The Count of Monte Cristo (Unabridged Penguin) Read Online Free PDF Page A

treat
Monte Cristo
as a treasure-trove rather than a sacred text, or that the many adaptations, abbreviations and reworkings of it have been done with a good deal less reverence (and consequently, more often than not, a good deal more success) than, say, Claude Chabrol brought to his film version of
Madame Bovary
. In the main, its fate has been that of most nineteenth-century ‘adventure’ novels: it has been treated as mere entertainment for adults or literature for the young.
    The truth is that, more because of the subject-matter than because of its length, the novel has had to be tampered with before it can be offered to young readers; or, as one may conjecture, to readersin mid-Victorian England. And, because this is merely a ‘popular’ novel, as well as one which represents a huge amount of work for a translator, there has been little enthusiasm in the English-speaking world for re-translating it.
    Claude Schopp’s edition (Robert Laffont, 1993), which lists the main foreign translations, records nothing into English since 1910. The most readily available edition in Britain at the moment reproduces the anonymous translation first published by Chapman & Hall in 1846. Its editor for the Oxford World’s Classics series (1990), David Coward, writes that ‘with one or two exceptions, the small number of “new” translations since made have drawn heavily upon… this classic version’.
    Anyone who has read
The Count of Monte Cristo
only in this ‘classic version’ has never read Dumas’ novel. For a start, the translation is occasionally inaccurate and is written in a nineteenth-century English that now sounds far more antiquated than the French of the original does to a modern French reader: to mention one small point in this connection, Dumas uses a good deal of dialogue (he wrote by the line), and the constant inversions of ‘said he’ and ‘cried he’ are both irritating and antiquated. There are some real oddities, like the attempt to convey popular speech (which does not correspond to anything in Dumas), when the sailor in Chapter XXV says: ‘that’s one of them nabob gentlemen from Ingy [
sic
], no doubt…’ Even aside from that, most of the dialogues in this nineteenth-century translation, in which the characters utter sentences like: ‘I will join you ere long’, ‘I confess he asked me none’ and ‘When will all this cease?’, have the authentic creak of the Victorian stage boards and the gaslit melodrama.
    It can be argued that this language accurately conveys an aspect of Dumas’ work, but not even his worst detractors would pretend that there is nothing more to it than that. Still less acceptable, however, than the language of this Victorian translation is the huge number of omissions and bowdlerizations of Dumas’ text. The latter include part of Franz’s opium dream at the end of Chapter XXXI , some of the dialogue between Villefort and Madame Danglars in Chapter LXVII , and several parts of Chapter XCVII , on Eugénie and Louise’s flight to Belgium. In some cases the changes are so slight as to be quite hard to detect. In the description of Eugénie at the opera ( Chapter LIII ) for example, Dumas remarks that, if one could reproach her with anything, it was that, both inher upbringing and her appearance, ‘she seemed rather to belong to another sex’. The English translator renders this: ‘As for her attainments, the only fault to be found with them was… that they were somewhat too erudite and masculine for so young a person’ (p. 542)! At the end of Chapter XCVII , the translation (p. 950) simply omits the few lines of dialogue where Dumas has Eugénie say that ‘
le rapt est bel et bien consommê
’ – where the word
rapt
(‘abduction’) has a rather too overtly sexual connotation. Similarly, earlier in the same chapter, where Eugénie jokes that anyone would think she was ‘abducting’ (
enlève
) Louise – another word used almost exclusively of a man with a