C. K. Scott Moncrieff

The translation that gave Proust his English voice. Scott-Moncrieff’s 1922 Swann’s Way is gorgeous, lush, cadenced, and unafraid of Proust’s enormous sentences, and for most of a century it was Proust in English. It is also a shade more ornate and Edwardian than the original, occasionally loose in sense, and it borrowed a Shakespeare line for its overall title, Remembrance of Things Past, that Proust never intended. Later hands corrected its slips. But as sheer English prose it is still ravishing, and it is public domain. Come for the music; check Davis when you need the exact meaning.

The best-of-both compromise, and for years the default. This is Scott-Moncrieff’s beloved prose twice corrected, by Terence Kilmartin in 1981 against a sounder French text, then by D. J. Enright in 1992, who retitled the whole work In Search of Lost Time. You keep most of the old music while shedding the worst inaccuracies, and the Modern Library set is handsomely annotated. Purists split: some want Scott-Moncrieff pure, others want Davis’s greater fidelity. As a middle path, this remains the safe, rich complete Proust.