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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2322 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 12, 2026

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Opinions on abridged versions?

Approaching the end of The Count of Monte Cristo. I haven't enjoyed a book this much in a long time, which at 1300 pages has worked out nicely.

I'm now eyeing up Les Miserables (no spoilers please). While I'm not averse to reading another 1300 page monster the reviews suggest that a good portion of this is spent on the author's digressions into history and dissertations on society. I'm leaning towards the abridged version (still a healthy ~900 pages) as I'm reading for pleasure rather than intellectual edification. I've always read unabridged versions before now but I've sometimes felt like many authors take the piss (looking at you in particular Dostoesky). On the other hand part of reading the unabridged versions is that it grants the privilege of talking shit about authors who take the piss, which counts as one of the pleasures of reading.

You can always skip through the most egregious digressions. I won't hesitate to admit I did when I was ten.

Seconding this. Skip the lengthy discussions on the Battle of Waterloo and the Parisian sewer system (also the argot one, though I personally found it interesting the first time I read it), but enjoy the rest of the novel intact.

It has lengthy discussions on the Battle of Waterloo? This is the first thing I've heard that makes me want to read it.

50 pages’ worth in my copy, plus a final few pages that are directly relevant to the story (this out of a total page count of 1,463). I wouldn’t want to discourage anyone from reading it, but it’s definitely extraneous to the plot.

Coming back to this discussion, I think I’ve changed my mind. A 900-page abridgment would probably only eliminate the digressions, in which case it wouldn’t be bad to read. Actually, I suppose you’d also lose the lengthy biography of the bishop at the beginning of the novel.* I enjoyed that section of the book, but its omission would lose very little of value to the plot.

*No spoiler since it’s the first 58 pages.

Just read the real thing. If you realize you can't stomach Melville's "digressions" on Cetology in Moby Dick, well, you can always just skip a chapter. People will rightly think less of you, but at least you'll have done your abridging yourself!

I wouldn't even have minded the cetology digressions if the information contained therein was actually correct. It felt profoundly demeaning reading information I knew to be inaccurate just so I could honestly say I'd read the whole book.

It's not a science textbook, you know! I for one found it very funny.

If that was actually the case, editors wouldn’t exist. Frequently the author is blind to their own follies and very often one of those follies is not knowing to cut things that are irrelevant and pointless digressions (see Scott’s writings for an extreme example).

If they were ”as the writer intended”, they would be unedited. Clearly there is significant benefit for books to not be literally as the author wrote and abridged editions are just another point on that continuum.

I'd question the writers' intentions and whether it's always better. Often writers' intentions were to keep people buying additional installments of a serial. I've read unabridged Dickens and Flaubert and what it taught me is there's a lot of filler that could be cut without much loss beyond the awareness of how much filler was inserted for a reason that serves the writer at the expense of the reader. The literary effects of commercial serialisation might be an interesting textual insight the first time but that insight doesn't stack while the time lost when I could be reading another book does.

Devil’s advocate: that ship sailed immediately. Even the earliest collected versions did shit like spelling the title “Monte Christo.” Who knows what else was modified?

And that’s for the original French. I’m not sure if Dumas wrote much English, but he never published his own translation.

I’m not sure if Dumas wrote much English, but he never published his own translation.

A while ago I whined about how “écu” is often translated as “crown” in The Three Musketeers.

This is a perfectly legitimate translation. A "shield" is not a unit of currency, it would be distracting to talk about people paying so many "shields" for something.

"Crown" is not only British currency: M-W has it as "any of several old gold coins with a crown as part of the device". Did écus have crowns on them? Why yes they did.

When I read Charles Perrault as a boy in Spanish, several of his tales would talk about "escudos". I admit it was a little confusing, but it was obvious from context that they meant some kind of currency (I would imagine them trading heraldic shields). Maybe "monedas" (coins) would have been clearer, but "pesos" would have been a bastardization.

It does seem that escudo has the currency meaning in Spanish though.

This is a perfectly legitimate translation.

No, it's a confusing localization—or, in Nabokov's words, a paraphrase.

A "shield" is not a unit of currency. It would be distracting to talk about people paying so many "shields" for something.

If "shield" sounds wrong to Anglophone ears, that's their fault for failing to acknowledge the validity of French currency units. And there are zillions of fantasy stories that use outlandish-seeming currency units with which readers quickly become comfortable.

"Crown" is not only British currency: Merriam-Webster has it as "any of several old gold coins with a crown as part of the device".

It doesn't matter. There is no good reason to falsely insert the French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc. shields into the ranks of the English/British, Scandinavian, Czech, etc. crowns, and thereby erase a meaningful distinction between two categories.

It isn't a paraphrase any more than wiring "horse" instead of "cheval" is a paraphrase.

If "shield" sounds wrong to Anglophone ears, that's their fault for failing to acknowledge the validity of French currency units. It doesn't matter. There is no good reason to falsely insert the French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc. shields into the ranks of the English/British, Scandinavian, Czech, etc. crowns, and thereby erase a meaningful distinction between two categories.

You've invented a distinction that does not exist. "Crown" is not limited to those things. I have already shown you the definition. It's a fact of life that no two words in different languages have exactly the same meaning.

There's no particularly good reason to translate "ecu" at all. If you read a history book about the period, it will say "ecus", and translators of novels should just follow that convention. Should we translate "sestertius"? "Solidus"? "Ducat"? "Reichsmark"?

An autistic fixation on accuracy in translating currency names in literature is basically a high modernist project. The based and lindy approach is to pick a reasonable substitute. Matthew 20:2 KJV: "And when he had agreed with the labourers for a penny [orig. dēnarion] a day, he sent them into his vineyard."

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¿Por que no los dos?

I’m saying that you can lose as much through translation than you do by omitting passages or chapters. Both are dependent on the editor’s understanding of the original intent. In the same way that you can have good and bad translations, then, it should be possible to find good and bad abridgements.

According to the Wikipedia article (citing a 1978 bibliography of Dumas's works), the misspelling "Monte Christo" was used as the title of several non-translated French editions.

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