What’s the best translation of Bambi?
The 1942 Bambi movie, re-released in 1988, is a fixture of my childhood. I recently learned that it started out as a novel by an Austrian Jew.
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How can I read Layla and Majnun in English?
And now for something completely different… Penguin Classics is throwing their weight behind a Persian epic poem about star-crossed lovers Layla and Majnun.
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What’s the best translation of War and Peace?
So you’re going to read War and Peace in English. A worthy ambition. But do you want the embedded French passages translated into English in the text itself, or in footnotes?
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What’s the best translation of Solaris by Stanislaw Lem?
Now you can read Solaris, Stanislaw Lem’s best-known novel, in an English translation made directly from the original Polish!
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What’s the best translation of Les Miserables?
I like big books and I cannot lie! Wordsworth Classics presents the Wilbour translation in two volumes, but Signet Classics still sells what may be the thickest mass-market paperback in existence. More pages than their War and Peace!
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What’s the best translation of Anna Karenina?
I read and enjoyed the Maude translation, but most people will have heard of the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, as it was chosen for Oprah’s book club in 2004. Supposedly it sounds more like Tolstoy than, say, Garnett…
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Review of The Plague by Camus (translated by Robin Buss)
I thought I wouldn’t like this book. I didn’t like the first part, which described the spread of the plague. But the plague is not actually the point. What matters is how people react to it.
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What’s the best translation of The Plague by Camus?
The Plague is popular these days because of the pandemic; that’s a good thing, because it’s an essentially hopeful book.
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What’s the best translation of The Tale of Genji?
If you have never read The Tale of Genji, my advice is, DON’T START WITH TYLER. That’s what I did: I started with Tyler. That was a mistake.
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What do the star ratings mean?
Quantitative scales are all very well and good. Except that the numbers mean different things to different people.
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