Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C. K. Scott Moncrieff: Soldier, Spy, and Translator - Couverture souple
Présentation de l'éditeur
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.
Quatrième de couverture
'A first-rate, playful, moving biography' The Times
Scott Moncrieff was an enigmatic man. A Catholic convert and a homosexual, a gregarious party-goer but deeply lonely, an interwar spy and public man of letters. He was the celebrated translator of Proust's A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. He was also a decorated First World War hero.
Written by Scott Moncrieff's great-great-niece, and with exclusive access to the family archive, Chasing Lost Time is a fascinating portrait of a man living through an era of war and profound change, and who rendered in English the definitive modern novel.
'A hugely readable and well researched biography' Scotsman
'Conveys this largely forgotten literary figure with great perspicacity and affection' Times Literary Supplement
'An engrossing and intelligent portrait of a man and an era' Evening Standard
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