Quote:
Originally Posted by stuartjmz
This is one of the things I like about the Buss translation of Monte Cristo - Buss's own comments about translation and the role of the translator. Your comments on the "ageing" of translations vs originals has me intrigued. I only have one book I can test that on, so I shall keep Kipling's19th-century Jungle Book on hand while I work through Ajay Anand's 21st-century Hindi translation to see how they stack up, thanks.
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The Buss translation of
Monte Cristo has been languishing on my ereader for a while; perhaps for next year I can have a challenge where I finally get to some of those, "I've been meaning to read that" books.
Buss is a good example of what I'm talking about, in a contrapositive manner. While
The Three Musketeers had its detractors when we read it a few months ago,
all seemed to agree that a couple of the recent translations were far superior to the earlier ones, even the ones that were contemporaneous. One of my hard and fast rules with older works going back to the classics is to eschew the public domain translation for something modern. Older translations seem inevitably fusty when modern ones delight.