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The fact that this Oxford edition chooses to retain the novel's original French title ("Notre-Dame de Paris") rather than its English counterpart ("The Hunchback of Notre-Dame"), which Hugo famously disliked for misrepresenting the book's contents, was encouraging to me when I found it in the bookstore. I've tried reading several other translations in the past including Walter Cobb's for Signet Classics and Catherine Liu's revised translation for Modern Library, but never could get beyond the first few chapters. I had also read and loved two other Hugo novels ("Les Miserables" and "The Man Who Laughs"), and couldn't understand why this famous novel never appealed to me.
This is the first version I was able to finish and I credit that to Alban Krailsheimer's extremely readable and vivid translation. He renders Hugo's often labyrinthine prose with great sensitivity, clarity, and eloquence. Readers who have read other translations may be surprised by the novel's bawdiness, eroticism, and humor. Hugo emerges as a very contemporary, imaginative writer.Read more ›
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20 of 20 people found the following review helpful
For readers familiar with Victor Hugo's "Notre-Dame de Paris" in the original French, translations into English of the nineteenth century and considerably later can be jolting. This especially applies to the dialogue of the novel. While characters with less formal education, including Esmeralda, are allowed to speak the "standard" English of the translator's period, a man of Claude Frollo's erudition is compelled to articulate in archaisms ("Thy dancing whirled in my brain; ... All at once thou didst begin to sing. ... At length thou didst, perhaps, take pity on me ..."). This falsifies the speech of such characters in the original, which is essentially that of an educated Parisian of 1831.
In 1978, the novel was delivered from latter-day Jacobeans by John Sturrock, whose vigorous translation is still in print from Penguin Classics. However, readers seeking the most accurate English rendition of Hugo's masterpiece should seriously consider Alban Krailsheimer's more recent version from Oxford World's Classics. In general, Krailsheimer is more appreciative of nuances of characterization. He manifests this awareness in translations that may be more conventional than Sturrock's, but which are also more attuned to the dramatic context in which particular words and phrases are employed. To cite one instance: in the dungeon where she awaits execution, Esmeralda laments: "J'ai froid, j'ai peur, et il y a des betes qui me montent le long du corps." Sturrock: "I'm cold, I'm frightened, and there are creatures that climb up my body." Krailsheimer: "I'm cold, I'm afraid, and there are creatures that climb over my body.Read more ›
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15 of 18 people found the following review helpful
"Notre Dame de Paris", better known by its English title "Hunchback of Notre Dame", suprised me with its applicability to the modern technological world. When I thought how unlikely events seemed and how painfully unsympathetic were most of the main characters, the story seemed poised to disappoint. But by the end I realized the fatal tragedy of the events and the effectiveness of Hugo's social commentary. All in all a wonderful book. It has inspired me to dig out Johnson's history of art to read again the history of gothic art. The book is more about architecture than about the hunchback, and events surrounding Claude Frollo, Quasimodo and Esmeralda seem to take a back seat to Hugo's passion for gothic architecture and its demise at the hands of modern "improvements". What surprised me most was an analogy by Hugo that presages technological advances of today, in particular the internet. In Book V Hugo describes the revolutionary advance made by the printing press and how it replaced architecture as the historical language for human ideas: "The invention of printing is the greatest event in history. It is the mother of revolutions. It is humanity's mode of expression totally renewed, human thought discarding one form and putting on another... In the form of printing, thought is more imperishable than ever; it is volatile, elusive, indestructible. It blends with the air. In the time of architecture it became a mountain and took forceful possession of an age and a space. Now it becomes a flock of birds, scatters to the four winds and simultaneously occupies every point of air and space.Read more ›
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This item: Notre-Dame de Paris (Oxford World's Classics)
