7/4/2023 0 Comments The great meaulnes![]() ![]() Frankly I think titles like those are just dumb, because they’re not translations at all. ![]() ![]() Gopnik comments in his Introduction that “In fact its title is exactly equivalent, in its combination of sardonic irony and appreciative applause, to that of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.”)īut almost every edition of this book in English has offered a different title, or combination of title and subtitle, including The Lost Estate, The Lost Domain, The Wanderer, and many more. OK, so “great” doesn’t convey everything the author meant by the French “grand,” but surely it’s a broad enough word with enough different senses to include most of it. The tricky one is the “Grand.” It more or less means “great” or “grand,” but translators have hesitated to use either of these English words, because neither of those nor any other word or phrase fully captures the nuance of the French “grand” in this context.įor my money, The Great Meaulnes is a perfectly good translation of the title, or at least the best available. “Le” of course is “the.” “Meaulnes” is the main character’s name-Augustin Meaulnes. It’s a novel that doesn’t even have a title that people can agree on. Le Grand Meaulnes is a peculiar book in some ways, and one that it definitely helped me to read the Introduction (in the edition I happen to have) by Adam Gopnik, as well as a note from the translator. ![]()
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