Bryan Alistair Charles
@bryanacharles.bsky.social
Writer in midst of disorienting midlife free fall / Author of a novel, a memoir, and a book about Pavement written for 33 1/3 / Broken Hearts Are Blue guitarist / Amateur Proust scholar bryanalistaircharles.com
The other night I semirandomly selected TOKYO STORY on Criterion Channel & now am hooked on Ozu's films, which I had never seen (C. Channel has a bunch). Last night I watched LATE SPRING, again featuring the mesmerizing Setsuko Hara whose smile can convey 1000 different thoughts and feelings
Always a delight when "Céleste Albaret" appears in The Search. *no one* in the whole of the novel talks to the narrator the way she does: "...lucky for you that those who created you made sure you were born rich...I've never seen such a clumsy oaf...Poor little ploumissou!" 😂 ❤️ #Proust
Excellent piece in the Financial Times by @joshspero.ft.com. Featuring an appearance by la traductrice géniale @avecsesdoigts.bsky.social. Welcome to the club, Josh I am pretty much always reading The Search and maybe it will be the same for you! giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...
Proust in the age of TikTok
The French writer’s seven-volume magnum opus was a challenging choice for a book club — but its evocation of the human psyche makes essential reading for our times
giftarticle.ft.com
History of translation of a single key line in The Search: "Bouleversement de toute ma personne." #Proust "Complete physical collapse." Moncrieff "Disruption of my entire being." Moncrieff/Kilmartin "Upheaval of my entire being." Moncrieff/Kilmartin/Enright Moncrieff/Carter
New short story from me. In which The Narrator wanders through a broiling Midwestern underworld one night in the long ago summer of 1993 www.bloodhoneylit.com/fiction/the-...
the wanderer — Blood+Honey
by Bryan Charles “The night, the music, the moment—Everything slipping away—My curse: always lamenting the inevitable end of whatever moment I am in—The days running away from me, the years—I am for...
bloodhoneylit.com
Très fan de cette affiche pour la nouvelle restauration 4K de Manhunter de Michael Mann
Excellent (short) life of Proust. Especially good, given the brevity, on the Dreyfus Affair and war years. #Proust
"The main part of a translation is giving it the music in English—not the same music—but whatever flow, whatever music it had in the original language. [...] I honestly don’t know if machines will ever do that. But there are plenty of humans who aren’t that good at it either."
Can ChatGPT Produce a Version of Proust Worth Reading?
“The part of ourselves that matters, when it matters, is outside time… Think of yourself simply as an instrument capable of whatever experiments in beauty or truth you wish to perform, and yo…
lithub.com
Reading this made me want to just stare out the window in quiet, resigned despair. If the ones *teaching* translation just shrug and hop on board, what future can there be for those of us who think translation actually has value as creative expression? And I only translate "popcorn" fiction!
Bryan Alistair Charles@bryanacharles.bsky.social · 4w agoSorry to drop in with a link of my own, but speaking of OUP, I wrote about AI/tech use in literary translation, specifically in a volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time forthcoming from OUP! I would love to know your thoughts on tech in translation. lithub.com/can-chatgpt-...
As well as being Proust's birthday, today is also Saul Bellow's birthday-- The Adventures of Augie March was a life-changing book for me at the age of 13. I wrote him a fan letter from France which he never answered :(
"I may be dead from the neck up, but cudgel my brains as I may, I fail to understand why a man needs thirty pages to describe how he tosses and turns in bed before falling asleep." --Paul Ollendorff reader's report rejecting Swann's Way #Proust
"712-page manuscript...one has no notion--none--of what it is about. What is it all for? What does it all mean? Where is it all leading?--It's impossible to know! It's impossible to say!" --Fasquelle reader's report rejecting Swann's Way #Proust
Always so electric in Proust bios when Marcel finally begins writing LA RECHERCHE! "..the bedside table of this seemingly unproductive lightweight and sleeper-in groaned with the notebooks of a masterwork that was to challenge the novel as decisively as Stravinsky had challenged music.."
“Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.” -Marcel Proust #BOTD
Such a good reflection this. I've actually always wondered to what degree translators of not just Proust but say Kafka compare their work line-by-line to previous translators? If they do, having them on screen to compare is doubtless useful!
Bryan Alistair Charles@bryanacharles.bsky.social · 4w agoI wrote about AI use in literary--specifically Proust--translation for @literaryhub.bsky.social. Featuring interviews with translators Andrew Rothwell and Sam Taylor. lithub.com/can-chatgpt-... #proust #booksky
Hitching a ride on this excellent, thoughtful article because it coincides with a puzzling research rabbit-hole I've recently fallen down: Is anyone on here knowledgeable on the life of Proust's first English translator, C. K. Scott Moncrieff? If so, I have questions prompted by archival digging...
Bryan Alistair Charles@bryanacharles.bsky.social · 4w agoI wrote about AI use in literary--specifically Proust--translation for @literaryhub.bsky.social. Featuring interviews with translators Andrew Rothwell and Sam Taylor. lithub.com/can-chatgpt-... #proust #booksky
Indredible thread, almost a supplementary essay, by my fellow Proustian @insearchofproust.bsky.social.
Robert de Saint-Loup@insearchofproust.bsky.social · 4w agoA probing article from @bryanacharles.bsky.social. Long thread incoming. References are to the Oxford Proust. Sodom and Gomorrah just came out and Bryan writes about The Captive. (1/x)
Not to cherry pick something controversial in an otherwise even-handed piece, but... 🤔
Bryan Alistair Charles@bryanacharles.bsky.social · 4w agoI wrote about AI use in literary--specifically Proust--translation for @literaryhub.bsky.social. Featuring interviews with translators Andrew Rothwell and Sam Taylor. lithub.com/can-chatgpt-... #proust #booksky
I wrote about AI use in literary--specifically Proust--translation for @literaryhub.bsky.social. Featuring interviews with translators Andrew Rothwell and Sam Taylor. lithub.com/can-chatgpt-... #proust #booksky
Can ChatGPT Produce a Version of Proust Worth Reading?
“The part of ourselves that matters, when it matters, is outside time… Think of yourself simply as an instrument capable of whatever experiments in beauty or truth you wish to perform, and yo…
lithub.com
@bryanacharles.bsky.social follows AI’s slow, steady invasion of literary translation.
Can ChatGPT Produce a Version of Proust Worth Reading?
“The part of ourselves that matters, when it matters, is outside time… Think of yourself simply as an instrument capable of whatever experiments in beauty or truth you wish to perform, and yo…
buff.ly
Watched CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT on Criterion. Really interesting. Welles is a great Falstaff. The moment when Hal turns his back on Falstaff so beautifully played-- sad to flash ahead & think of me absorbed in THE MAN WHO SAW TOMORROW campy Nostradamus doc narrated by Welles, class movie in 6th grade.
‘Marilyn’s characters could be giggly, they could play dumb, but there’s nothing dumb about her here. This is an image of a 20th-century woman in control of the means of production, with flashbulb intelligence.’ Andrew O’Hagan at the National Portrait Gallery. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Andrew O’Hagan · At the NPG: Portraits of Marilyn
Marilyn Monroe’s image, after Warhol, is still encoded with a vulnerability we instantly recognise, which makes us...
lrb.co.uk
I found this novel at European Books, Oakland. About a hairdresser in a small town whose life is changed by reading...well, you know. There is an English translation but I think my French (reading comprehension anyway) is OK for this one. And...Gallimard publishes such beautiful books! #Proust
#lastfourwatched Obsession, now Disclosure Day, now Wild Strawberries, 1957 Alice in the Cities, 1974 Alice was a rewatch, one of my favorites ever!!! Wild Strawberries I had not seen since an existentialism class fall 1993 & I loved that one too.
Just signed off on edits to a piece I wrote about AI in literary, specifically #Proust, translation. Featuring interviews with Andrew Rothwell, who translated La Prisonnière for Oxford using translation tools, and Sam Taylor, translator of The 75 Folios. look for it soon on @literaryhub.bsky.social
So many thanks to the judges of the French- American Foundation Translation Prize for choosing my translation of The Deserters by Mathias Énard! So grateful. I hope I can meet them all at the ceremony next Wednesday. frenchamerican.org/2026-transla...
