this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
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In middle school I read The Three Musketeers and enjoyed it overall. Later in high school a movie adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo was released and I enjoyed it enough to read the book. I feel like I lucked out in picking up the Robin Buss translation. It was a recent translation based on the most complete original texts he could find. He explained how the first anonymous English translations would sometimes edit the story to fit English sensibilities of the era or simply not be very good at translation. The book is full of endnotes explaining things, like references that would’ve been obvious to contemporary readers but are largely lost to anglophones over a century later, or things that simply don’t translate well, like an important scene where a character uses the formal vous tense instead of the informal/familiar tu tense but this distinction doesn’t exist in modern English. It made me want to re-read The Three Musketeers in a translation by Buss, but the only other Dumas work he translated before his death at the age of 67 in 2006 was The Black Tulip.

Have you read Buss’s translation of The Count of Monte Cristo? Have you found a similar translation you liked for The Three Musketeers? Searching online the most helpful listings I’ve found are a couple old Reddit threads where it seems like the two recommendations are those by Richard Pevear or Lawrence Ellsworth.

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[–] hopetelescope@lemmy.world 2 points 8 hours ago

A few years ago I was in the same boat as you. I found a blog post that compared the first pages of all the available editions, which at the time I found useful, but Google and other search engines are useless nowadays and I can’t find it now, sadly. Eventually, I went with the Pevear version. It doesn’t quite have the zip that Buss’s Monte Cristo translation has, but I still thoroughly enjoyed it. Even though personally, I think The Three Musketeers gets a little lost in the second half of the story(though the first half is great).

I haven’t read Lawrence Ellsworth translation of Musketeers, but I have read his translations of Twenty Years After and Blood Royal. I found them very readable and a considerable step up from the widely available 19th century translations that exist in the public domain.