In Search of Lost Time
English-language translations

The first six volumes were first translated into English by the Scotsman C. K. Scott Moncrieff under the title Remembrance of Things Past, a phrase taken from Shakespeare 's Sonnet 30; this was the first translation of the Recherche into another language. The individual volumes were Swann's Way, in two books (1922), Within a Budding Grove, in two books (1924), The Guermantes Way, in two books (1925), Cities of the Plain, in two books (1927), The Captive (1929), and The Sweet Cheat Gone (1930). The final volume, Le Temps retrouvé, was initially published in English in the UK as Time Regained (1931), translated by Stephen Hudson (a pseudonym of Sydney Schiff), and in the US as The Past Recaptured (1932) in a translation by Frederick Blossom. There were thus eleven books in the original English translation. Although cordial with Scott Moncrieff, Proust grudgingly remarked in a letter that Remembrance eliminated the correspondence between Temps perdu and Temps retrouvé (Painter, 352). Terence Kilmartin revised the Scott Moncrieff translation in 1981, using the new French edition of 1954. An additional revision by D. J. Enright —that is, a revision of a revision—was published by the Modern Library in 1992. It is based on the "La Pléiade" edition of the French text (1987–89), and rendered the title of the novel more literally as In Search of Lost Time. It also includes an index / concordance to the novel compiled by Terence Kilmartin that was published in 1983 as the Reader's Guide to the Remembrance of Things Past. The guide contains four indices: fictional characters from the novels; actual persons; places; and themes.

In 1995, Penguin undertook a fresh translation based on the "La Pléiade" French text (published in 1987–89) of In Search of Lost Time by a team of seven different translators overseen by editor Christopher Prendergast. The six volumes were published in Britain under the Allen Lane imprint in 2002, each volume under the name of a separate translator, the first volume being American writer Lydia Davis, and the others under English translators and one Australian, James Grieve. The first four volumes were published in the US under the Viking imprint as hardcover editions in 2003–2004, while the entire set is available in paperback under the Penguin Classics imprint.

Both the Modern Library and Penguin translations provide a detailed plot synopsis at the end of each volume. The last volume of the Modern Library edition, Time Regained, also includes Kilmartin's "A Guide to Proust", a set of four indexes covering the (fictional) characters, (real) persons, places (both real and fictional), and themes in the novel. The Modern Library volumes include a handful of endnotes, and alternative versions of some of the novel's famous episodes. The Penguin volumes each provide an extensive set of brief, non-scholarly endnotes that help identify cultural references perhaps unfamiliar to contemporary English readers. Reviews that discuss the merits of both translations can be found online at the Observer, the Telegraph, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, TempsPerdu.com, and Reading Proust.

Since 2013, Yale University Press has been publishing a new revision of Scott Moncrieff's translation, edited and annotated by William C. Carter, at the rate of one volume every two or three years.

After a partial translation of the first volume in 2018, since 2023 Oxford University Press is publishing a new, complete translation by Brian Nelson, edited by Adam Watt.
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