As it happens, those slippery past tenses reach to the heart of Proust, and of the torments of translating a narrator who perpetually folds the past into the present (and vice versa). Prendergast also quotes a facetious idea for the first sentence that came into Penguin’s special Proust website: “For absolutely bloody ages it was lights out early”.OTT, maybe – but that does have a nice whiff of Proust’s fin-de-si?e, lounge-lizard characters. The glory, and curse, of the version that Scott Moncrieff heroically produced during the Twenties is that it sounds as if written by a milord straight from the pages of A la recherche du temps perdu. Scott Moncrieff acted as private secretary to the press baron, Lord Northcliffe.

He was a suave Scottish gent of the kind whom the novel’s protagonist might easily have run across in a chi-chi Parisian salon, gallery – or brothel. Behind the corrections offered by Terence Kilmartin and D J Enright, his purple flourishes and Edwardian swagger still give the old translation much of its enduring charm.Despite the wide acclaim that greeted Enright’s final polish in 1992, Penguin soon decided that they needed an in-house Proust for their classics list. The publisher invited Prendergast to oversee the Herculean task in 1995: “I’d done little bits and pieces of literary translation before, but nothing to write home about,” he recalls. “I thought it would be interesting to go down this road for a while. And interesting it proved to be, confirming me in the view that the kinds of judgments and decisions bound up with literary translation make it one of the higher forms of criticism.”In general, the Penguin team offer fidelity to the versatile, mutable languages of the text, in place of the consistent period aura and mood found in Scott Moncrieff Penguin’s unity pivots on the author’s diversity. “I wouldn’t want this to be seen as an attempt to ‘update’ or ‘modernise’ Proust,” remarks the editor. “It is rather an attempt to be faithful to Proust in the terms available to us.” Does his little clan of colleagues promise an improved version? “Well, there are certain respects in which I think our translation is better .. obviously, I would think that.

But, in terms of some overall judgement, I would prefer ‘different’ to ‘better’.”It sounds altered, most conspicuously, in the orchestration of seven idiosyncratic voices. Prendergast reflects that the vast burden of translating Proust is now “beyond a single individual”. Yet his original dream-team would have looked a bit different to the magnificent seven that he finally recruited: Lydia Davis, James Grieve, Mark Treharne, John Sturrock, Carol Clark, Peter Collier and Ian Patterson. Early on, he approached Harold Pinter, who had published his inspired (but unfilmed) Proust Screenplay in 1977 It was “no surprise when he turned me down” As did Julian Barnes. He also “toyed with the idea” of Paul Auster.The Penguin chorus of strong voices draws attention to the shifts in tone and style between volumes Proust began his novel in earnest in 1908.