Rating: 
Summary: A note on the translation
Review: This is not about the work of Rabelais itself, which does not need promotion, but about Cohen's translation, which a reviewer below has maligned. Because 22 of 27 people so far have found his/her review "helpful" I feel obliged to put in a word, though not on account of any agenda. Opinions on translation are nearly as personal as opinions on more recognizable arts, yet some objections are also clearly mistaken.The reviewer below complains that paragraphs have been invented. S/he uses this as a representative example of the numerous 'mistakes'. Yes, paragraphs have been invented but if you look at other modern translations - here on Amazon, where you can use the Look Inside feature - you will notice the paragraphs in Frame's and Raffel's versions break off at the same point as Cohen's, for whatever common purpose they have in mind (I assume readability). Urquhart's translation (incomplete, 17th century, finished by Motteux) is regarded as a classic, but it is not the "best", the most accurate or the most readable. The reviewer also insists Cohen's translation is not literal enough, as if this were a major fault. Literalness is not the most important, much less the only principle by which to judge a translation, it is one among many. Many readers who pick up the Urquhart today would probably be put off by Rabelais. (I am put off by the Raffel, though it is recent, so contemporaneity is not an overriding concern either.) Also remember Rabelais was writing in the early 16th century, and the language has changed significantly, so even the average French reader today engages in a certain degree of "translation" - comparing every word and syntactical deviation between the French and English texts is misleading. Literary translation is an inherently faulty art, and the translator has priorities that differ from the author's (you can't always be faithful to the author when the reader needs more attention); s/he is bound to make compromises. Not that comparison is impossible, nor that there is no such thing as a poor translation, but Cohen was one of the best in his trade and this translation, which I too have compared with the original text, is not particularly "worse" or "better" than Frame et al. Each of them lapses where another succeeds, each of them make choices that may be more or less accurate, reader-friendly, or grammatically consistent. To pick the first paragraph as an example again, Rabelais alludes to a popular saying of "Flacce" in the original - Frame translates the name as Flaccus, Cohen as Horace. The latter choice may seem egregious at first, but consider: Flaccus was a popular name in Rome and may stand for nearly any one of the several Roman personalities with Flaccus as a last name, whereas it would be quite clear to Latin readers, which most or all literate people of Rabelais' period and society were, that Rabelais is talking about Horace, whose full name was Quintus Horatius Flaccus. Frame remains literal, but Cohen opts to remove a possible early stumble for the contemporary reader. Yet, on the next page, Cohen does not translate the inscription HIC BIBITUR, but Frame does: "Here you drink". If you want to choose a suitable translation, in this case, you have to decide which one appeals to you most by browsing several first; the scholarly-minded will have to learn the language anyway if they want to carry out a textual analysis. There are also previous versions by LeClerq and Putnam (one of the highly recommended translators of Cervantes). And of course, once you read Rabelais, the irony of discussing academic questions about his work won't evade you; though if it does, then you probably did pick a bad translation ...
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