About Moncrieff’s translation of
À la recherche du temps perdu as Remembrance of Things Past
 

In Search of Lost Time (a translation of the original À la recherche du temps perdu) is a sequence of 7 novels by French writer Marcel Proust, published between 1913 and 1927 ... Previous English translations used the Shakespearean phrase Remembrance of Things Past (taken from Sonnet 30) as the title, despite Proust's exhortations to the contrary.
    Source:  Wikipedia -  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Proust

Remembrance of Things Past was Scott Moncrieff’s invention; he picked out a quote from Shakespeare. Obviously, Scott Moncrieff wanted something that echoed English literature. But Proust himself hated the English title, and he was right. ... “Remembrance of Things Past” is quite pretty, but has absolutely nothing to do with Proust’s own title. “Remembrance” loses all the ambiguity of the word “lost”—even though “lost” doesn’t capture the meaning of “wasted” that is contained in the French word “perdu.” “Remembrance of Things Past” also loses the word “recherche,” which we’ve translated as “In Search of,” but which is a word with multiple meanings, as it means both “investigation” and “experiment.”
    Source: World Press Review (VOL. 50, No. 2) - http://www.worldpress.org/Europe/874.cfm

Scott-Moncrieff ... had a tendency to over-elaborate. The general title - Remembrance of Things Past - is typical of his cucumber-sandwich prose. Proust hated it, and no wonder: his active "quest" was replaced with daydreaming and commemoration.
    Source:  Telegraph (UK publication) – 12/10/02 - http://www.arts.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2002/10/13/bopro13.xml

Proust took his title from Voltaire’s translation of Shakespeare’s sonnet 30, so when C.K. Moncrieff wrote the first English translation of A la recherche du temps perdu in the year before Proust’s death, he used Shakespeare’s words.
    Source:  Humanitas, Volume XI, No. 1, 1998 -   http://www.alaindebotton.com/reviews/proust_humanitas.htm