Product Description

Young D’Artagnan arrives in Paris to join the King’s elite guards, but almost immediately finds he is duelling with some of the very men he has come to swear allegiance to – Porthos, Athos and Aramis, inseparable friends: the Three Musketeers. Soon part of their close band, D’Artagnan’s loyalty to his new allies puts him in the deadly path of Cardinal Richlieu’s machinations. And when the young hero falls in love with the beautiful but inaccessible Constance, he finds himself in a world of murder, conspiracy and lies, with only the Musketeers to depend on. A stirring nineteenth-century tale of friendship and adventure, The Three Musketeers continues to be one of the most influential and popular pieces of French literature. Richard Pevear’s introduction investigates the controversy of Dumas’ literary collaborators, and how important serialisation was to the book’s success. This edition also includes notes on the text.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #35756 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-25
• Original language: French
• Binding: Paperback
• 736 pages

About the Author
Alexander Dumas was born in 1802 at Villes-Cotterets. He received very little education but when he entered the household of the future king, Louis-Philippe, he began to read voraciously and then to write. In 1839 he began writing novels dealing with the wars of religion and the Revolution, but he is most remembered for his historical novels, The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. Richard Pevear, together with his wife Larissa Volokhonsky, has translated Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (winner of the PEB/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize) as well as works by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Anton Chekhov, and Mikhail Bulgakov. He has also translated a number of works from French, Italian and Greek. Originally from Boston, he now lives in Paris, where he is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at the American University of Paris.

Customer Reviews

Avoid this edition
I must have a thing about translations at the moment because one of the best adventure stories ever written is totally let down by the translation here. The translator in question appears to specialise in translating Russian to English and this would appear to be his first attempt from the French, and he fails miserably. I gave up after chapter three and returned to my wordsworth edition ( which appears to have been translated at the end of the 19th century by all accounts!)
Two examples for you. In the early scene where the innkeeper runs out shouting for the character (no spoiler here) to pay his dues for staying at the inn. In all the other translations I've seen the cry is "Oy you haven't paid your bill" In this one it's "...you haven't paid your expenses!" Eh?
And by page 40 we have been treated to the word physiognomy THREE times. In other translations it is "face" or "countenance".
There are other clumsy examples so be warned if you choose this edition.

Great book - better than the film
Really good book, lots of parts not in the film. Well worth reading, this version was good and has alot of preface about the history as well.