He also had commercial pressures: he needed to establish Proust's genius in the English-speaking world. With one brother dead and the other improvident, he provided for their education and medicine. He took on an enormous workload, including translations of Stendhal, Abelard and Heloise, and Pirandello, so as to feed 'nine hungry nephews and nieces'. Nor did Scott Moncrieff have the time for slavish dedication to accuracy. 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. 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. 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. The few who weren't killed in the war were overworked with undertrained assistants. In postwar France there was a shortage of typesetters. He knew he could not find an English expression meaning time wasted and time lost, involving memory and still reflecting the beauty of what the novel contained, so he chose a line from Shakespeare's Sonnet 30: 'When to the sessions of sweet silent thought / I summon up remembrance of things past.' This horrified purists, and still does, and so the new version translates the title as precisely as you'll find it on Google Translate.īut there were reasons for internal technical inaccuracies. He took liberties with the title from the very beginning. Scott Moncrieff was not a mechanical translator he was more like Gielgud interpreting Shakespeare, or Casals interpreting Bach.

Joseph Conrad wrote to him that 'I was more interested and fascinated by your rendering than by Proust's creation … You have a supreme faculty akin to genius.' But critics have since deemed his work 'inaccurate', 'overinterpretive' or 'flowery'. In the following year – and F Scott Fitzgerald would later concur – his translation was hailed as a masterpiece in itself.

Things of remembrance past