrouvais le souvenir aussitôt que j’avais réussi à m’éveiller pour échapper aux mains de mon grand-oncle, mais par mesure de précaution j’entourais complètement ma tête de mon oreiller avant de retourner dans le monde des rêves.
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N o t e s
To hear the woodwork … tiny part. I played with syntax, parts of speech, and connecting elements here to convey more of the sound and feeling of the French. A transliteral rendering would be: “to hear the organic creaks of the woodwork, to open my eyes to stabilize the kaleidoscope of the darkness, to taste, thanks to a momentary flicker of consciousness, the sleep where would be plunged the furniture, the room, the everything of which I was only a small part.”
The Everything. This is an admittedly antiquated use of initial cap to denote the special use of a term. Proust’s le tout doesn’t signify as easily in English as in French. I’ll turn to this solution again in upcoming paragraphs. The copyeditor in me would possibly disapprove, but I’m not asking her to weigh in (yet).