#c. k. scott moncrieff

[thesobsister]

A poster of the longest sentence in the Moncrieff translation of Proust's Cities of the Plain diagrammed.

Linking to the zoomable version.

[guy60660]

C. K. Scott Moncrieff | Public Domain Review

[uwmspeccoll]

Milestone Monday

On this day, July 10 in 1871, French novelist Marcel Proust (Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust, to be exact) was born to an upper-class family in the Paris Borough of Auteuil. Born at a time of great change for French society, with the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the middle class, Proust's most well-known publication, the monumental, 7-volume novel À la recherche du temps perdu (currently translated as In Search of Lost Time, but previously translated as Remembrance of Things Past) explores the effects of these changes in personal and intimate ways.

Proust began work on this novel in 1909 and continued to work on it until his final illness in the autumn of 1922 forced him to stop. It was published in France between 1913 and 1927, and has become one of the hallmarks of world literature from the 20th century. The novel unfolds as a series of memories initiated by the sensation of a sip of tea in which he had dipped a madeleine cake. The sensation sparks dormant recollections of experiences from childhood to adulthood in fin de siècle France society.

The first six volumes of the novel were first translated into English by the Scottish author and translator C. K. Scott Moncrieff from 1922 to 1930, with the final volume translated by British novelist and translator Stephen Hudson in 1931. Terence Kilmartin revised the Scott Moncrieff translation in 1981 (with the final volume translated by Andreas Mayor) using the new French edition of 1954. The copy shown here is a revision of that revision by British academic D. J. Enright, based on the French Bibliothèque de la Pl��iade edition of 1987-1989, published in six volumes by the Modern Library in New York (and by Chatto and Windus in London) in 1992. It is the first edition to use the more current translation of the title, In Search of Lost Time.

View other Milestone Monday posts.

[felixcloud6288]

Does Tumblr have a post tag limit?

[soulmaking]

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff)

[grotto-esque]

“Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase, up which I had watched the light of [my father’s] candle gradually climb, was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which, I imagined, would last for ever, and new structures have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are difficult of comprehension. It is a long time, too, since my father has been able to tell Mamma to “Go with the child.” Never again will such hours be possible for me. But of late I have been increasingly able to catch, if I listen attentively, the sound of the sobs which I had the strength to control in my father’s presence, and which broke out only when I found myself alone with Mamma. Actually, their echo has never ceased: it is only because life is now growing more and more quiet round about me that I hear them afresh, like those convent bells which are so effectively drowned during the day by the noises of the streets that one would suppose them to have been stopped for ever, until they sound out again through the silent evening air.”

- Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way (trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff)

[adriansbooks]

Remembrance Of Things Past, by Marcel Proust.

Three-volume set published by Random House in 1981. The Terence Kilmartin revision of the C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation, based on the French Pleiade edition. Time Regained is translated by Andreas Mayor, again with Kilmartin's revisions.

While the dust jackets are lovely (the illustration on each cover is repeated on and takes up the entirety of the back of each jacket; I've included a photo of volume two's illustration of flowers as that's my favorite, but all three covers are stellar) I believe this set truly shines when the book itself is revealed: bound in black cloth, with silver stamping to the spines for the title, and with "Marcel Proust" on the front cover of each volume.

Sets like this usually come without the dust jackets, at the cost of very major sunning to the beautiful black spines, which often results in a grey or brown instead of black. I'm very lucky to have found a set that not only includes the covers, but retains the original black cloth bindings.

Each volume opens with a half title page containing the titles of each book contained in said volume, as well as the first two lines of Shakespeare's sonnet 30, from which Moncrieff's English title is taken (a more literal translation of the original French, À la recherche du temps perdu, or In Search of Lost Time, has since been adopted). The full title pages of each volume contain the book titles in a gorgeous serif font, as well as a small illustration that changes with each volume.

I'll be reading these for the first time beginning this autumn; I'm looking forward to the journey!

[pandaemoniumpancakes]

There can be no peace of mind in love, since what one has obtained is never anything but a new starting-point for further desires.

Marcel Proust, from ‘Volume II. Within a Budding Grove: Part One, Madame Swann at Home’ in In Search of Lost Time, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and Andreas Mayor.

[orangerosebush]

Marcel Proust. Remembrance of Things Past. Volume II: The Guermantes Way & Cities of the Plain. (Translator: C K Scott Moncrieff)

[milenapetrofig]

Literary criticism of the work by Stendhal in the early twentieth century by comparison with more recent writers on the novel The Red and the Black in easy American idiom.

[valkxrie]

“I gazed at her, at first with that gaze which is not merely the messenger of the eyes, but at whose window all the senses assemble and lean out, petrified and anxious, a gaze eager to reach, touch, capture, bear off in triumph the body at which it is aimed, and the soul with the body…”

— Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff)

[centaurself]

If only I had been able to start writing! But, whatever the conditions in which I approached the task (as, too, alas, the undertakings not to touch alcohol, to go to bed early, to sleep, to keep fit), whether it was with enthusiasm, with method, with pleasure, in depriving myself of a walk, or postponing it and keeping it in reserve as a reward for industry, taking advantage of an hour of good health, utilising the inactivity forced on me by a day's illness, what always emerged in the end from all my efforts was a virgin page, undefiled by any writing, ineluctable as that forced card which in certain tricks one invariably is made to draw, however carefully one may first have shuffled the pack.

- Marcel Proust, "Remembrance of Things Past", vol. 2, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, published 1981, ISBN 0701124784, page 151.

That moment when the author of the world's longest novel suffered from immense bouts of writer's block.

[alovelywaytospendanevening]

[August 2024 update]

The following relationship connections have been added:

Lord Berners (new name) – Harold Acton

Lord Berners – John Betjeman

Lord Berners – Beverley Nichols

Lord Berners – Harold Nicolson

Lord Berners – William Plomer

Lord Berners – Siegfried Sassoon

Lord Berners – Osbert Sitwell

Rupert Croft-Cooke (new name) – Alfred Douglas

C. H. B. Kitchin (new name) – L. P. Hartley

D. H. Lawrence – Norman Douglas

D. H. Lawrence – David Garnett

W. Somerset Maugham – E. F. Benson

W. Somerset Maugham – Robert Hichens

W. Somerset Maugham – Beverley Nichols

C. K. Scott Moncrieff (new name) – Wilfred Owen

Beverley Nichols – A. C. Benson

Beverley Nichols – Osbert Sitwell

John Gambril Nicholson (new name) – Frederick Rolfe

Walter Pater – Bram Stoker

Thank you for all the responses!

British gay/bi male writers and their social circles

As a great admirer of gay literature, the social circles of gay and bisexual male writers is something that piques my interest. Due to the dangerousness of the matter in the past and also because it revolves around a relatively small niche, it seems that there was high level familiarity between these figures. The United Kingdom, a country whose literary input has abundant homoerotic tones, is a very adequate setting to analyze such a configuration.

I've been building a graph on this subject for some time, and now it seems mature enough for me to post it. It's a diagram based on friendship connections — deep or superficial —, although romantic and family-related connections are also included. Just a mutual recognition of existence isn't enough to justify a connection (otherwise most of them would be linked to Wilde!), and rivalries were not considered too. All the writers included were born during the Victorian and Edwardian eras (1837-1910), where this interconnectivity seemed particularly strong.

This is just an early version, as I imagine there is still a considerable amount of information that I missed. Therefore, I'm very open to suggestions and comments on it!

(Three Irishmen were also included in the diagram: Stoker, Wilde and Reid)

[infiniterichesinalittleroom]

I cannot express the discomfort I felt at such an intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room which I had succeeded in filling with my own personality until I thought no more of the room than of myself. The anaesthetic effect of custom being destroyed, I would begin to think and to feel very melancholy things

Du côté de chez Swann by Marcel Proust rendered into English by C. K. Scott Moncrieff

[soulmaking]

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff)

[zahut]

“We fall in love for a smile, a look, a shoulder. That is enough; then, in the long hours of hope or sorrow, we fabricate a person, we compose a character.”

― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Stephen Hudson, Terence Kilmartin, Lydia Davis and James Grieve)