During the 1990s, to great fanfare, Penguin Books commissioned a new translation of Marcel Proust’s seven-volume masterpiece Remembrance of Things Past (now usually called In Search of Lost Time in English), from seven different translators (each handling one volume). Through the irritating vagaries of American copyright extension, half the new series is unavailable in the United States for the foreseeable future, thank you very much Sonny Bono Copyright Act of 1998. But I’d heard good things about the new translation, and wondered if it was worth buying copies from the U.K. (Take that, Sonny Bono! Amazon.co.uk is the brave pine tree standing in the way of your slippery ski slope of endless copyright extension!) If I were to buy myself a new set of Proust, which was the “right” translation to choose?

I was unavailable to find much head-to-head comparison on-line. Consumer Reports was no help, wasting pages on frozen pizza and jacuzzis instead of rating fin de siecle French literature. This exchange from the New York Review of Books was entertainingly mean-spirited, but didn’t help make up my mind. This reviewer (the author of Go Tell the Spartans!) provided the only close comparison I could find. He calls the new translation more “exciting” but less “magisterial.” So do I like my Proust exciting, or magisterial? Why, I…I don’t know. It’s never come up.

So I borrowed dueling Proust volumes from a local library: two copies of volume III, The Guermantes Way. One was the latest polish (by D. J. Enright) of the classic Scott Moncrieff translation, the other the new Penguin upstart version, translated by a British professor called Mark Treharne. How would they stack up?

Let me start off with this disclaimer: I’ve never tried to read any Proust in the original French, because I speak almost no French. I’m not qualified to tell you which version replicates the French-speaking experience. All I can tell you is what I’d rather read in English. And I’m not an unbiased judge, because my idea of what makes language distinctively “Proustian” has been filtered through English translations of Remembrance of Things Past, er, past–in fact, through an older version of the Moncrieff.

So I wasn’t surprised when the older Moncrieff sounded uniformly smoother and more elegant to my ear than the new Treharne. The Penguin editor claims that what I call “elegance” is really unnecessary filigree, and that the simpler new translation is actually truer to the original. I can’t speak to that, but Proust’s long sentences sure seem to flow better in the Moncrieff/Enright. Here’s a passage taken at random. Moncrieff/Enright first:

I was genuinely in love with Mme de Guermantes. The greatest happiness that I could have asked of God would have been that he should send down on her every imaginable calamity, and that ruined, despised, stripped of all the privileges that separated her from me, having no longer any home of her own or people who would condescend to speak to her, she should come to me for asylum. I imagined her doing so. And indeed on those evenings when some change in the atmosphere or in my own state of health brought to the surface of my consciousness some forgotten scroll on which were recorded impressions of other days, instead of profiting by the forces of renewal that had been generated in me, instead of using them to unravel in my own mind thoughts which as a rule escaped me, instead of setting myself at last to work, I preferred to relate aloud, to excogitate in a lively, external manner, with a flow of invention as useless as was my declamation of it, a whole novel crammed with adventure, in which the Duchess, fallen upon misfortune, came to implore assistance from me–who had become, by a converse change of circumstances, rich and powerful.

And here’s Treharne:

I really was in love with Mme de Guermantes. The greatest boon I could have asked of God would have been that He should bring down upon her every possible calamity, and that–ruined, discredited, stripped of all the privileges that separated me from her, with no home of her own or people who would consent to speak to her–she would come to me for asylum. In my imagination, I would picture her doing this. And even on those evenings when a change in the atmosphere or in my own state of health led to my awareness of some forgotten scroll on which impressions of earlier days were inscribed, instead of taking advantage of the forces of renewal they generated, instead of using them to unravel the thoughts that usually eluded me, instead of finally setting myself to work, I could find nothing better to do than to recite out loud and at length, following a bustling, external train of thought that added up to no more than a useless and florid exposition, a mere adventure novel, sterile and unreal, in which the Duchesse, fallen upon misfortune, came to beg help from me, who had become, by a converse set of circumstances, rich and powerful.

Obviously both are very similar, and both are by skilled, careful translators. But the differences are telling. Take Treharne’s third sentence: “In my imagination, I would picture her doing this.” I have no doubt that this is very close to the literal French. But it sounds stumbling and redundant once you’ve read Moncrieff’s easy rendering: “I imagined her doing so.” It sure scans better, does the same work, even if Proust’s original sentence structure more closely resembled the longer Treharne.

Or take the difficult passage at the end of the excerpt. The narrator’s fantasy monologues seem much more vivid to me in the old than in the new translation, where “train of thought” seems less clear than “flow of invention,” and the whole train is drowned in a sea of mixed-metaphor adjectives: bustling, external, useless, florid. The narrator writing a “whole adventure novel” in his head makes the joke work, but it seems to odd to have him write a “mere adventure novel.” Of course, it’s also clear here that Moncrieff has left some things completely untranslated, like Proust’s description of the adventure novel as “stérile et sans vérité,” which puzzles me a bit–was he working from a different French version? Did he choose to simplify syntax? Did he make a mistake?

Moncrieff/Enright, fresh from looking up “excogitate,” pull out the thesaurus again for the final sentence: they would never say “beg help” where they can say “implore assistance” instead! If the flowery Moncrieff phrasing strikes you as too elaborate, stick with the Penguin. But “implore assistance” has a slightly archaic flavor that seems right to me here–because Proust wrote almost a century ago, sure, but also because the Duchesse’s pleas aren’t happening in real life, but in a cliched “adventure novel” of the narrator’s own invention. The overheated “implore assistance” seems to be what the protagonist of a hackneyed romance novel would do.

In the end, my decision was to stick with the older translation, even if it means (since I have no way of knowing!) that I’m getting a less literal or even less “faithful” Proust. At this point, I’m stuck with an idea of Proustian style that’s already all mixed up with his previous English translators, so the new version jars me when I read it. I’m too old for a 21st-century translation! You young people today with your “text messaging” and your “Hot Pockets” and your “Penguin Proust”!