Regarding Les Miserables:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Timboli
@ZodWallop - Have you checked out The Gutenberg Project, they have a few English translations for free?
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Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
They really aren't good translations, as I mentioned above. The modern ones are far better.
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I found this thread on Goodreads regarding different translations to be helpful:
Les Misérables question: Which translation?
The free Gutenberg translation is the Hapgood version.
I've decided to go with the Signet Classics Fahnestock/MacAfee translation based on this comment:
Quote:
My wife and I have been reading Les Miserables aloud together; she on her Kindle and me from an old paperback copy I've had for years. At first we just downloaded one of the cheapest unabridged kindle editions we could find... which turned out to be the Hapgood translation, while my paperback copy was the Fahnestock/MacAfee translation. For a little while we tried to make it work, but ultimately decided to spend some extra money to have the same translation.
We decided on the Fahnestock/MacAfee version. From our experience of reading the two side by side, Fahnestock/MacAfee was more understandable. There were certainly times when we preferred the wording of the Hapgood translation, buy typically it was the other way around.
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Considering the length of the book and that it is translated from another language, I don't mind spending the money to get a better reading experience.
My one concern is how the book will survive the conversion process. In the book, songs and poems were left in French with translations available via footnotes. Hopefully buying an .AZW version from Amazon, using Calibre to convert it to ePub and then convert
that to kepub doesn't wreck things.
I could just buy the kepub from Kobo, but odds are I won't.