PROUST, Marcel

Remembrance of Things Past. Translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin

London, The Folio Society, 1981 (first thus).

Octavo, three volumes, xii, 1040; viii, 1197; and viii, 1128 pages plus 48 full-page plates from dry-point etchings by Philippe Jullian.

Red- and gilt-decorated black silk, top edges dyed purple; light crease near the head of the spine of the second volume; essentially a fine set in the lightly rubbed and marked slipcase.

The complete 'roman-fleuve' presented here in three volumes. The titles of the seven novels are 'Swann's Way'; 'Within a Budding Grove'; 'The Guermantes Way'; 'Sodom and Gomorrah'; 'The Captive'; 'The Fugitive'; and 'Time Regained'. Terence Kilmartin's extensive revision of C.K. Scott Moncrieff's original translation was first published by Random House in the same year as this Folio Society edition (also as a three-volume set, and with the same collation). Kilmartin's four-page note on the translation at the beginning of the first volume here hints at what must have been a herculean labour. The 'original French edition from which Scott Moncrieff worked (the "abominable" edition of the "Nouvelle Revue Francaise," as Samuel Beckett described it ... in 1931) was notoriously imperfect. This was not so much the fault of the publishers and printers as of Proust's methods of composition.... The present translation is a reworking of Scott Moncrieff's version of the first eleven volumes of the twelve-volume English edition.... I have refrained from officious tinkering for its own sake, but a translator's loyalty is to the original author, and in trying to be faithful to Proust's meaning and tone of voice I have been obliged, here and there, to make extensive alterations'.

The publisher's note on the verso of the half-title of the first volume makes an additional comment: 'In 1954 a text of "A la recherche du temps perdu" derived by Pierre Clarac and Andre Ferre from holograph and other sources was published in the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade ... The Pleiade edition contains material not available to C.K. Scott Moncrieff and this, together with extensive revision by Terence Kilmartin of the original English translation, is incorporated in the present three-volume set'. [3 items].