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To approach Proust through Scott Moncrieff is to encounter two artists at once, and to spend the duration of these volumes unsure which of them one is admiring. That ambiguity is the central fact of the experience, and the source of both its pleasures and its frustrations. The novel itself needs no defending; what is worth examining is the English garment it has worn for English readers across most of a century, the version that for decades was simply Proust to anyone who could not manage the original French.

The first thing to say is that the prose is gorgeous, and gorgeous in a way that holds up sentence by sentence rather than merely in summary. There is a real ear at work, a feeling for cadence and for the long suspended clause that does not collapse under its own weight. The set pieces everyone remembers - the madeleine, the magic lantern, the hawthorns along the Méséglise way, Vinteuil's little phrase recurring through Swann's jealousy - arrive in English with their architecture intact. The translator clearly understood the music of what he was rendering, and in the great lyrical passages the result is something close to incantation. It is easy to see why other writers reached for superlatives, and why for a long stretch of the twentieth century this was treated less as a translation than as an English masterpiece in its own right.

And yet the closer one reads, the more apparent a thumb on the scale becomes. The persistent reservation about this version is not that it is inaccurate in the crude sense but that it changes the temperature of the writing. It makes Proust sound precious. It heightens, embroiders, perfumes. Where the French is exact, rigorous, almost clinical in its dissection of feeling, the English tends toward the ornate, reaching for a lushness that the original does not actually possess. Proust's sentences are elaborate, certainly, but they are elaborate the way a proof is elaborate; the balance and the maxim-like compression are load-bearing. Some of that severity is lost here, traded for a Belle Époque shimmer that is lovely on its own terms but is, finally, a different thing. There are stretches where the cadence is so seductive that the translator's temperament becomes more present than the author's intelligence.

The title is the emblem of the whole problem, and it is impossible to discuss this version without it. Borrowing a line from Shakespeare's thirtieth sonnet produces a beautiful phrase that points in precisely the wrong direction. It suggests an old man's passive drift back through the years, a sweet melancholy summoning-up of what is gone. But the book is about the opposite: an active, almost violent recovery of time through involuntary memory and the redemptive labour of art. To call it Remembrance of Things Past is to misfile the novel on its own cover. The original author, gravely ill, registered his dismay at the liberty, and it took the better part of a century before later editors restored a title closer to his meaning. Anyone coming to the work through this name should know they have been gently misdirected before the first page.

There is also the matter of the foundations. The translator was working from a corrupt French edition, and was racing his own mortality, completing all but the last stretch before he died with the final volume unfinished. Subsequent revisers have quietly corrected hundreds of small slips and pruned back the floridity, and those revised texts are the ones a first-time reader is best steered toward. But it would be ungenerous to let the errata define the achievement. The scale of what was attempted here, by one man, alongside a small library of other translations, remains faintly absurd in the best way.

So where does that leave this particular English Proust? It can neither be dismissed nor wholly trusted, which may be the honest condition of reading any translation of this magnitude. The dated diction, the occasional preciousness, the misleading title - these are real, and a reader who wants the austere, exact Proust will feel the version pulling elsewhere. But there is a reason it has never quite been displaced. It was the work of someone who understood the book early and loved it without reservation, and that love is legible in every cadence. The advice, then: read it for the spell it casts, keep a revised edition or the French nearby for correction, and treat the two artists as collaborators whose disagreements are part of what one is reading.