Proust loops the loop

The year 2022 marks a notable double centenary. It is one hundred years since Marcel Proust died and since the publication of the first volume of C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation of À la recherche du temps perdu, which held the field for many years despite criticisms of its inaccuracies. Successive revisions of Scott Moncrieff, by Terence Kilmartin (1981) and D. J. Enright (1992), offered a more reliable text, but meanwhile, a completely new Pléiade edition of the French text appeared in 1987–89, replacing that of 1954 and making available extensive materials for the study of the manuscript as it evolved. (The most recent discovery, which came to light only in 2018, consists of the earliest known sketches of the novel, dating from 1907/08; they were...