His most artificial creations

Overshadowed by the tall trees which stood close around it, an ornamental pond had been dug by Swann's parents; but, even in his most artificial creations, nature is the material upon which man has to work...


A few interesting things here. First, the grammar is wrong--and I of course can't tell if that's the fault of the author or the translator. I'm guessing the author. (I should at some point look this up in the newer, Enright translation; as noted earlier, I'm using the Kilmartin for the first two books.) And the grammar mistake throws off the reader, rendering the author's point a bit more initially cryptic, a bit more to slog through. The mistake is putting the word "nature" after the comma, resulting in a misplaced pronoun: the phrase "even in his most artificial creations" refers to "man," not "nature." Proust might have more clearly written "even in man's most artificial creations, nature is the material upon which he has to work."

And yet that way also seems not quite right. Either that or I've gotten used to Proust's roundabout ways of expressing thoughts, to the point where the roundaboutedness may indeed be part of the thought, may add some ineffable insight to that being expressed merely words.

The last interesting thing about this sentence fragment is that it goes on and on from there; the rest of the paragraph expands upon this thought in an increasingly dense way. He might have merely stopped at "has to work," instead of placing a semi-colon there and going on. And yet then it would not be Proustian. I'll look at the rest of the passage next time. The only way I can absorb some of this stuff is in small doses.