A review by spacestationtrustfund
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

1.0

DENNY WHY.

Okay so here's the thing, straight from the horse's mouth:

There are passages of mediocrity and banality in Les Miserables, as in all [Hugo's] work, which may cause the reader to lose all patience with him and put the book aside [...]. The translator can, I maintain, do something to remedy these defects… He can 'edit'—that is to say abridge, tone down rhetoric, even delete.

Anyway, Denny goes ahead and does that, namely by removing over 100 pages' worth of the text, including moving an entire section (the digression concerning "Argot") to an appendix, replacing one of Hugo's original poems with a much shorter version penned by Denny himself, and taking it upon himself to "improve upon" the original in all sorts of frustrating and misleading ways. If you want to read Norman Denny's opinion of what Les Misérables should be, then full fucking steam ahead!—but if you want to read Les Misérables, skip this edition.

I'm not even convinced that Denny LIKED Les Misérables, or Hugo at all, or even the act of translating. This thread claims that Denny's version:

[...] carries much of the poetry and force of the original. However, since it is not always a word-for-word translation, at times a bit of accuracy is sacrificed. Denny does mention in his introduction that a good translator should be more concerned with the *intent* and *spirit* of the author, and a translation that is too literal (i.e., a word-for-word rendering) is often not the best way to achieve that.

which I obviously think is a load of bullshit, coming from Denny, even if I agree with the concept in principle. Regardless of whether that's indeed something with which a "good translator" should be concerned, Denny is not a good translator by pretty much any metric. Fuck this guy. Don't read this shit.