#robin buss

[fugglerz]

[pedanther]

I decided to do Monte Cristo daily again and three days in I'm being reminded why I didn't finish before: I'm finding the entries lengthy and unengaging. I know it's one of your favorite stories and I wonder whether you can recommend a translation that a modern reader might not find so dry and heavy.

Normally, the answer to a question like this would be easy: The translation I always recommend in any case is the 1996 translation by Robin Buss, which is the most recent and has the most modern language. It's the translation Penguin Classics uses for all their editions.

The trouble is that I'm pretty sure this is the translation that Monte Cristo Daily is using, so if you're finding it hard going there isn't another more modern rendition to try.

[booksandchainmail]

The growth of the nineteenth-century metropolis led to a whole literature of the urban life, later exploited on film, in which the city is no longer seen as a place of civilized, ‘urbane’ living and safety from attack, but as a menacing sub-world, in which human beings prey on one another or suffer fearful bouts of loneliness, alienation, and ennui. A machine devised to supply every need of civilized humanity in one place has become a monster enclosing every form of vice and depravity. Only in England did murder continue to take place in country houses.

Robin Buss, introduction to The Count of Monte Cristo

[nreadsandetc]

The dead have never done as much evil as the living do in a day

[apesoformythoughts]

“Dumas’ first, vital departure from Peuchet is to make Monte Cristo only indirectly the avenger: his ‘victims’ are all, in reality, destroyed by their own past misdeeds which Monte Cristo uncovers.

As the man who brings the truth to light and uses the discovery to punish the wrongdoer, Monte Cristo is the forerunner of the detective, that central figure in modern popular fiction.”

— Robin Buss

[brightbeautifulthings]

'Senseless!' he said. 'The day when I resolved to take my revenge ... senseless, not to have torn out my heart!'

The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas (trans. Robin Buss)

[hermitthrush]

Maximilien, the friends whom we have lost do not rest in the earth, they are buried in our hearts, and that is how God wanted it, so that we should always be in their company. I have two friends who are always with me, in that way: one is the man who gave me life, the other is the one who gave me understanding. The spirit of both lives in me. I consult them when I am in doubt and, if I have done any good, I owe it to their advice.

Alexander Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo (1844) | Buss translation.  The Count consoles the grief-stricken Morrel.

[nreadsandetc]

Moral wounds have the peculiarity that they are invisible, but do not close: always painful, always ready to bleed when touched, they remain tender and open in the heart.