Marcel Proust: In Search of Lost Timeedited by Christopher Prendergast

£75, pp3,300 (six volumes)

Towards the end of the second volume of In Search of Lost Time, much of which has been taken up with long and longing descriptions of his lover Albertine, Proust's narrator puzzles over the fact that he seems to be obsessed by many different girls who happen to share the same name. Sometimes Albertine's face looks dull and sullen, sometimes glowing and sultry; sometimes his gaze is arrested by the pink tip of her kittenish nose, sometimes his eyes slide over her rosy cheeks as if they were as frictionless as the surface of a painted miniature. And as Marcel loses his grip on Albertine, so he loses his grip on himself: 'It may be because the personalities I perceived in her at that time were so various,' he confesses, 'that I later took to turning into a different person, depending on which Albertine was in my mind: I became a jealous man, an indifferent man, a voluptuary, a melancholic, a madman.'

The idea that each of us contains many possible selves, patiently waiting to be liberated by circumstance, has long been an attractive one for Proust's biographers, who have drawn attention to the large number of Prousts who seemed to live within the same skin: the reclusive socialite (Proust's most recent biographer in English, Edmund White, describes him as a 'playboy-monk'); the critic of habit who lived according to strict routines; the sensitive aesthete who became sexually excited by watching caged rats being stabbed with hatpins. His writing style is equally slippery: consider his fondness for puns, which reveal how easily words, like people, can have more to them than first meets the ear; or the syntax of his sentences, which uncoil inquiringly across the page to dramatise both the directions and the indirections of desire, the shape of finished thoughts and the sound of somebody thinking. In short, Proust's voice is like Albertine's face: it invites interpretation and resists explanation; the longer we examine it, the more it refuses to stand still.

One might expect Proust's translators to be sensitive to this dilemma, because translation too provides only a partial version of its original, changing its appearance according to who is looking at it, and when, and why. The team of scholars behind this new Penguin version, for instance, are largely unimpressed by the earlier translation of C. K. Scott Moncrieff (successively revised by The Observer 's Terence Kilmartin and D. J. Enright): too full of errors, they complain, and too stuffy. Based on the more accurate French text published by Pléiade in 1987, their Proust is supposed to be far more down-to-earth and up-to-date, and the figure who emerges in these pages is indeed more plain-speaking, even blokeish, than many readers might expect, with an edgy wit no longer blunted by Scott Moncrieff's purplish prose. In many respects, this is a Proust for our time.

Scott Moncrieff's dedication of his work to Proust as 'the chaplet that I would fain offer you' gives a flavour of how easily his writing could slip from the lofty to the stilted, and from the archaic to the merely arch. Yet often the work of the Penguin translators jars still more awkwardly with Proust's original. Much of this is down to the decision to use different translators for each volume, on the principle that this division of labour 'heightens the chances of bringing into focus [Proust's] stylistic variety'. This curious rationale (why use seven translators rather than 70? Or 700?) does suggest one important half-truth about Proust's writing: what Christopher Prendergast, the general editor, describes as its 'commitment to the mobile and the multiple'. But it ignores the other half of that truth, which is Proust's commitment to describing the sheer variousness of the world in a voice which is uniquely his own. This is the set of vocal contours which Proust described in his novel as the writer's 'accent', his imaginative DNA, and it announces itself on every level of his writing, from the local echoes which ripple back and forth across the full range of these 3,000-plus pages, to the sustaining narrative arch that spans In Search of Lost Time from its first word ('Longtemps' - 'for a long time') to its last ('temps' - 'time').

And how did Proust learn to weave his voice into these teasing, testing patterns? Through translation. The years he spent translating Ruskin can be felt pressing on every sentence in his novel, because although Proust had a shaky grasp of English (one friend claimed that he probably couldn't have ordered a cutlet in an English restaurant), he claimed to know Ruskin 'by heart', and it is by learning Ruskin off by heart that he learnt how to describe the workings of his own heart. By imagining what it was like to write as somebody else, he discovered what it was to write as himself. Similarly, Scott Moncrieff, for all his occasional carelessness and prissiness, was probably temperamentally better suited than many later translators to making sense of a style which Montesquiou once described memorably as 'a mixture of litanies and sperm'. Ernst Curtius, visiting him in Rome in 1928, recalled how 'he generally received me with some strong abuse of Albertine, whose moods and vices were at that time keeping him very busy'. For the Penguin translators, one feels, this version of Proust is a job well done; for Scott Moncrieff, it was a labour of love.