portrait of Marcel Proust (1895)
At the key turning point in Proust's life and career, he translated two books by John Ruskin, The Bible of Amiens and Sesame and Lilies -- Ruskin's first book-length translations into French. The philosophy of translation that he developed in the process, his practice writing Ruskin's glorious prose in French, and his adoption of and reaction against the specific concept of reading that Ruskin lays out in "Of Kings' Treasuries," the "Sesame" lecture of Sesame and Lilies, transformed Proust's writing and laid the groundwork for his great novel Remembrance of Things Past. Searls, who has translated Proust's introductions and notes to Ruskin and published them for the first time in English together with Ruskin's full text, will discuss the biographical background to this project of Proust's, what he took from it about reading and translation, and how the vast world of Ruskin's body of work inspired Proust's own.
Damion Searls has translated more than forty books from German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch, including a translation of Proust's On Reading Ruskin published together with the essay by Ruskin that Proust was translating and annotating. Searls has received writing and translating awards including a Guggenheim, Cullman Center, and NEA Fellowships; the major English and American German-to-English translation prizes; and the Federal Order of Merit from the German government. He abridged Henry David Thoreau's The Journal for New York Review Books Classics; his own work includes poetry in The Paris Review, a book of short stories, a history of the Rorschach test and biography of its creator that has been translated into ten languages, and a forthcoming book called The Philosophy of Translation.