「 ''Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure.'' Lydia Davis translates: ''For a long time, I went to bed early,'' capturing some of the intentional awkwardness of the original.
You can see on Proust's manuscripts how he crossed out a more conventional lead-in, choosing to start with that floating, unanchored ''for a long time.'' Scott Moncrieff regularized the sentence by putting the verb in the tense of habitual action: ''I used to go to bed early.'' But Proust chose the ''passe compose,'' the tense compounded of past and present, which both produces an abruptness inconsistent with literary ''stylishness'' and points to the crucial issue of temporal structure. 」（NY Times Book Review）


唉，我讀小說從不會小心地去辨識作者或譯者在這些時態語句上反覆推敲的沈吟安排。聽說周克希先生獨力完成的第二個中文譯本可望在今年內上市第一部。雖然期待，但我的人生還會有像去年夏日那樣一口氣悶頭讀完那二百八十萬字小說的時光嗎？