Chasing Lost Time by Jean Findlay
Chatto & Windus, £25
Sub-titled “The Life of CK Scott Moncrieff: soldier, spy and translator”, this book will be of particular interest to those who first encountered Proust’s great novel through Scott Moncrieff’s 1920s translation. Written in affectionate, familial tribute to this many-sided man, his great-niece shows that CM’s life was much more interesting than one might have guessed.
Born in 1890 into an old Scottish family, he won a scholarship to Winchester; tellingly, in the entrance exam his translation from Ovid showed “an almost adult understanding”. But although he inherited a love of literature from his mother and wrote somewhat mannered poetry himself, it took Scott Moncrieff some years to develop his particular gift for translation.
Although criticised by later translators as taking too much poetic licence with Proust’s text, he was uniquely suited to the challenge: like Proust he had a passion for genealogy and aesthetics, alongside an acute sensitivity to the nuances of language. The ultimate accolade for his translation came from Joseph Conrad, himself no stranger to absorbing a new language: “It is clear you have done this for love … and there is no more to be said.”
A brave First World War soldier, having enlisted in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, CM was invalided out of the army in 1917 with an MC and a serious leg wound. More importantly, he had become a Catholic in 1915, feeling that the Church gave stronger spiritual support to soldiers than Anglicanism. Findlay suggests that he “joined a religion that expected celibacy or marriage, but had the gift of absolution, repentance from sin in the confessional”.
She writes this having discovered a cache of hidden letters to a friend, Vyvyan Holland (son of Oscar Wilde), which show a side of CM that he successfully hid from his family: his homosexuality. As a British spy in Mussolini’s Italy during the 1920s (he died in Rome of stomach cancer in 1930), he clearly understood secrecy from the inside.
What emerges from this portrait is a man of great generosity, loyalty to family and friends and fidelity to his faith: “a Catholic soul but … a Protestant work ethic”.
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