There are some nice Folio editions coming out this year. The bloke's family orders them regularly, so I received The Art of War for my birthday. It's very nice, although the extensive background & annotations for every page means I read about three of the actual text an evening before I pass out.
The one thing one can be sure of with Folio is that there will be something for everyone! There's everything from Dawkins and Feynman to Andrew Lang and Tolkien (plus far too much Trollope)
First Orwell my parents gave me, in the country, when I was 12 or so, in French, translated as La Vache Enragée,* the old Gallimard edition, falling apart. I can still smell the warm paper (it was a hot summer near Montélimar) and see the dust motes in the sun rays in the book-lined passage to the bedroom, where i usually sat on the floor to read...
Et qui c'est, le Baron de Marbot?
* as in "manger de la vache enragée", being seriously skint
Marbot was an officer in Napoleon's army and after the restoration. His father was a general of division in Italy when Napoleon was First Consul. He was an an aide de campe to various marshals in Germany, Spain and Portugal and commanded a chasseur regiment from 1812-1814.
The memoirs saved my life when I was imprisoned in a chateau in Brittany as a youth. They were the only thing I had to read.
Marbot sounds WONDERFUL! Also, MUST pass on the tip (assuming she hasn't read it; she seems to have read EVERYTHING) to artaxastra, who has a couple of Napoleonic novels down the road in her historic cycle.
(Having read it, is Conan Doyle's Gérard a charming fiction, or has it got some basis in history? Haven't re-read it but it was another of the books my father gave me early on in French translation, and I remember loving it at the time; Gérard and Gil Blas de Santillane were my two favourite rogues..)
"Manger de la vache enragée": haven't heard it in quite a bit; my parents used it. It was the original translation's title (that has been changed in a new translation; like the new English-language Proust it may be more accurate but it's not a patch on the earlier one); can't recall when that came out in French first, possibly immediate postwar.
"postwar" meant the book, Orwell not necessarily having been deemed of translation pre-Animal Farm. The expression is much older; I'll try & trace it .
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2008-10-14 01:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-14 01:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-14 02:49 pm (UTC)(Have you read his short story, Why Frau Frohmann Raised Her Prices?)
no subject
Date: 2008-10-14 03:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-14 03:18 pm (UTC)An elegant piece of terse literary criticism, this.
WFFRHP is a short story about inflation. In 1850. In the Tyrol. It is MARVELLOUS.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-14 03:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-14 02:48 pm (UTC)Et qui c'est, le Baron de Marbot?
* as in "manger de la vache enragée", being seriously skint
no subject
Date: 2008-10-14 03:00 pm (UTC)The memoirs saved my life when I was imprisoned in a chateau in Brittany as a youth. They were the only thing I had to read.
plus ca change..
no subject
Date: 2008-10-14 03:17 pm (UTC)(Having read it, is Conan Doyle's Gérard a charming fiction, or has it got some basis in history? Haven't re-read it but it was another of the books my father gave me early on in French translation, and I remember loving it at the time; Gérard and Gil Blas de Santillane were my two favourite rogues..)
"Manger de la vache enragée": haven't heard it in quite a bit; my parents used it. It was the original translation's title (that has been changed in a new translation; like the new English-language Proust it may be more accurate but it's not a patch on the earlier one); can't recall when that came out in French first, possibly immediate postwar.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-14 03:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-14 04:05 pm (UTC)*clickety-click-Amazonwards*
Moo
Date: 2008-10-14 04:06 pm (UTC)