Chasing Lost Time

The Life of C.K. Scott Moncrieff: Soldier, Spy and Translator

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Pub Date 28 Sep 2014 | Archive Date 4 Dec 2014

Description

The first ever biography of the man who made Proust a legend, his celebrated translator, C.K. Scott Moncrieff


C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s celebrated translation of Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu was first published in 1922 and was a work which would exhaust and consume the translator, leading to his early death at the age of just forty. Joseph Conrad told him, ‘I was more interested and fascinated by your rendering than by Proust’s creation’: some literary figures even felt it was an improvement on the original.

From the outside an enigma, Scott Moncrieff left a trail of writings that describe a man expert at living a paradoxical life: fervent Catholic convert and homosexual, gregarious party-goer and deeply lonely, interwar spy in Mussolini’s Italy and public man of letters – a man for whom honour was the most abiding principle. He was a decorated war hero, and his letters home are an unusually light take on day-to-day life on the front. Described as ‘offensively brave’, he was severely injured in 1917 and, convalescing in London, became a lynchpin of literary society – friends with Robert Graves and Noel Coward, enemies with Siegfried Sassoon and in love with Wilfred Owen.

Written by Scott Moncrieff’s great-great-niece, Jean Findlay, with exclusive access to the family archive, Chasing Lost Time is a portrait of a man hurled into war, through an era when the world was changing fast and forever, who brought us the greatest epic of time and memory that has ever been written.

The first ever biography of the man who made Proust a legend, his celebrated translator, C.K. Scott Moncrieff


C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s celebrated translation of Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu...


A Note From the Publisher

UK edition – available to read in UK, Commonwealth, Canada and Europe.

UK edition – available to read in UK, Commonwealth, Canada and Europe.


Marketing Plan

The man who brought Proust to the English speaking world: first biography of Proust's translator, the man whose celebrated translation is still used to this day

First World War hero: amazing WWI material - insight into day-to-day life in the trenches, never-seen-before letters, published for the WWI anniversary in 2014

Family story: Jean Findlay is Scott Moncrieff's great-great-niece

Classic literary biography: will appeal to lovers of Proust, Pirandello, Stendhal (all of whom Scott Moncrieff translated) as well as WWI fanatics

‘The quality of Mr. Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Du coté de chez Swann is nothing less than amazing. Had it not been done, it would have seemed impossible. But it has been done; and now the average English reader has a smooth road open before him into one of the most important books of our time… M. Proust is a genius; and Mr. Moncrieff has treated him like one.’ Nation & Athenaem, 1922

'Scott Moncrieff's Proust is a masterpiece in itself.' F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1939

The man who brought Proust to the English speaking world: first biography of Proust's translator, the man whose celebrated translation is still used to this day

First World War hero: amazing WWI...


Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9780701181079
PRICE £25.00 (GBP)

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