The literary feature: An English search for lost time

This problem goes further back than Oliver Stone’s 1984 masterpiece though. Marcel Proust’s mammoth-sized social commentary À la recherche du temps perdu, most recently translated as seven separate books by Penguin in 2003, offers plenty of leeway. Du côté de chez Swann was originally translated by Moncrieff as The Way by Swann’s referring to one of the author's preferred routes through Paris. In Treharne’s 2003 translation we are offered the double entendre Swann’s Way which serves the character of Charlus well as it is indicative both of a route and of an ascetic which becomes more evident within the novel.

À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, and Sodome et Gomorrhe weren’t translated quite as literally, in the first case sexual overtones caused the book to become called Within a Budding Grove which allows for the author to become its subject rather than the observer which he is remembered as, while the biblical connotations of Sodome et Gomorrhe caused Moncrieff to translate its title as Cities of the Plain, and it wasnt until 2003 that it got its literal name.

La Prisonnière, La Fugitive and Le Côté de Guermantes are the only versions which have had relatively simple titles except for La Fugitive’s brief period as the rather poorly named Sweet Cheat Gone, a fairly literal translation but one that does not fit within the series.

The most difficult title though has to fall to the closing book Le Temps Retrouvé, a soft title could have seriously undervalued the entire series's content and understandably there have been disagreements. Moncrieff’s choice, Time Regained, is a good title but it doesn’t really capture Marcel Proust trying to rediscover his life through memory. Instead the titular conquest would fall on Finding Time Again, the absence of former lovers and gone relatives allowing him to find the time that had been alluding him since meeting M. Swann in his childhood.

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