#and an entire longwinded aside on the sewer system. and argots. | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

coquelicoq · 2 years

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omg i promise this will be my last post about this today but not only am i reading this book in the original french for the first time rather than the english translation i have read in the past, i'm also reading it unabridged for the first time. i've been curious when we would start getting to some action that didn't make it into the abridged version, because the abridged version is 441 pages and just volume 1 (of two) of the original is 700 pages, so there must be a bunch of stuff missing. i feel like everything i've read so far (8 chapters and 87 pages in) is familiar, so i was beginning to think that the cut stuff must all be ahead of me, but i just checked my abridged copy to see how many pages it took in that version to get to where i am now, and it only took 29 pages! that is, just the part i've read so far took 3 times as many pages in the original as in the abridged translation!! so maybe i do already know everything that's going to happen? i'm on tenterhooks.

also, just for fun i looked to see what the translator did with one particular sentence in the french that i wouldn't have the first idea how to translate (Le geôlier avait raison, il s'en fallait bien peu que Dantès ne fût fou), and he just...didn't include it. well that's one way to do it! how handy to abridge and translate at the same time...if a sentence is too hard to translate, out it goes!

#i mean in fairness to lowell bair that sentence was dead weight #the sentiment had already been gotten across by other sentences #but still it made me chuckle thinking that that could have been a deliberate strategy #it probably wasn't. but what if #omg also this just reminded me that the only version of les miz that i've ever read was in english and abridged #and it was still 1000 pages long...#it still spent 100 pages on the history of convents...#i feel like you should not be able to call it an abridged version if it still contains 100 pages on the history of convents.#and an entire longwinded aside on the sewer system. and argots.#don't get me wrong i want to know about the argots of the parisian criminal class or whatever. but just give me the whole thing then #the count of monte cristo #translation #my posts #okay but there are some things i'm hoping the original goes into more depth about #like i want a lot more details on how abbé faria taught dantès like 4 new languages and a bunch of other shit in two years #and more details on how come no one ever recognizes him #so we'll see if lowell was just holding out on me or if it was dumas who was holding out on me all along

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