Perfectly Imperfect Proust

April 2, 2015 | 2 books mentioned

In a piece for the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik writes about a new life of C. K. Scott Moncrieff, the first translator of Proust into English, and about the strange success and beauty his imperfect translation of Remembrance of Things Past achieved. The essay as a whole pairs well with both our own Bill Morris‘s essay against literary biography and Barclay Bram Shoemaker‘s Millions review of Mo Yan‘s Frog and “the trouble with translation.”

is a staff writer for The Millions. She lives in New York and every so often writes things at kaulielewis.wordpress.com.