Chez Swann means not only “Swann’s home, Swann’s place,” but also “on the part of Swann, about Swann”; i.e., the title refers not just to where Swann lives but to the person Swann is, to Swann’s mind, opinions, character, nature. And by extension the first volume concerns not just Swann’s manner of living, thinking, but also Swann’s world, the worldly and artistic domain, while Le Côté de Guermantes (now the third volume of the novel) concerns the ancient family of the Guermantes and their world, the domain of the aristocracy. And it is true that the character of Swann gives the volume its unity. (By the end of the novel, the two divergent walks are symbolically joined.)

Proust’s friend Louis de Robert did not like the title, and Proust mentioned a few others—rather idly, as it turns out, since he was not really going to change his mind: “Charles Swann,” “Gardens in a Cup of Tea,” and “The Age of Names.” He said he had also thought of “Springtime.” But he argued: “I still don’t understand why the name of that Combray path which was known as ‘the way by Swann’s’ with its earthy reality, its local truthfulness, does not have just as much poetry in it as those abstract or flowery titles.”

The work of the printer was finished by November 1913—an edition of 1,750 was printed—and the book was in the bookstores November 14. Reviews by Lucien Daudet and Jean Cocteau, among others, appeared. Not all the reviews were positive. The publisher submitted the book for the Prix Goncourt, but the prize was won, instead, by a book called Le Peuple de la mer (The People of the Sea), by Marc Elder.

A later edition was published in 1919 by Gallimard with some small changes. A corrected edition was published by Gallimard in its Bibliothèque de la Pléiade series in 1954 and another, with further corrections and additions, in 1987.

The first English translation of Du côté de chez Swann, C.K. Scott Moncrieff’s Swann’s Way, was done in Proust’s lifetime and published in 1922. Sixty years later, a revision of Scott Moncrieff’s translation by Terence Kilmartin, based on the corrected edition of the French, brought the translation closer to the original, cutting gratuitous additions and embellishments and correcting Scott Moncrieff’s own misreadings, though it did not go as far as it could have in eliminating redundancy and also introduced the occasional grammatical mistake and mixed metaphor; in addition, Kilmartin’s ear for the English language was not as sensitive as Scott Moncrieff’s. In 1992, after Kilmartin’s death and after the publication of the still-more-definitive 1987 Pléiade edition, the translation was further revised by D. J. Enright. The two revisions of Scott Moncrieff’s Swann’s Way retain so much of his original work that they cannot be called new translations. Thus, there existed, until the present volume, only one other translation of Du côté de chez Swann, and that was Swann’s Way (Canberra, 1982) as translated by James Grieve, a writer and professor of French literature in Australia. Grieve’s approach was not to follow the original French as closely as possible, as had been Scott Moncrieff’s, but to study the text for its meaning and then re-create it in a style which might have been that of an author writing originally in English. He therefore brings to his version a greater degree of freedom in word choice, order, and syntax.

If Proust has been reputed by some to be difficult reading, this can be attributed perhaps to several factors. One is that the interest of this novel, unlike that of the more traditional novel, is not merely, or even most of all, in the story it tells. (In one letter, Proust himself describes the work as a novel, but then, having second thoughts, qualifies that description with typical subtlety and precision by adding that, at least, “the novel form” is the form from which “it departs least.”) In fact it does not set out to tell a linear, logically sequential story, but rather to create a world unified by the narrator’s governing sensibility, in which blocks of a fictional past life are retrieved and presented, in roughly chronological order, in all their nuances. A reader may feel overwhelmed by the detail of this nuance and wish to get on with the story, and yet the only way to read Proust is to yield, with a patience equal to his, to his own unhurried manner of telling the story.

Another factor in Proust’s reputed difficulty for Anglophone readers in particular may be that in the Scott Moncrieff translation, which has been virtually the only one read hitherto by readers of Proust in English, Proust’s own lengthy, yet concise, expatiations were themselves amplified by a certain consistent redundancy which makes the translation at all points longer than the original. Proust’s single word “strange” is rendered in English by Scott Moncrieff, for the sake of euphony or rhythm, as “strange and haunting”; “uninteresting” becomes “quite without interest”; “he” becomes “he himself.” At the same time Proust’s prose was heightened by Scott Moncrieff, by the replacement throughout of a plain word such as “said” by a more colorful one such as “remarked,” “murmured,” “asserted,” etc.; he was given, regularly, a more sentimental or melodramatic turn: the “entrance to the Underworld,” in the original French, becomes “the Jaws of Hell.” The effect of all these individual choices was to produce a text which, although it “flows” very well and follows the original remarkably closely in word order and construction, is wordier and “dressier” than the original. It remains a very powerful translation, but, as with many of the first translations of seminal literary works, somewhat misrepresents the style of the original, which was, in this case, essentially natural and direct, and far plainer than one might have guessed.

Yet another factor in Proust’s “difficulty” may be his famously long sentences. Proust never felt that great length was desirable in itself. He categorically rejected sentences that were artificially amplified, or that were overly abstract, or that groped, arriving at a thought by a succession of approximations, just as he despised empty flourishes; when he describes Odette as having a sourire sournois, or “sly smile,” the alliteration is there for a purpose, to further unite the two words in one’s mind. As he proceeded from draft to draft, he not only added material but also condensed. “I prefer concentration,” he said, “even in length.” And in fact, according to a meticulous count of the sentences in Swann’s Way and the second volume of the novel, reported by Jean Milly in his study of the Proustian sentence, La Phrase de Proust, nearly forty percent of the sentences in these two books are reasonably short—one to five lines—and less than one-quarter are very long—ten lines or more.

Proust felt, however, that a long sentence contained a whole, complex thought, a thought that should not be fragmented or broken. The shape of the sentence was the shape of the thought, and every word was necessary to the thought: “I really have to weave these long silks as I spin them,” he said. “If I shortened my sentences, it would make little pieces of sentences, not sentences.” He wished to “encircle the truth with a single—even if long and sinuous—stroke.”

Many contemporaries of Proust’s insisted that he wrote the way he spoke, although when Du côté de chez Swann appeared in print, they were startled by what they saw as the severity of the page. Where were the pauses, the inflections? There were not enough empty spaces, not enough punctuation marks. To them, the sentences seemed longer when read on the page than they did when they were spoken, in his extraordinary hoarse voice: his voice punctuated them.

One friend, though surely exaggerating, reported that Proust would arrive late in the evening, wake him up, begin talking, and deliver one long sentence that did not come to an end until the middle of the night.