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Les Miserables: Complete and Unabridged (Signet Classics)
Books: Text Books: Philosophy: Item 8
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Les Miserables: Complete and Unabridged (Signet Classics)by Victor Hugo and Norman MacAfee
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188 of 198 people found the following review helpful: WARNING TO STUDENTS, August 21, 2000 Reviewer:Mr. A - Whether you have a miserable experience or a wonderful one will be determined by which translation of *Les Miserables* you're reading. Three translations are currently available: one by Charles E. Wilbour, one by Lee Fahnestock/Norman MacAfee (based on Wilbour), and one by Norman Denny. You can also get abridged (cut) versions. Don't get any abridged version. It's like reading a toilet paper wrapper - an almost worthless experience! If you have to write a report on *Les Miz* but prefer to skip reading it, then get the Cliffs Notes. The Cliffs Notes are better than abridged versions. If you want to read *Les Miz*, which translation is best? Simple: the Lee Fahnestock/Norman MacAfee. First of all, the Charles E. Wilbour translation was published in 1862, the year Hugo finished writing *Les Miz*. Wilbour translated all 1200 pages of *Les Miz* in just a few months, and it shows. What Wilbour wrote isn't French, it isn't English - it isn't any known tongue. It just can't be read. (Oh sure, it can be STUDIED, and it's the version in which I first read *Les Miz*, and some parts of it are okay, since Hugo is hard to kill.) This bad translation is around only because most publishers are too cheap to pay for new translations. Norman Denny's translation is new and published by Penguin, but it's bad, too. In the biography of Victor Hugo by Graham Robb, the Denny translation is called "a Swiss cheese of unavowed omissions and [it] bears out Hugo's comments on translation as a form of censorship. The translator does admit to 'thinning out, but never completely eliminating, [*Les Miz's*] lapses.'" Hm ... lapses? Here are some other remarks by Denny about *Les Miz*: "'wholly unrestrained,' 'no regard for the discipline of novel-writing,' 'moralizing rhetoric,' 'exasperating,' 'self-indulgent.'" Hugo is hard to kill, but Denny proves it's possible: I read his translation and it's the dullest of all time. The best translation is the Lee Fahnestock/Norman MacAfee one. Signet Classics publishes it. The cover shows the drawing of the waif from the musical. This translation (and no other) gets as close to the real thing as possible, in English. If Hugo had written in English, he would have written this. You can hear Hugo's "voice" and feel his living spirit. Though not perfect (few things are), this is a great achievement. Get the Lee Fahnestock/Charles MacAfee translation (that's two people), and leave the others on the shelf!
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