In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu) is Marcel Proust's seven-volume novel, written between 1909 and 1922, and it is either the greatest novel ever written or the most famous unfinished project in literary history, depending on how generously you read its final volumes. Swann's Way is the first volume: the one that opens with an insomniac narrator lying in the dark, the one that contains the episode of the madeleine dipped in tea whose taste floods the narrator with an involuntary memory of childhood, the one that introduces Charles Swann and his disastrous love for Odette. It is the volume that determines whether you will read the rest.
The history of Proust in English is also a history of one remarkable translation and its revisions. C.K. Scott Moncrieff, a Scottish writer who had already translated Stendhal, began translating Proust in 1922 — while Proust was still alive and still writing — and continued until his own death in 1930. His translation was a literary achievement in its own right, and he gave it the title Remembrance of Things Past (from Shakespeare's 30th Sonnet), which shaped how the English-speaking world read Proust for fifty years. In 1981, Terence Kilmartin revised the translation throughout; in 1992, D.J. Enright made further revisions and restored Proust's own title, In Search of Lost Time. Lydia Davis's 2003 translation of Swann's Way — the first volume only — is the only serious modern alternative to the Moncrieff lineage.
For a first reading of Swann's Way, the Lydia Davis translation is this guide's primary recommendation.
Swann's Way — trans. Lydia Davis (2003)
First translation, recommended for most readers
Lydia Davis's Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Swann's Way covers the first volume only — she was commissioned to translate it as part of Penguin's project to produce new translations of each of the seven volumes by different hands. It is, by wide scholarly consensus, the finest English translation of any Proust volume: more faithful to Proust's French than the Moncrieff tradition, more attuned to the musicality and length of Proust's sentences, and more precise about the social and psychological details that fill every page. Davis is herself a major prose stylist and a supremely skilled translator of French, and her Swann's Way restores to English readers what the Moncrieff translation, however accomplished, inevitably transformed. The Penguin Deluxe Edition is beautifully produced and widely available. If you read only one volume of Proust, read this one in this translation.
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Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. I — trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff, rev. Terence Kilmartin (1981)
Best for readers who will read the complete series — affordable and authoritative
For readers who intend to read all seven volumes of Proust, the Vintage paperback set of Remembrance of Things Past — the Moncrieff translation revised by Terence Kilmartin — is the most accessible and affordable starting point. Volume I of the Vintage set combines Swann's Way and Within a Budding Grove in a single paperback, which is economical and convenient. Kilmartin's 1981 revision corrected numerous errors in Moncrieff's original and updated the English prose without erasing Moncrieff's distinctive literary personality. The result is a translation that still carries the Edwardian elegance of Moncrieff's sensibility — some readers feel this is exactly right for Proust, whose world is inseparable from that era — while being more accurate to the French than any earlier version. For those who want the complete series in a consistent translation style, the Vintage Kilmartin remains the practical standard.
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In Search of Lost Time, 6-volume set — trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff, rev. Kilmartin & Enright (Modern Library)
The definitive complete series — for committed readers of the full Proust
The Modern Library six-volume set is the most authoritative complete English Proust available, using the Moncrieff translation as revised first by Kilmartin and then further by D.J. Enright — the third layer of revision, published in 1992, which also restored Proust's own title, In Search of Lost Time, replacing Moncrieff's Shakespearean adaptation Remembrance of Things Past. The Enright revision introduced additional corrections throughout, tightened the prose in several places, and updated phrasing that had dated since Kilmartin's work. The Modern Library edition is the one most widely assigned in universities and the one that most serious readers of Proust are likely to encounter in critical discussions and annotations. For a reader who is committing to all seven volumes and wants the edition that will be referenced most consistently in secondary literature, the Modern Library set is the right choice.
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