What’s the best translation of In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past)? (Post 1)

Who was C.K. Scott Moncrieff?

Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff, surname “Scott Moncrieff”, was a Scottish writer, translator, and poet. He knew Scots, English, French, Italian, German, Latin, and ancient Greek (!!!). He died at age 40 without having finished his translation of Proust’s novel.

Jean Findlay, his great-great-niece, published a biography of him titled Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C. K. Scott Moncrieff: Soldier, Spy, and Translator  and a volume of his writings titled ANT: Collected Short Stories, War Serials, and Selected Poems of C.K. Scott Moncrieff.

Who was Stephen Hudson (Sydney Schiff)?

Sydney Schiff was a British novelist and translator who wrote under the pseudonym ‘Stephen Hudson.’ He was friends with Proust.

Wikipedia: “Stephen Hudson”
“Schiff’s novels are now almost entirely forgotten; but his and his wife’s significance as key figures of early Modernism, both as friends and facilitators to several major artists and writers, has recently been reassessed by Stephen Klaidman in a joint biography of the couple, Sydney and Violet: Their Life with T.S. Eliot, Proust, Joyce and the Excruciatingly Irascible Wyndham Lewis (2013).”

Who was Frederick Blossom?

Frederick A. Blossom was the American professor, editor, author, translator, and activist who was commissioned by Random House to translate volume 7. His translation is out of print.

» More about Frederick Blossom from the University of Wisconsin Digital Archive

» NYT Obituary of Frederick Blossom

About the Scott Moncrieff translation of In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past)

Scott Moncrieff started his translation before Proust had finished writing all seven volumes.

Volume titles:

1. Swann’s Way
2. Within a Budding Grove
3. The Guermantes Way
4. Cities of the Plain
5. The Captive
6. The Sweet Cheat Gone
7. Time Regained

Bookforum: “Review of Swann Songs: A new biography of translator C. K. Scott Moncrieff” by Eric Banks
“[Moncrieff] carried on with his own private translation without any commitment from a publishing house to back it up…. [Faults in his translation include] his sometimes purple prose (which Lydia Davis has called “dressy”), his reliance on faulty source materials, and the downright muddled passages in which he, perhaps out of sheer fatigue with the project, lost track of the narrative…. But as Jean Findlay reminds us in her new biography Chasing Lost Time, the fact that the second (and only other) English translation of Proust relied on seven translators (including Davis)—it being considered ‘beyond the capability of one single person to translate Proust’—only underscores how superhuman was the devotion and drive of Scott Moncrieff.”

Public Domain Review: “Lost in Translation: Proust and Scott Moncrieff” by William C. Carter
“Scott Moncrieff died in 1930, at age forty, leaving untranslated the final volume Le Temps Retrouvé. His task would be completed by Sydney Schiff, writing as Stephen Hudson. Schiff dedicated his translation: ‘To the memory of my friend CHARLES SCOTT MONCRIEFF, Marcel Proust’s incomparable translator.’”

FSG Work in Progress: “Soldier, Spy, Translator: The Life of C.K. Scott Moncrieff” by Jean Findlay
“So inspired was his translation that some critics felt he was improving on the original. Joseph Conrad wrote to him in 1922: ‘I was much more interested and fascinated by your rendering than by Proust’s creation. One has revealed to me something and there is no revelation in the other… [You have] a supreme faculty akin to genius…’ The Scott Moncrieff translation is widely seen as a literary masterpiece in its own right, and he is considered one of the great translators into English of the twentieth century….. Conscious of his task of selling Proust to the English-speaking world, he did not make an exact literal translation but a poetic one—one he knew would appeal to the post-Edwardian public—and one that has been the subject of appreciation and controversy ever since.”

New York Times: “Proust Re-Englished” by Richard Howard
“The Scott Moncrieff translation, based on the muddled and incomplete text which was all he had to work from, is embalmed among us as – well, semi-classical. (One recalls E.M. Forster’s praise of it in ”Aspects of the Novel.”) I disagree with this widespread but careless approval, and would seek out any excuse to dislodge the thing from such status. The text is frequently erroneous, almost always at odds with the temper of Proust’s prose: Where the original is infallibly immediate and alive, Scott Moncrieff sounds, to me, stale and dated.”

The Guardian: “The perfect Proust translation – but not for purists” by Jean Findlay
“The first volumes of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu were printed with quantities of typesetter errors; Proust’s elliptical sentences were hard to follow and his handwritten annotations on top of the typescript indecipherable in places. Scott Moncrieff not only understood Proust on a personal and cultural level, he had also worked in a newspaper office and knew how typesetter errors occurred. Despite having no access to the original manuscript, Scott Moncrieff had to be both the translator and, in many cases, the interpreter, using guesswork and intuition to find the right word or probable meaning. Nor did Scott Moncrieff have the time for slavish dedication to accuracy. He took on an enormous workload, including translations of Stendhal, Abelard and Heloise, and Pirandello, so as to feed “nine hungry nephews and nieces”. With one brother dead and the other improvident, he provided for their education and medicine…. [I]f you want to read the Proust that Proust saw published, that influenced Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, that is all of one piece and interpreted by someone as close to Proust’s sensibilities, education and experience as you can get, then you must read the Scott Moncrieff translation.”

Grand Street: “Translating Proust” by Terence Kilmartin
Kilmartin says Scott Moncrieff’s work was hampered by several disadvantages. For one thing, the first volume of his English translation was published before the last volume was published in France. “The complexities of the opening pages of the novel are especially difficult to decipher without the hindsight provided by the later volumes.” Another disadvantage was the “faultiness” of the French texts Scott Moncrieff had to work with. But also: “Scott Moncrieff’s knowledge of French was far from perfect. There is evidence of this throughout the novel—signs of haziness and uncertainty that in a less ingenious and resourceful translator would have been crippling. Time and again he fails to recognize quite ordinary set expressions. One finds him translating literally when English equivalents could and should have been found. We have, for instance, the Duc de Guermantes telling Swann that he is ‘as strong as the Pont Neuf’ instead of ‘as sound as a bell.’ … [C]areless or ignorant misreadings can sometimes distort the meaning of a whole passage or even make Proust say the opposite of what he intends…. When all this is said, however, it is extraordinary how successful Scott Moncrieff was…. [he] tried as a rule to stay as close as possible to the French text.”

Oxford University Press Blog: “Translating Proust Again” by Brian Nelson
“This translation was monumental in its scale and in many ways admirable in its realization. Moncrieff had a fine ear for the cadences of Proust’s prose, and a considerable talent for elegant phrasing. But his language dated over time, especially in dialogue, and from the beginning he was prone to tamper with the text, through embellishment or the heightening of language. The reservation most commonly voiced about his translation, indeed, is that it changed Proust’s tone. He tended to make Proust sound precious and flowery, whereas Proust’s style is not in the least affected or ornate. His prose is precise, rigorous, exact.”

Translation and Literature: “Scott Moncrieff s First Translation” by Peter France
“Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff (1889-1930) is one of the most visible of English-language translators. His virtually single-handed translation of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, done in a mere eight years from 1921 to 1929, probably had almost as great an impact on English-speaking culture as Constance Garnetťs work on the Russian novel. It has been criticized (as inaccurate, too flowery, dated, etc.) and twice revised, but it survives to compete effectively with the more recent six-handed Penguin version.”

Boston Review: “Style over Substance: On Translating Proust” by Leland de la Durantaye
“There is always a tension in translation between the spirit and the letter, between conveying things we might call tone, mood, feel, or music, and being as literally faithful to the original as possible. Moncrieff excelled at both. He created a rich and recognizable style that became, for English readers, Proust. Because the translation was the only one in existence for so very long, it naturally became closely intertwined with the fate of the work in the English-speaking world…. Moncrieff gave the book’s opening section the heading ‘Overture.’ If we turn to the other translations we find no such heading…. This is not a sign that Moncrieff was a poor translator, but it is a sign that he was a very free one, ready and willing to depart from Proust’s text where he deemed it desirable.”

New York Times: “The Shape of Time” by Peter Brooks
“Scott Moncrieff may be pardoned for thinking of the early parts of the novel as a kind of series of tone poems, along with some purplish passages, which were his forte. What he couldn’t know was the rigorous architecture of the novel as a whole.”

The New York Review: “Kilmartin’s Way” by Roger Shattuck
“[T]he ‘old’ translation (unretouched Moncrieff followed by either Blossom or Mayor) works remarkably well. You need not throw away the edition in which you have read Proust, or still hope  to read him, in the hope of obtaining the real thing that has been unavailable all these years. Moncrieff was a pro with staying power.”

From the Note on the Translation by Terence Kilmartin in the Scott Moncrieff / Kilmartin edition:
“A general criticism that might be levelled against Scott Moncrieff is that his prose tends to the purple and the precious—or that this is how he interpreted the tone of the original…. [I]n his efforts to reproduce the structure of those elaborate sentences with their spiralling subordinate clauses, not only does he sometimes lose the thread but he wrenches his syntax into oddly un-English shapes: a whiff of Gallicism clings to some of the longer periods, obscuring the sense and falsifying the tone. A corollary to this is a tendency to translate French idioms and turns of phrase literally, thus making them sound weirder, more outlandish, than they would to a French reader.”

From the Note by D. J. Enright on his revised translation:
“C. K. Scott Moncrieff excelled in description, notably of landscape and architecture, but he was less adroit in translating dialogue of an informal, idiomatic nature…. And some further intervention was prompted by Scott’ Moncrieff’s tendency to spell out things for the benefit of the English reader: an admirable intention (shared by Arthur Waley in his Tale of Genji), though the effect could be to clog Proust’s flow and make his drift harder to follow.”

From the General Editor’s Preface by Christopher Prendergast:
“There was indeed much to be corrected in Scott Moncrieff, on a scale from the trivial to the egregious.”

From the Translator’s Introduction by Lydia Davis to the Penguin translation:
“Much as one may argue with the specifics of Moncrieff’s decisions, however, his monumental work remains the standard by which all succeeding translations of Proust will be judged. Within the limitations of his approach, which was in part conditioned by his time and cultural milieu, Moncrieff’s ambition, to remain faithful to the shape of the Proustian sentence and the order in which it unfolded, and to create a rhythmic, coherent, eloquent text in English, was impressively fulfilled in Swann’s Way. His ear was for the most part sensitive, his handling of the language adroit, his mistakes in interpretation relatively few, given the sheer number of pages he translated.”

From the introduction by William C. Carter to his revision of the Scott Moncrieff translation:
“Part of the reason for the book’s success is Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff’s extraordinarily fine English translation of the first six parts, generally regarded as the best rendering of any foreign work into the English language…. Harold Bloom observes that Scott Moncrieff made it possible for In Search of Lost Time to become ‘widely recognized as the major novel of the twentieth century.’”

Extract from the Scott Moncrieff translation of In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past)

Who was Terence Kilmartin?

Terrence ‘Terry’ Kevin Kilmartin was a translator and the literary editor of The Observer. He was born in Ireland and moved to England as a child. In addition to reworking Remembrance of Things Past, he compiled A Guide to Proust (originally published in 1983, now out of print but included in some versions of the novel—see below).

» An address read at the memorial service for Terence Kilmartin

About the Kilmartin version of Remembrance of Things Past

Kilmartin’s version is an edit of Scott Moncrieff’s existing English translation, except that Volume 7 was translated from French by Andreas Mayor in 1970.

Grand Street: “Translating Proust” by Terence Kilmartin
“Roger Shattuck…rebuked me very severely for failing to change the overall title…. I was indeed in favor of such a change, but allowed myself to be overruled by the publishers. I do not find it quite such a crucial issue as Shattuck and others do. Still, on balance I would have preferred to re-christen the novel In Search of Lost Time, even though the English phrase lacks the specific gravity of the French and misses the double meaning of temps perdu: time “wasted,” as well as “lost.”

This version includes a note on the translation, explanatory endnotes in each volume, addenda, and synopses.

Volume titles:

1. Swann’s Way
2. Within a Budding Grove
3. The Guermantes Way
4. Cities of the Plain
5. The Captive
6. The Fugitive
7. Time Regained

From the “Note on the Translation” by Kilmartin:
He says that the French edition Scott Moncrieff was using was “notoriously imperfect” as a result of “Proust’s methods of composition,” which were chaotic and resulted in published books plagued by “errors, misreadings and omissions.” In 1954, the painstakingly revised and “virtually impeccable” Pleiade edition was published (in French). The differences are “sometimes considerable.” His version thus updates Moncrieff’s text to match the revised French source. He includes volume 7 as translated by Andreas Mayor, who was working with the revised French source. Kilmartin also corrects some mistakes in Scott Moncrieff’s translation, even making “extensive alterations”, but avoiding “officious tinkering.”

The Guardian: “The perfect Proust translation – but not for purists” by Jean Findlay
“After Proust died his brother Robert, a medical doctor, who himself died 13 years later, and Proust’s publishers, Gallimard, began work on a new version. It brought together all the notes they had found among the manuscripts. Proust would insert pieces of paper by way of revisions, and these gummed-on “paperoles” would often fall off. Gallimard and Robert Proust painstakingly reinserted these bits of sentences where they thought they ought to be. The result was an even longer novel: they added 300,000 words to the original 12 volumes. This “definitive version” was published by Gallimard in the 1950s, and reworked into Scott Moncrieff’s translation in the 1980s by Terence Kilmartin.”

From the General Editor’s Preface by Christopher Prendergast:
“Readers of Proust in English translation have been well served, above all by two truly heroic figures: first, C. K. Scott Moncrieff, and subsequently, Terrence Kilmartin. In relation to his own predecessor, Kilmartin… modestly billed his own effort as a ‘revision’ of Scott Moncrieff’s majestic, if in certain respects flawed, production…. [In terms of style,] Kilmartin’s description of his project as a ‘revision’ was excessively modest. It is in fact in very many ways a rewriting based on a quite different conception of the language and style of the novel as a whole.” Prendergast says Kilmartin’s goal was not to foreignize but to naturalize the language of the translation “to create for the reader the sense that he or she is reading a text as if it had been ‘originally’ written in the guest language.”

New York Times: “Proust Re-Englished” by Richard Howard
“Within the limits of his corrective enterprise, Mr. Kilmartin has done a conscientious and illuminating job. I can barely imagine the skills – beyond the dreams of dentistry – which such a labor of reconstruction must have demanded…. Major and minor, Mr. Kilmartin’s revisions occur almost sentence by sentence, always with great pertinacity…. He also offers at the end of each huge volume a valuable thematic synopsis, as well as a limited but extremely useful series of notes to explain literary and historical references -and inconsistencies – which occur throughout the text. Thirty notes for each thousand pages of a work published half a century ago is a modest enough apparatus, but an immediately helpful one, and I believe all new readers of Proust in English are in an inestimably advantageous position compared with their predecessors.”

The New York Review: “Kilmartin’s Way” by Roger Shattuck
“Definitive it is not. Vastly improved, yes. I take my hat off to Kilmartin for accepting the thankless task of cleaning up after a great translator, knowing that he would have to take the blame for all remaining weaknesses and would receive little credit for his contributions.”

Grand Street: “Translating Proust” by Terence Kilmartin
“[I]t was only the impending expiry of the Scott Moncrieff copyright that persuaded the publishers to initiate a revision of the entire text. I approached the task with some trepidation. On the one hand, I was warned that my tinkering would be regarded as lese-majeste if not sacrilege. On the other, I knew there were extremists who considered that nothing less than a complete re-translation could ever do proper justice to Proust…. As I worked my way through [Scott Moncrieff’s] text, I found myself alternating between delighted admiration of his elegant fluency and exasperation with his clumsy fallibility, his bowdlerising, archaising, prettifying.”

The New York Review: “Kilmartin’s Way” by Roger Shattuck
“Kilmartin’s ‘fix’ of Moncrieff has not caused deterioration or breakdown…. He was wise enough not to tinker idly and to keep repairs to a minimum. Kilmartin peered at or listened to every line of The Search. Small readjustments turn up everywhere, not just in sudden clusters.”

On the Translation of Volume 7 (Time Regained) by Andreas Mayor:

The Paris Review: “I have I Have Gone to Bed Early: Translating Proust” By Dan Piepenbring
Richard Howard said, regarding Mayor’s volume 7: “It was so good that there were plans to commission Mayor to do all the preceding parts, but then he died too.”

The New York Review: “Kilmartin’s Way” by Roger Shattuck
“Mayor, having displaced his rivals, also prepared notes for the revision of all Moncrieff’s version. He died before he could do the work. Using Mayor’s notes as well as comments garnered from critics who had discussed the translation, Kilmartin revised everything except Mayor’s version of the last volume…. Since its appearance a decade ago, Andreas Mayor’s translation of Time Regained has been judged the only one of the three to match Moncrieff’s sustained performance.

Reading Proust: Finding by Stephen Fall
“Random House commisioned [sic] a new version by Frederick Blossom under the title of The Past Recaptured. It was Prof. Blossom’s version that I read and reread many years ago, and I wouldn’t wish it upon anyone. Sydney Schiff’s translation apparently wasn’t highly regarded, either, for an entirely new translation by Andreas Mayor was commissioned and published in 1970. It is basically Mayor’s prose that appears in the Modern Library edition today, lightly edited by Kilmartin and Enright. There are wildly varying opinions of Mayor’s Time Regained, whether he restored Proust from Schiff’s depredations, or whether his work was a depredation in its own right.”

Bookforum: “Ruminations in an Emergency: A New Translation of Proust’s Late Masterpiece” by Rebecca Ariel Porte
To solve the conundrum of Time Regained, the Modern Library editors chose to use the work of Andreas Mayor, which was based on the 1954 Pléiade edition of the novel and often colored by Mayor’s heavy editorial hand, which tended to omit in places and, like Moncrieff’s translation, elaborate on or simplify Proust’s work according to its own standards.

Extract from the Kilmartin version of Remembrance of Things Past

Who was D.J. Enright?

Dennis Joseph Enright was a British “Man of Letters.”

» More about DJ Enright at the British Council

About the Enright version of In Search of Lost Time

Enright’s version is an edit of Kilmartin’s version of Scott Moncrieff’s existing English translation (not a new translation from French). The title page of the current Modern Library edition says “Translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright.”

The title was updated to In Search of Lost Time for the first time.

Volume titles:

1. Swann’s Way
2. Within a Budding Grove
3. The Guermantes Way
4. Sodom and Gomorrah
5. The Captive and The Fugitive
6. Time Regained + A Guide to Proust

The introduction by Richard Howard in volume 1 introduces new readers to Proust and Proust to his new readers, addressing both, in turn, as ‘you’. (I find this a bit strange.)

Volume 6 contains “A Guide to Proust” compiled by Terence Kilmartin and revised by Joanna Kilmartin. The guide contains a foreword and indexes of characters, persons, places, and themes. This guide was also previously published in 1983 as “A Reader’s Guide to the Remembrance of Things Past.”

Each volume contains a biographical note, notes on the translation, a synopsis, and endnotes. Sometimes there are textual addenda.

From the “Note on the Translation” by Terence Kilmartin:
He says that the French edition Scott Moncrieff was using was “notoriously imperfect” as a result of “Proust’s methods of composition,” which were chaotic and resulted in published books plagued by “errors, misreadings and omissions.” In 1954, the painstakingly revised and “virtually impeccable” Pleiade edition was published (in French). The differences are “sometimes considerable.” His version thus updates Moncrieff’s text to match the revised French source. He includes volume 7 as translated by Andreas Mayor, who was working with the revised French source. Kilmartin also corrects some mistakes in Scott Moncrieff’s translation, even making “extensive alterations”, but avoiding “officious tinkering.”

From the Note by D. J. Enright on the Revised Translation:
“The present revision or re-revision has taken into account the second Pleiade edition…. [which] clears up some long-standing misreadings.”

From the General Editor’s Preface by Christopher Prendergast to the Penguin translation:
“Kilmartin had the advantage of working from the far more reliable 1954 Pleiade edition…. [The] 1987 Pleiade edition… formed the basis of a further projected revision by Kilmartin, which, owing to ill-health, he passed on to D.J. Enright (Enright calls it a ‘re-revision’).”

Blurb by Richard Howard
“[T]his ultimate revision of the primary version affords the surest sled over the ice fields as well as the most sinuous surfboard over the breakers of Proustian prose, an invaluable and inescapable text.”

The Guardian: “Reviving the dread deity” by Paul Davis
“[T]he only previous translation of the novel into English, by CK Scott Moncrieff, showered Proust’s text in “cascades of Edwardian purple prose”, some but not all of them staunched by Terence Kilmartin and DJ Enright in the “fully revised” version now reissued by Vintage to compete with [the Penguin translation]…. For those without French considering setting out on the Proustian journey, the Moncrieff/ Kilmartin/Enright translation, remains, in my view, the best available reading text.”

Independent: “Forever in search of lost truth: Gabriel Josipovici on the problems of translating Proust, and the new revision by D J Enright”
“Enright’s hand has wisely been extremely light, for Kilmartin had, by and large, done an excellent job. He had corrected most of Moncrieff’s blunders… and had generally tried to make the tone as colloquial as that of the originals…. There are places, though, where Kilmartin has failed to spot a lapse by Scott Moncrieff and Enright has not acted either…. There are also places where Kilmartin seems to have gone more wrong than his predecessor, and where Enright has still let things stand…. It is of course easy for a reviewer to carp. Enright has had a go at the well-nigh impossible closing sentence of the novel and has not, to my mind, done any better with it than his predecessors; on the other hand, there are here and there many tiny touches where, like Kilmartin before him, he has helped make the translation more colloquial, flexible and in tune with the great original.”

The Yale Review: “Loaf or Hot-Water Bottle: Closely Translating Proust” by Lydia Davis
“[N]either Kilmartin nor Enright – as far as I can see from a number of close comparisons along the way – was as good a stylist as Moncrieff, so that although the latest version is undoubtedly more correct than Moncrieff’s, the newly rendered passages are not always up to the standard of the original translation. The text throughout could also be brought much closer to the French. There is still a great deal of “padding” in the revised versions. Not all the archaicisms have been eradicated – you will still come upon such expressions as “I bethought myself” – and not all the mistakes have been corrected.”

Extract from the Enright version of In Search of Lost Time

What’s in Post 2?

• Translations by the Penguin team, a revision of the Scott Moncrieff translation by William C. Carter, and a new translation by Brian Nelson edited by Adam Watt.
• Other information and resources (guides and biographies).

If you just want a quick-and-dirty recommendation on which translation to choose, jump to the Conclusion of Post 2.

Go to the start of Post 2

What do you think of the Scott Moncrieff translation? Unparalleled classic, or time to move on? Let us know in the comments!