I can't be the judge of whether Davis is right or wrong in saying that Kilmartin's ear for French is deficient. But as the passage above serves to demonstrate, the laurels may go in the end to the one who has the superior feeling for English. Vladimir Nabokov, no mean multilinguist, wrote in his Strong Opinions and elsewhere that a translator must be (a) fairly good in the "out of" language, (b) very good indeed in the "in to" language, and (c) a male. That might give Kilmartin two advantages where he need claim only one (I mean the second one). Nabokov quarreled with Scott Moncrieff in the matter of titles, saying that the latter had "inflicted" some "more or less fancy translations" in this area. Nabokov proposed The Walk by Swann's Place as a replacement, which certainly meets the test of accuracy, if at some cost in literal-mindedness. A similar directness, almost off-putting this time, is involved in his choice of In the Shade of Blooming Young Girls. Unquestionably, the creator of Lolita was being true to Proust's A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, and there is prettification, again, in Scott Moncrieff's Within a Budding Grove; but perhaps something should be reserved for the reader's imagination.

The Kilmartin translation, to the ire of Roger Shattuck and other specialists, retained Scott Moncrieff's overall title, taken from Shakespeare's Sonnet XXX and thus naturally euphonious: Remembrance of Things Past. Proust himself, when told of this, said simply, "Cela détruit le titre," and as Kilmartin states, "There is no doubt that the notion of 'summoning up' the past contradicts the basic theme of the novel, which is a celebration of involuntary memory." But Proust, despite his Anglophilia, was not always the most exquisite judge; he complained about Swann's Way as well, because he thought that "way" could only connote "manner." Kilmartin's preference was for In Search of Lost Time, which has in fact been the title since Enright's successor edition of 1992. But he had reservations even about that, because "the English phrase lacks the specific gravity of the French and misses the double meaning of temps perdu: time 'wasted' as well as 'lost.'" This Viking edition preserves the new overall name and rechristens the second volume In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower—a choice slightly less enthusiastically inflammatory than Nabokov's.

How one pines, incidentally, for a translation of Proust by the hand of Nabokov. Here is Professor Adam Krug, in Bend Sinister, the first novel that Nabokov wrote in America, as he touches a stone on a bridge on the night his wife has died:

I had never touched this particular knob before and shall never find it again. This moment of conscious contact holds a drop of solace. The emergency brake of time. Whatever the present moment is, I have stopped it. Too late. In the course of our, let me see, twelve, twelve and three months, years of life together, I ought to have immobilized by this simple method millions of moments; paying perhaps terrific fines, but stopping the train. Say, why did you do it? the popeyed conductor might ask. Because I liked the view. Because I wanted to stop those speeding trees and the path twisting between them. By stepping on its receding tail. What happened to her would perhaps not have happened, had I been in the habit of stopping this or that bit of our common life, prophylactically, prophetically, letting this or that moment rest and breathe in peace. Taming time. Giving her pulse respite. Pampering life, life—our patient.

I think it was perfectly brilliant of Scott Moncrieff to look to the Sonnets for a title. They anticipate Proust in almost every respect, with their deep and melancholy reflections on the sorrows of love, the tortures of jealousy, and—this perhaps above all—the tyranny of time. "When forty winters shall besiege thy brow ..." "Those hours that with gentle work did frame ..." "When I do count the clock that tells the time ..." "Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed ..." "Being your slave, what should I do but tend / Upon the hours and times of your desire?" "Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore / So do our minutes hasten to their end." "Against my love shall be as I am now / With Time's injurious hand crush'd and o'erworn." "When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced ..." "When in the chronicle of wasted time ..." It is also notoriously the case that we cannot know whether these morose and smoldering yet lovely lines are intended as addresses to boy or girl or both, and this makes them doubly fitting as either source or analogue (speculation about the identity of Albertine is almost as fervent as that concerning "Mr. WH" or the dark lady).