Le Temps de Proust:
About reading In Search of Lost Time, associated Proust criticism, and other secondary literature.

During the 20th century there was only one version of Proust’s novel in English, which was started by C. K. Moncrieff and from which Swann’s Way was published in 1922, while Proust was still alive. Moncrieff went on to translate all but the final volume of the novel, which was completed, after his death, by Frederick Blossom.

After Moncrieff’s death, Terence Kilmartin published a revision of the Moncrieff translation, basing his work on a corrected French edition. Kilmartin excised emandations made by Moncrieff, tightened some of his prose, and generally cleaned up the translation. In 1992 after the 1987 publication of the definitive Pléiade edition of Proust overseen Jean-Yves Tadie, D. J. Enright further revised the Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation (and changed the name, for the better, from Remembrance of Things Past to In Search of Lost Time). Despite the revisions, however, the translation is essentially Moncrieff’s, and his work has formed the basis for the English language reception of most of Proust’s novel. (There was a translation of Swann’s Way published in 1982 by James Grieve, an Australian translator and the translator of In The Shadow of Young Girls in Flower in the present Viking edition, which is impressionistic and confined to Proust’s first volume.)

In the 1990s Penguin Press, aided by the entry of In Search of Lost Time into the public domain, made arrangements to have each volume translated by a different translator. The idea behind the project, overseen by Christopher Prendergast, was to present a wholly new translation of Proust that both acknowledged the latest Proust scholarship and avoided the English embellishments that had been introduced by Moncrieff. These new translations came out as a set in the United Kingdom in 2002, but were issued separately in the United States. It was only after several of the volumes had been issued in the US that it was acknowledged that due to the recent, inane, extensions of authorial copyright (sometimes known as the Mickey Mouse Law), the final two volumes would not be issued in the United States until substantially later in this decade. [See this Slate article from March 2005, which I just found (Sept 26, 05) for information on the problems with publication.]

For people interested in obtaining Proust’s entire novel in the new Penguin translations, the complete edition is available from the UK. If, as is my case, you bought the American hardcovers as they were issued, only to be left without the final volumes, you may be able to get copies of the British hardcovers from England. They will not be the same size as the American edition. Remainders have been available (I ordered mine at the end of August 2005, from PostScript Books. The catalog number for The Prisoner/The Fugitive (bound as one volume) is 30109, and for Finding Time Again the number is 30110. The books cost £4.99 each, and there is a reasonable charge for shipping. Thanks to Dan Ford’s Reading Proust site for the information.