In particular, MM. Clarac and Ferré have included a number of passages, sometimes of a paragraph or two, sometimes of several pages, which the original editors omitted for no good reason.

The present translation is a reworking, on the basis of the Pléiade edition, of Scott Moncrieff’s version of the first six sections of À la recherche—or the first eleven volumes of the twelve-volume English edition. A post-Pléiade version of the final volume, Le temps retrouvé (originally translated by Stephen Hudson after Scott Moncrieff’s death in 1930), was produced by the late Andreas Mayor and published in 1970; with some minor emendations, it is incorporated in this edition. There being no indication in Proust’s manuscript as to where La fugitive should end and Le temps retrouvé begin, I have followed the Pléiade editors in introducing the break some pages earlier than in the previous editions, both French and English—at the beginning of the account of the Tansonville episode.

The need to revise the existing translation in the light of the Pléiade edition has also provided an opportunity of correcting mistakes and misinterpretations in Scott Moncrieff’s version. Translation, almost by definition, is imperfect; there is always “room for improvement,” and it is only too easy for the latecomer to assume the beau rôle. I have refrained from officious tinkering for its own sake, but a translator’s loyalty is to the original author, and in trying to be faithful to Proust’s meaning and tone of voice I have been obliged, here and there, to make extensive alterations.

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: whereas the truth is that, complicated, dense, overloaded though it often is, Proust’s style is essentially natural and unaffected, quite free of preciosity, archaism or self-conscious elegance. Another pervasive weakness of Scott Moncrieff’s is perhaps the defect of a virtue. Contrary to a widely held view, he stuck very closely to the original (he is seldom guilty of short-cuts, omissions or loose paraphrases), and in 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 unEnglish 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. In endeavouring to rectify these weaknesses, I hope I have preserved the undoubted felicity of much of Scott Moncrieff while doing the fullest possible justice to Proust.

I should like to thank Professor J. G. Weightman for his generous help and advice and Mr D. J. Enright for his patient and percipient editing.

A NOTE ON THE REVISED
TRANSLATION (1992)

D. J. Enright

Terence Kilmartin intended to make further changes to the translation as published in 1981 under the title Remembrance of Things Past. But, as Proust’s narrator observed while reflecting on the work he had yet to do, when the fortress of the body is besieged on all sides the mind must at length succumb. “It was precisely when the thought of death had become a matter of indifference to me that I was beginning once more to fear death … as a threat not to myself but to my book.”

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. At ease with intellectual and artistic discourse and the finer feelings, and alert to sallies of humorous fantasy, he was not always comfortable with workaday matters and the less elevated aspects of human behaviour. It was left to Kilmartin to elucidate the significance of Albertine’s incomplete but alarming outburst—“… me faire casser …”—in The Captive, a passage Scott Moncrieff rendered totally incomprehensible, perhaps through squeamishness, perhaps through ignorance of low slang. Other misunderstandings of colloquialisms and failures to spot secondary meanings remained to be rectified. 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.

The present revision or re-revision has taken into account the second Pléiade edition of À la recherche du temps perdu, published in four volumes between 1987 and 1989 under the direction of Jean-Yves Tadié. This both adds, chiefly in the form of drafts and variants, and relocates material: not always helpfully from the viewpoint of the common (as distinct from specialist) reader, who may be surprised to encounter virtually the same passage in two different locations when there was doubt as to where Proust would finally have placed it. But the new edition clears up some long-standing misreadings: for example, in correcting Cambremer’s admiring “niece” in Time Regained to his “mother,” an identification which accords with a mention some thousand pages earlier in the novel.

Kilmartin notes that it is only too easy for the latecomer, tempted to make his mark by “officious tinkering,” to “assume the beau rôle.” The caveat, so delicately worded, is one to take to heart. I am much indebted to my wife, Madeleine, without whose collaboration I would never have dared to assume a role that is melancholy rather than (in any sense) beau.

À M. Gaston Calmette.
Comme un temoignage de profonde
et affectueuse reconnaissance.

M. P.

Part One
COMBRAY

I

For a long time I would go to bed early. Sometimes, the candle barely out, my eyes closed so quickly that I did not have time to tell myself: “I’m falling asleep.” And half an hour later the thought that it was time to look for sleep would awaken me; I would make as if to put away the book which I imagined was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was the immediate subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V.