103. Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust

This is not the story of À la recherche du temps perdu, as such, but the story of its English translation, Remembrance of Things Past. In 1920 Charles Kenneth Scott-Moncrieff began the Englishing of Proust's magnum opus, and after several false starts decided to give it a title from Shakespeare’s Sonnet No. 30:

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste [...]

The Shakespearian quotation (however beautiful) did little to render Proust’s title, and the intrusion of the words of a foreign author must have seemed to Proust like a blow in the face (rather as if a Frenchman had translated Great Expectations by giving it a title from Balzac). Proust wrote to Scott-Moncrieff to protest, saying that the translation missed the ‘deliberate amphibology’ of the French, and particularly mentioned the inadequacy of ‘things past’ as a substitute for ‘temps perdu’ (a phrase significantly mirrored in the title of the last volume, Le Temps retrouvé: ‘temps perdu’ can mean either ‘time lost’ or ‘time wasted’). The Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English by Olive Classe puts the matter thus:

In fact that title [Remembrance of Things Past] seriously distorts Proust’s intention, diverting the prospective reader’s attention away from the work’s subject, largely a series of minute analyses of feelings to which a particular view of the function of memory is central. The distraction is especially important, because writers were already beginning to explore imaginatively the phenomena of indeliberate mental associations, before Freud had published anything of importance, and before World War I made obviously urgent the examination of the corporate psychologies of Western European cultures.

But Proust’s protests were ignored. It was only in 1992 that the title was more accurately rendered as In Search of Lost Time.

Consulted:
Carter, William C.: Marcel Proust: A Life‎ (2002)
Classe, Olive: Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English (2000)