Scott Moncrieff's translation, based on a French original that turned out to be full of errors, was revised by Terence Kilmartin in 1981, on the basis of the French Pléiade edition published in 1954, then further revised by D. J. Enright in 1992, taking into account the scholarly (rather too much so) Pléiade text published in 1987. While Scott Moncrieff-Kilmartin-Enright is far better than the original translation in accuracy, tone and clarity, I think most readers will prefer Davis. She strips away some of the fustian and fussiness that still characterize revised Scott Moncrieff. She deals better with issues of sexuality -- with Marcel's account of his first experience of masturbation, for instance, and the famous scene of sadomasochistic love between Mlle. Vinteuil and her companion that Marcel spies on through a window at Montjouvain. And on the whole she nimbly reassembles those long but firmly structured Proustian sentences that often suspend several segments of time past, present and future in one thought.

''Swann's Way'' contains the passages best known to most readers: the haunting bedtime drama of Marcel deprived of his mother's kiss, and especially the conjuring of an entire childhood world, in Combray, which opens, in the manner of compressed Japanese paper flowers that unfold in water, from the madeleine cake dipped into a cup of tea. It includes as well the 200 pages of ''Swann in Love,'' an apparent digression that in fact lays out the path that Marcel must discover if he is to become a writer, if he is to succeed where the aesthete Swann, through a congenital mental laziness, fails. The need for shaping time, and the model for doing so, are adumbrated here by way of Vinteuil's sonata, which provides the paradigm of temporal organization transcending spoken meanings. ''Never,'' the narrator tells us of the sonata, ''had spoken language been such an inflexible necessity, never had it known such pertinent questions, such irrefutable answers.'' There is here self-critique, of Proust's years as dandy and mere aesthete, and a signal of things to come.

Those things to come, alas, are put out of the immediate reach of American readers, who are placed by this new translation somewhat in the position of Proust's first readers in their 14-year wait between ''Swann'' and ''Time Regained.'' That is: Davis's ''Swann'' is the first volume of a complete new translation of ''In Search of Lost Time'' produced by a team of seven different translators working under the general supervision of Christopher Prendergast of Cambridge University. The entire translation -- seven parts, in six volumes -- was published simultaneously in Britain (Penguin, 2002). But American copyright law allowed Random House to renew its copyright on the last three parts of Scott Moncrieff-Kilmartin-Enright: ''The Prisoner,'' ''The Fugitive'' and ''Time Regained.'' As it stands, the United States will get ''In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower'' next month, and then ''The Guermantes Way'' and ''Sodom and Gomorrah'' later this year. American readers will have to wait until at least 2019, however, for Parts 5, 6 and 7 -- longer than Proust's original public had to.

I imagine the missing volumes can, in the manner of some prescription drugs, be smuggled in from Canada. Still, this unfortunate circumstance does compromise the very idea of a simultaneous multivoiced new Proust. ''In Search of Lost Time'' is one novel, not seven. That many readers have bogged down in ''Swann,'' or somewhere later along the line, is all the more reason to give them a fresh version to dip into. In fact, when you know the beginning and the end of the novel, you can pick it up almost at random and discover after a few pages the pleasure of interconnections, of seeing old acquaintances in sharp new light, of finding expectations deceived and reoriented and encountering the same puzzles set to the inquisitive mind by three church steeples at Martinville or three trees at Hudimesnil. ''In Search of Lost Time'' is full of internal cross-references, recalls of earlier experiences pointing toward much later elucidations.

Proust himself considered the second large part, ''À l'Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleur,'' as something of a transitional section, with the adolescent Marcel himself in transit from the childhood domain of Combray to the social world of the Guermantes, and the startling reversals of perspective brought by ''Sodom and Gomorrah,'' the watershed volume after which nothing will be quite the same. This second part, which Scott Moncrieff had cryptically called ''Within a Budding Grove,'' is translated by James Grieve, who did ''Swann's Way'' in 1982, as ''In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower.'' That is far superior, though why ''shadow'' rather than ''shade,'' which better preserves the Monet garden imagery?