Quote:
Originally Posted by ReadingManiac
I loved that book! I find the translation makes a big difference though. One version I had was full of wonderful flowing prose, another more stilted.
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Many translations are heavily edited. The standard English text of "The Count of Monte Cristo", for example, is that of the anonymous translator employed by Chapman and Hall for their 1846 British publication of it. It omits large sections of text dealing with a lesbian character, because that would have been unacceptable for a Victorian British readership. That's still the version normally read in English today, although a recent translation by Robin Buss for Penguin Classics in 1996 is, thankfully, now available.
An even more egregious situation is that of the most commonly-encountered English version of Jules Verne's "Journey to the Centre of the Earth", published by Griffith and Farran in 1871. It renames the book's major characters: eg the protagonist, "Axel", becomes "Harry" in the translation, while his uncle, Professor Lidenbrock, is renamed to Professor Hardwigg. Entire chapters of the book are omitted, or completely re-written. Eg the detailed account of how Axel decodes the manuscript which leads to the path into the volcano is entirely omitted, with "Harry" just mysteriously deciphering it without explanation.
(I've uploaded both the original translation and a more recent, enormously more faithful one, to the MR library.)
So please, when you say you've "read" a book in translation, tell us
which translation. You may have actually read a book which has only a tenuous connection with what the original author wrote
.