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Candide

or Optimism

By Voltaire, Burton Raffel (Translator)

(26)

| Hardcover | 9780300106558

Book Description

In this new translation of Voltaire’s Candide, distinguished translator Burton Raffel captures the French novel’s irreverent spirit and offers a vivid, contemporary version of the 250-year-old text. Raffel casts the novel in an English idiom that--had Voltaire been a twenty-first-Continue

In this new translation of Voltaire’s Candide, distinguished translator Burton Raffel captures the French novel’s irreverent spirit and offers a vivid, contemporary version of the 250-year-old text. Raffel casts the novel in an English idiom that--had Voltaire been a twenty-first-century American--he might himself have employed. The translation is immediate and unencumbered, and for the first time makes Voltaire the satirist a wicked pleasure for English-speaking readers.
Candide recounts the fantastically improbable travels, adventures, and misfortunes of the young Candide, his beloved Cunégonde, and his devoutly optimistic tutor, Pangloss. Endowed at the start with good fortune and every prospect for happiness and success, the characters nevertheless encounter every conceivable misfortune. Voltaire’s philosophical tale, in part an ironic attack on the optimistic thinking of such figures as G. W. Leibniz and Alexander Pope, has proved enormously influential over the years. In a general introduction to this volume, historian Johnson Kent Wright places Candide in the contexts of Voltaire’s life and work and the Age of Enlightenment.

1 Review

  • I read this on the beach in Cape May. A girl I was seeing at the time was with me. She related later that she had shared with her mother what I was reading. According to the mother, "Any boy who reads Candide in his spare time is a keeper."

    We did not last.

    Is this helpful?

    ― Batona said on Mar 24, 2007 about the Paperback edition | 1 feedback

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ISBN Edition List Sale Seller
9780300106558 Hardcover $23.00 $17.16 Amazon US
£14.00 £14.00 Amazon UK
$24.37 $17.73 Amazon CA
¥2988.00 ¥3288.00 Amazon JP
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