At the starting point of the great journey into the time of psychic experience, Marcel the boy was tormented by the question of whether he was gifted with literary talent. In the middle of this volume, on his third return from a sanatorium to Paris - this time to Paris after the First World War, to a world that has changed completely and is no more than a ball of masks worn by time - he is already coming to terms with the arid chapter of his life: he lacks the soul of an artist.
But precisely then, in the middle of the last volume, unexpectedly arrives, on the evening when he goes out for a social outing, a series of experiences of what-is-that, which rub a current situation in a memory that pops up involuntarily. A moment of the past invades in all its random fullness into a moment of the present, until the narrator does not know which of the two he is in. And from the tussle of the two moments, an experience of essential truth, which escapes the vicissitudes of time, becomes more and more necessary. This revelation, in which the "lost time" is found and becomes tangible for him, makes his destiny clear to him. In the last pages of the volume he felt that he was ready to begin his life's work, writing 'In the wake of the lost time'. The boy-that-was is now the man who asks on the verge of his death if he has time left and if he has the strength to write his book.
After 2800 pages of 'In the wake of the lost time' the narrator has thus become a writer, and the constant forward-backward movement of the entire cycle of novels becomes the starting point in the following pages. Readers will wonder if the book they are holding in their hands is just the grand master plan outlined by the man who dreams of becoming a writer, or if it is already the work itself; Are the previous volumes just material and bricks, or is the book itself already written in them? This closing-opening volume was first published in 1927, more than four years after Proust's death; But back in 1920, before the second half of the cycle was written, Frost discovered, in a letter, that the last page of the last volume had already been written for years; The entire end of the book was written at the same time as the first volume.
The last 180 pages of the volume are not only the highlight of all of Frost's work and the most beautiful pages he wrote. They are also the pinnacle of Halit Yeshuron's achievement, the translator. "On the threshold" between two languages and two cultures, she invents for Frost a unique Hebrew that has never been seen before, a fresh voice in which all the layers of Hebrew rub together to produce a wealth that is cleansed of all fat, and a precise contemporary vitality, far from the dull poverty. Frost's characteristic syntax "discolors" her Hebrew, but this, for her part, is an example of Frost's declaration that "the beauty of one thing is recognized in the other": she adds to the original a fascinating Hebrew adventure, which projects a new beauty on it.
'The found time', the final movement of the Proustian symphony, is a retrospective. Can it be read separately? it is possible Now (Ju2022) we are left to continue to wait for the completion of the translation of the four volumes of "The Middle", and to ask together with the translator, and with Frost, winner of the Goncourt Prize, "Do we still have time?"