The Past Continuous

Several friends whose grasp of English grammar is better than mine have been unable to answer a question I have: What is the name of the construction in English, where the word “would” is used as a continuous past tense instead of as a conditional? Here’s an example I made up: “As a child, I would often go and play in a sandbox.”

Trying to figure this out, I remembered one of the most famous opening lines in all of literature, the first sentence in Marcel Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu: “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.” I just came across an interesting discussion between Richard Howard and George Plimpton about different published and unpublished translations of this sentence, but none of them uses the “would” construction.

Which is what I would use, here: “For a long time, I would go to bed early.” It gives the sense of a repeated action happening over time, in the imperfect, though Proust doesn’t use the imperfect here, which, as Howard points out, is jarring: almost nowhere else in the seven volumes is the passé composé used in the narrative. The standard English translation for decades, Scott Moncrieff, reads “I used to go to bed early,” which is a different imperfect continuous…

Such questions keep me up at night, which is better than being kept up by stupid and illegal foreign wars.