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

woman – the translator prefers the more neutral phrase ‘carrying me off’ and omits altogether Louise’s remark that Eugénie is ‘a real Amazon’. Another anonymous translation (Dent, 1894) refers to ‘the escape’ rather than ‘the abduction’ – which makes nonsense of Louise’s reply that it is not a true abduction since it has been accomplished without violence.
    What may be more surprising than these concessions to the prudery of the age is that the Victorian translators left in as much as they did. And the omissions are by no means all to do with sexual matters. At the start of Chapter XXXIV , for example, the translator decides to spare us the description of the route taken through Rome by Albert and Franz on their way to the Colosseum (though the 1894 translator restores it). A whole paragraph analysing the character of M. de Villefort at the start of Chapter XLVIII is cut out; almost a whole page of dialogue between Albert and Monte Cristo, on horses, in Chapter LXXXV is cavalierly omitted (part was restored by the translator of 1894); and so on. This is only a tiny sample of what is, in reality, a vast number of phrases omitted, and occasionally mistranslated.
    What we see here, interestingly enough, is a stage in the process of transforming Dumas’ text into something simpler, less complex, less rich in allusions, but more concentrated in plot and action. The 1846 translator already has an idea of what kind of novel this is, and that dictates what he, or she, can afford to omit: travelogue, classical references, sexual and psychological analysis, and so on. None of these is essential to the plot of a thriller, and if some of them will embarrass English readers, then why leave them in? The only problem is that, nearly 150 years later, we do not have quite the same idea of what is and what is not important. It was high time to go back to Dumas, entire and unexpurgated.
    As the basis for my translation, I have used the edition by Schopp, quoted above, and the three-volume edition in the
Livre de Poche
(1973). Both of these use an arrangement of chapters which differs slightly from that in the nineteenth-century English translations. I have followed the
Livre de Poche
in not changing Dumas’ ‘errors’ of chronology etc. in the text as Schopp does; instead I have pointed out the more important ones in the notes. I owe a debt to Schopp and to Coward’s edition in the World’s Classics series for some of the information in the notes.
    On the broader question of translation, I have tried above all to produce a version that is accurate and readable. A great deal of nonsense is written about translation, particularly by academics who approach it either as a terrain for theoretical debate or, worse still, as a moral issue: ‘the translator must always be faithful to his original,’ Leonard Tancock wrote, oddly assuming that translation is a masculine activity, even though on this occasion he was prefacing Nancy Mitford’s translation of
La Princesse de Clèves
(Penguin, 1978). ‘… he has no right whatever to take liberties with it… Nor has he any right to try to smooth the reader’s path by the omission of “dull” bits, short-circuitings, explanatory additions, radical transferences or changes of order.’ Why? And who says? Is it the reader who is demanding this perfection, this absence of explanatory additions, and so on?
    Such academic theorists insist that a translation must read like a translation – it is somehow immoral to conceal the process that has gone into making it. ‘Ordinary’ readers usually demand the opposite, and reviewers in quite respectable papers sometimes show little appreciation of what the process means and involves: ‘Not all of this material works in translation,’ said one serious review of a book by Umberto Eco; and another: ‘… the stories [of Viktoria Tokareva] are well served by their translator, who hardly ever gets in the way’.
    In philosophical