Recommended Translations of Les Miserables?

[Grey Watcher]

So, there was a discussion that touched on Les Miserables and such, and I was inspired to read the dang thing. Problem is, I can't find a free English translation for my Kindle, and my French is nowhere near good enough to read it in the original French. Anyone have any suggestions on good translations, especially from among those available cheap on Amazon Kindle?

[Treblain]

Project Gutenberg does have a Kindle version here (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/135). I think I read that translation (Hapgood) and thought it was fine translation-wise, though having an e-reader's dictionary helped a lot in some cases. Wikipedia has a list of English translations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Mis%C3%A9rables#English_translations); I've heard good things about the Julie Rose translation which is the most recent and probably the most readable and best-annotated.

[afroakuma]

Make sure whatever you get is abridged. I read the original unabridged novel in French and would heartily recommend it as a form of torture.

[BWR]

So the recent movie of the musical is actually faithful to the original?

[Grey_Wolf_c]

So the recent movie of the musical is actually faithful to the original?

Unless they included a twenty-minute song on the history of a convent, no. Although that might be the case, I think I zoned-out at some point, and I may have missed it.

GW

[Dienekes]

Ehh, faithfulish. It leaves a lot out though (I don't think Jean Valjean is even introduced until a couple hundred pages in), and some characters change a bit. The Thenardiers are turned into comic relief instead of being the true monsters of the story. The students role is expanded upon, as is Gavroche's backstory. Eponine's crazy which is only alluded to in her song is on full display. Javert isn't religious.

The biggest change though is that Victor Hugo has a habit of going off on random seemingly unimportant tangents including talking about the sewer system of whatever city they're in or something. Some of it comes back and is relevant, a lot maybe has some deeper meaning I'm missing but really makes no difference to the story.

If you do intend to read it, good luck to you. I read through it once, and I never will again. Some of the characters are interesting with some good concepts, but there are parts that are just painful. When I want my Les Mis fix I just listen to the 10th Anniversary cds.

[Macros]

Make sure whatever you get is abridged. I read the original unabridged novel in French and would heartily recommend it as a form of torture.

Aww, come on, it's not so bad ! ... ok, it kinda is, but still ! well I enjoyed it...

About the musical... Well, let's say it's a reaaaaaally abridged version. I don't remember any gross transgretion, though, even if the characters are a bit flanderized. Ok, a lot. well I enjoyed it too...

[Grey Watcher]

Make sure whatever you get is abridged. I read the original unabridged novel in French and would heartily recommend it as a form of torture.

Well, I actually enjoyed reading Dante's Inferno, so really long doesn't bother me that much.

[afroakuma]

Well, I actually enjoyed reading Dante's Inferno, so really long doesn't bother me that much.

It's not about the length, it's about the maddening tangents and irrelevance. It's like...

Well, let's compare it to Star Wars: A New Hope. Imagine if it began with a half-hour on Cliegg Lars's business partner, leading up to the sale of the moisture farm to Cliegg Lars, then jumping to Owen Lars owning a successful moisture farm, marrying Beru, and eventually adopting a nephew. Only now do we start the movie, but when we hit the sandcrawler, we have to have half an hour expounding on how Jawas acquired sandcrawlers and came to favor them over other modes of desert transportation, then a fifteen-minute dissertation on the impact of Jawas on planetary commerce on Tatooine. Then we continue. When we reach the Dianoga, we'll need another tangent for that, yes, we'll have a sidebar for discussion of Garindan's career as an Imperial spy, another for the Kessel Run and a third for Hutts. Let's not forget that when Greedo appears, we'll need a talk about the comparative merits of bounty hunting over smuggling and other forms of illicit activity and of course we'll need to discuss Shyriiwook and multilanguage communication in the Star Wars universe, preferably with an eye to its history and intricacies. The film would bloat out to ten hours, at least eight of which (depending on your appreciation for Star Wars) would be devoutly dedicated to making you want to eat your own eyeballs and fill your intestinal linings with undiluted capsaicin.

Actual I-wish-I-was-kidding example of what I mean: in abridged versions and the musical, the story begins with Valjean, Javert and plot setup - basically the germ of the whole tale. In the unabridged novel, the beginning consists of: The Bishop of Digne was born into the nobility, his wife died, he was a minor priest, he had a chance encounter with Napoleon, he needs a whole chapter to talk to a dying revolutionary, etc. etc. etc. and eventually he will be a minor character who has an interaction with Valjean. Hooray.

Scholars of the novel have stated that nearly 1000 pages of the novel are devoted to Hugo's essays on random topics he obsessed over, and this count specifically excludes any mention of plot or subplot, which means that some number more mix irrelevance with minor subplots. 19 chapters are spent at Waterloo, which only figures into the tale through a minor character. Other author tracts include argot and the construction of the Paris sewer system. Les Miserables in unabridged form is infamous for these digressions. It is 14 chapters before Valjean shows up, and Hugo even lampshades it at one point: "Although these details in no way essentially concern that which we have to tell..."

I can appreciate the Inferno, which I have also read in its original language. I cannot appreciate the unabridged Les Miserables. The title refers to those who have read it, not to its characters.

[Legato Endless]

Along with everything else, also note that even an abridged version is going to contain a vast amount of authorial tract. For example, Hugo is Napoleon's most famous apologist, and it's a bit repetitive how much one's stance on royalism is brought up outside of the revolutionary plotline.

This applies to everything written by Hugo. The Hunchback of Notre Dame occasionally has a plot about some guys and a girl, the rest of the book is a treatise on Parisian architecture.

[LadyEowyn]

You can get an unabridged version, and I'd even recommend it in case you want to read some of the digressions at a future point; there are also some important bits that a lot of abridged versions leave out.

My favourite translation - which I searched through several bookshops before finding - was translated by Charles E. Wilbour in 1862. It's got more of the poetry and cadence that I associate with the book than some of the modern translations. There's the moderate annoyance of referring to places (aside from Paris) by their first letter followed by dashes (e.g., Digne is D----). I can identify it by its superior translation of the chapter titles (for example, Book 1 Chapter 4 is "To Entrust is Sometimes to Abandon", which captures the meaning of the chapter much better than any other translation I've seen, some of which are way off base).

Anyway, if you want to get an unabridged version but limit yourself to the pertinent parts of the book, here's a guide to the unessential vs. essential parts:

BOOK 1: Chapter I ("An Upright Man") is about the Bishop of Digne; it's really quite interested and worthwhile, but if you want to get directly into the main plot you can skip it. The other chapters are all plot (although the very first section of Chapter III ["The Year 1817"] is a review of French events in the aforementioned year, and can be dispensed with. It's only a few pages, though).

BOOK 2: All of Chapter I ("Waterloo", about the 1815 battle) can be dispensed with, EXCEPT its final section (section XIX, or 19). This last section is an essential part of the plot. You can also probably skip the greater part of VI ("Petit Picpus"), which describes in great detail a convent where Valjean ends up for a time, and can certainly skip the entirety of VII ("A Parenthesis"), giving Victor Hugo's thoughts on convents in general.

BOOK 3: You can skip Chapter I ("Paris Atomised", about the street children of Paris), EXCEPT for the last section, which introduces a new and important character. If I remember correctly, the rest of the book is plot-relevant.

BOOK 4: The first chapter isn't plot, but it's a review of French history around the time of the book's events, and is very pertinent to the revolutionary movement that is the heart of this section of the book. So it's worth reading. Skip Chapter VII ("Argot"), on the slang of the Paris slums.

BOOK 5: Skip Chapter II the (in)famous digression on Victor Hugo's thoughts on the Paris sewer system which interrupts a quite dramatic chase scene. The rest of the book is plot-relevant.

I've read the whole unabridged book once, although it did take me several months. I just wanted to know what was in it; now I skip the digressions (except for the beginning, about the Bishop of Digne, which is really an excellent portrait of a character and includes one of my favourite passages in the whole book).

Also, the musical is very, very good when done by a strong cast (I've seen it twice and loved it), and last year's film is a very faithful adaptation of the musical. They leave out a lot of the book's elements, and they're in no way a substitute for it, but they're very worthwhile. Russell Crowe's lack of singing chops is basically the only criticism most people have of the film.

EDIT: How accessible is Dante's Divine Comedy? I've considered reading it, but from what I've heard it includes a lot of Dante's contemporaries and historical figures in the various afterlives, and I'm worried I'd miss a lot of the references due to unfamiliarity with the political situation of the medieval Italian region.

[BWR]

I've read an English and a Norwegian translation of the Divine Comedy and found it fairly accessible, but try to find a nice annotated version to explain who all these contemporary Italians were and why they were in hell. Either that or read it next to a computer so you can use Wikipedia.

TBH, I've forgotten most of it. Hell was (obviously) the most intersting bit, Purgatory was entirely forgettable and Heaven was ok. Of course I read it about half my lifetime ago, so my appreciation of it may change if I reread it now.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

There's the moderate annoyance of referring to places (aside from Paris) by their first letter followed by dashes (e.g., Digne is D----).

I'm morbidly fascinated by this. Why on Earth would the translator do that? Is there a reason given?

GW

[Legato Endless]

I'm morbidly fascinated by this. Why on Earth would the translator do that? Is there a reason given?

GW

Popular style of 1800s novels. The convention existed to let the reader invent or implant whatever local they cared to, making the story more accessible since it could happen "anywhere." Bronte's works would be another example.