In the mid-1990s, Penguin decided to prepare a wholly new translation of Marcel Proust’s seven-part novel À la recherche du temps perdu, to compete with the existing version of C.K. Scott-Moncrieff (revised by Terence Kilmartin and D.J. Enright). The Penguin project was overseen by a general editor, who chose seven different translators, each of whom was assigned to work on a separate section of the text. The project did not evolve without difficulties, some of which arose from incompatibilities between the working hypotheses of certain members of the team. I was one of the team, and the word ‘demented’ in the title of my essay here refers not to those with whom I collaborated but to me, in the view or by the inference of at least one of my fellows.

As general editor of the new translation, Penguin chose Christopher Prendergast, a professor of French then at Cambridge. The people he selected for the project were all experienced translators or Proust scholars, or qualified in both domains. I, for one, had already translated the first part of À la recherche (Swann’s Way, 1982); I had published articles, papers and reviews on Proust; I had taught his work to advanced students of literature for many years. But in the event our ‘collaboration’ amounted to this: we had a meeting, at which three of the seven translators were not present; and we corresponded by e-mail. I had the naive expectation that we would all be in frequent correspondence with each other. In fact, I had frequent contact only with the general editor and with Lydia Davis in New York, with each of whom I exchanged dozens of messages over a period of about five years. One of the seven was not on e-mail, so there was next to no contact with him; others made scant use of it.