Soldier, poet, lover, spy: just the man to translate Proust

Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff’s Englishing of Proust — widely and immediately agreed to be one of the greatest literary translations of all time — very nearly didn’t happen. Scott Moncrieff only suggested the project to his publisher after they rejected a collection of satirical squibs in verse (sample: ‘Sir Philip Sassoon is the Member for Hythe;/ He is opulent, generous, swarthy and lithe.’). Like any good hack, he had another suggestion up his sleeve: there was this character Proust just starting to be published — making a bit of noise in France. Constable didn’t immediately see the value: ‘They replied that they did not see much use in publishing a translation of Prevost [sic].’ His sort-of mentor Edmund Gosse agreed: ‘Since you told me you were translating Proust I have not felt happy. Not here, O son of Apollo, are haunts meet for thee.’

Ah, hindsight. Translating Proust wasn’t all CK did in his astoundingly busy life. He also translated Pirandello and Stendhal, Beowulf, the Chanson de Roland and the letters of Abelard and Heloise. He wrote poetry and short stories and put himself about in the world of letters — even finding time to prosecute a long and pointless feud with Osbert Sitwell. Through these pages pass Robert Graves, G.K. Chesterton, Siegfried Sassoon, Joseph Conrad, Ronald Knox, Saki and George Moore and a very young Noël Coward. He was decorated for bravery on the Western Front, and worked as a British spy while living in Mussolini’s Italy.

Scott Moncrieff (the non-hyphenated double-barrel is characteristic of Scottish nobility, apparently) grew up in grand houses amid a fug of respectability in Scotland. He was a precociously swotty kid, volunteering a critical opinion on Milton’s ‘Nativity’ ode at the age of four. He won a scholarship to Winchester, and fell in with the literary and homosexual circle in London surrounding Oscar Wilde’s friend Robert Ross and his private secretary Christopher Sclater Millard.