The Red and the Black (Modern Library)

Rating:
Summary: Raffel's translation sings!
Review: I put off reading this novel for 30 years because I could not get past the first page in prior translations. Raffel has created a highly readable version which moves without getting bogged down in Victorian hyperbole. His addition of modernized expressions detracts in no way from the period of the novel; these additions simply make it more accessible to the modern reader. I was delighted to discover a compelling story, and a very likeable, although fallible hero. The plot reminds me in many ways of Dostoevsky's "Idiot": the author's indictment of the suffocating societal milieu, the sympathetic hero, the various femme fatales, as well Stendhal's delicious skewering of the corrupt powermongering clergy....altogether quite an enjoyable read that I was sorry to see end.

Rating:
Summary: Raffel Does It Again
Review: Readers in my generation grew up with some pretty awful translations, with even the French and Russian writers often coming off sounding Victorian. We should be grateful for Burton Raffel and other currently active translators (including Richard Pavear and Larissa Volokonsky, who got the vernacular back into Dostoievski) for changing that. It was Raffel who finally enabled me to read and savorDon Quixote, and I'll always thank him for that. Now I also owe him thanks for making Stendahl's uneven but nonetheless great tale of Julien Sorell so engaging and readable.

If any reader out there can make any sense of the mystifying jacket photograph on this book, please share that sense with us. What does it have to do with the book? More to the point, what IS it? Do the torso and the oversized hand belong to the same person, or what?

But, hey, the Modern Library gave us a full cloth binding on this one, so we can forgive the jacket.