Quote:
Originally Posted by astrangerhere
I wish my French were good enough and I wasn't so obsessive about the footnotes.
|
I was pleased to find that my French is good enough for the conversations; I enjoy that aspect of P&V and prefer it to the silent translations of Dunagin. I could make it through the letters, but the more formal vocabulary and sentence structure would slow me down more than I’d like. Fortunately, most of the French is conversation. Actually, the relative ease with which I read the French makes me wonder just how fluent those Russians were! I wonder if that wasn’t a point that Tolstoy was making, or if, perhaps, his own French wasn’t top notch.
I do read the footnotes but they generally don’t present a problem. What I miss about paper books is that it’s so much harder to flip around and check on references in ebooks. In yesterday’s stint, for example, I’d have loved to have gone back and read Pierre’s and Andrei’s earlier conversation about fallen women, but it was too much trouble to locate.