This time, though, instead of using just one translator, Penguin decided to use a team of seven translators – one for each volume. Three years after the Modern Library edition was published, Penguin Books, under the editorial guidance of Christopher Prendergast, undertook an entirely new translation based on the authoritative French text of 1987-89. In the words of Richard Howard, “A triumph of tone, of a single (and singular) vision, this ultimate revision of the primary version accords the surest sled over the ice fields as well as the most sinuous surfboard over the breakers of Proustian prose, an invaluable and inescapable text.”

Today, this version is considered by many to be a landmark in the art of translation. Enright and published by Modern Library in 1992. This translation has itself been revised twice – the first time in 1981 by Terence Kilmartin, using the new French edition of 1954 – and then re-revised by D.J. The first translation of Proust’s work into another language, it was published under the rather unfortunate title “Remembrance of Things Past,” a phase taken from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30, rather than the more accurate In Search of Lost Time. The first is the celebrated translation by Scotsman C.K. This discovery raised a basic question: If you don’t read the original language, how is the common reader to know just which translation comes the closest to capturing the essence of what the author was originally trying to convey?įortunately, when it comes to Marcel Proust and In Search of Lost Time, there are really only two major translations for the English language reader to choose from. Not only was the language in each translation slightly different from the other, but the meanings themselves were subtly different. John had four different translations available, so we read the first paragraph of each, trying to determine which version to recommend. A mutual acquaintance came in, looking for a copy of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. The pitfalls of translation selection became obvious to me a number of years ago, when I was hanging out at my friend’s bookstore in New Orleans. I have to admit that I’m both extraordinarily picky and extraordinarily insecure when it comes to picking the “right” translation of a foreign language writer into English.

Swann's way translations