In Search of Lost Time
Begun in 1909, À la recherche du temps perdu consists of seven volumes totaling around 3,200 pages (about 4,300 in The Modern Library's translation) and featuring more than 2,000 characters. Graham Greene called Proust the "greatest novelist of the 20th century", and W. Somerset Maugham called the novel the "greatest fiction to date". Proust died before he was able to complete his revision of the drafts and proofs of the final volumes, the last three of which were published posthumously and edited by his brother, Robert.
The book was translated into English by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, appearing under the title Remembrance of Things Past between 1922 and 1931. Scott Moncrieff translated volumes one through six of the seven volumes, dying before completing the last. This last volume was rendered by other translators at different times. When Scott Moncrieff's translation was later revised (first by Terence Kilmartin, then by D. J. Enright) the title of the novel was changed to the more literal In Search of Lost Time.
In 1995 Penguin undertook a fresh translation of the book by editor Christopher Prendergast and seven translators in three countries, based on the latest, most complete and authoritative French text. Its six volumes, comprising Proust's seven, were published in Britain under the Allen Lane imprint in 2002. The first four volumes, having transferred to the public domain under American copyright law, were published in the U.S. under the Viking imprint and in paperback under the Penguin Classics imprint.
Read more about this topic: Marcel Proust
Famous quotes containing the words search and/or lost:
“The meaning of the Street in all ways and at all times is the need for sharing life with others and the search for community.”
—Virginia Hamilton (b. 1936)
“We enter church, and we have to say, We have erred and strayed from Thy ways like lost sheep, when what we want to say is, Why are we made to err and stray like lost sheep? Then we have to sing, My soul doth magnify the Lord, when what we want to sing is O that my soul could find some Lord that it could magnify!”
—Thomas Hardy (18401928)