In Search of Lost Time (v. 1) - Hardcover

Marcel Proust

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0713996048 ISBN 13: 9780713996043

Publisher: Allen Lane (imprint of Penguin), 2002

Synopsis

Proust's monumental work has been described as the masterwork of masterworks; its place in the history of world literature was assured long ago. Yet since Scott Moncrieff's original translation, there has been no brand-new rendering of the French original into English. Now, Penguin is proud to present a superb new translation of this seminal work for the twenty-first century. Tthis translation brings to the fore a more sharply engaged, comic and lucid Proust than English readers have previously been able to enjoy. Language, and its rich variety and extravagances, is very much at the centre of this translation by many hands; a team of translators is ideally placed to capture Proust's world of multiple styles and modes of writing.

About this title

About the Author:

Marcel Proust (1871-1922) is now generally viewed as the greatest French novelist and perhaps the greatest European novelist of the 20th century. He lived much of his later life as a reclusive semi-invalid in a sound-proofed flat in Paris and giving himself over entirely to writing IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME.

From Publishers Weekly:

Relax: it's fantastic. There's no question that Davis's American English is thinner and more literal than C.K. Scott Montcrieff's archaically inflected turns of phrase and idioms, at least as revised by Terence Kilmartin and later by D.J. Enright. The removal of some of the familiar layers of the past in this all-new translation gives one a feeling similar to that of encountering an old master painting that has just been cleaned: the colors seem sharper and momentarily disorienting. Yet many readers will find it exhilarating, allowing the text to shed slight airs that were not quite Proust's and making many of the jokes much more immediate (as when he implies that sense-organ atrophy in the bourgeois is a defense mechanism and the result of hardening unarticulated feelings). As accomplished translator and novelist Davis (The End of the Story) notes in her foreword, she has followed Proust's sentence structure as closely as possible "in its every aspect," including punctuation, word order and word choice. To take just one case, where Montcrieff/Kilmartin describe Mlle. Vinteuil finding it pleasant to metaphorically "sojourn" in sadism, Davis has the much more definitive "emigrate." Proust's psychological inquiry generally feels much sharper, giving a much more palpable sense of Freud and Bergson-and of the young Marcel's willful (if not malefic) manipulations of those around him. For first-timers who don't have French and are allergic to the slightest whiff of euphemism, this is the best means for traveling the way by Swann's.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Allen Lane (imprint of Penguin)
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0713996048
• ISBN 13: 9780713996043
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 451
• Editor: Christopher Prendergast