World Literature in English
Pick the English translation of the massive classic novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms that will best help you enjoy one of China’s greatest epics. You’ve got three to choose from.
According to Joyce Crick, translator for Oxford Classics, “[Kafka] insisted that the cover illustration should not depict the insect. The physical appearance of the insect is far less important than its emotional connotations.” But look how many current editions depict an insect anyway!
“Like Kafka written by Hemingway,” according to critic Jean Paulhan.
Elie Wiesel bears witness to the horrors of the Holocaust because “to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time."
There's only one, and according to the author, it's better than his original Spanish version!
If when you read this book, the characters are called Professor Von Hardwigg, Harry or Henry Lawson, and Gretchen, you are reading the anonymous 1871 Griffith and Farran English translation. Those are not the character names used in every other version---and those weren’t the only changes the translator made!
Did you know there’s no hot air balloon in the book? A balloon is shown on the covers of some editions because of the 1956 movie!
Jules Verne’s reputation in the Anglophone world has undergone considerable transformation as translators have more and more seriously sought to recapture his original text and its meaning.
It’s like the story of Robin Hood, but in China… that is, it would be, if the story of Robin Hood were brutally violent, and included crude language, seduction, murder of women and children, and cannibalism!
In his introduction to the Ginsburg translation published by Bantam, Donald Fanger calls Notes from Underground “one of the most sheerly astonishing and subversive creations of European fiction.”