1.1.1-Dingelchen

Club Ninety-Three, Erster Theil, 1.1(.1) Im Wald von La Saudraie.
'''"Quatrevingt-treize" / "Ninety-three" / "1793" by Victor Hugo, 1874.

Well, I think I may try to read along? Also I found a German translation this time, which is nice because I do way Too Much English already and barely read stuff in my native language anymore. While original is preferable, my French is not so good or in-use that I would trust myself to fluently read it without having to check or losing stuff, so that leaves either English or German translation, and so the latter it is. For cross-checking I use the French and English wikisource texts.



''—Wading through symbolic foliage.

Sadly, it doesn’t have any publication info, and some googling around didn’t turn it up either. Which is too bad because the translation is old as balls, going by orthography sometime pre-1900. It’s full of old spellings, and so much THs instead of Ts, and the random french-cisms (gallicisms?) that used to be a thing.

'''Erster Theil: Auf hoher See.

'''1.1(.1) Im Wald von La Saudraie.

Thus I also cannot give the illustrator who rendered Sergeant Radoub’s (at least I assume it’s him) multiple-times referred-to beard/moustache so extravagantly:



Now imagine that with the Single Perfect Tear hanging on.

Overall, not really much to say that wouldn’t have been said already, though. I am probably only good for adding random (translation) trivia and apparently spamming funny(?) images.

Being that German also has T-V distinction that is preserved in the translation, although the last line adressing Michelle Fléchard as citoyenne/Bürgerin is tutoyering her, unlike the original.

And the grenadier’s curse as translated fails a bit in the category of being secular, while the second curse is omitted like in the English Burt/wikisource version. FYI, for ‘sacré mille noms de noms de brutes’ he curses “Himmelherrgottsakramentsochsen”, which is “heaven-lord-god-sacrament oxen”.

The bit about ‘iroquois de la Chine’/’Chinese peasants’ is rendered as “chinesische Kaffern”, which keeps it as ‘[ethnicity] from China’ in but switches from Americans to Africans. Which makes sense insofar as iroquois seems to be a fixed term in French, but is not a people that is used in the same way here.

Oh, well. Have an image of the vivandière/sutleress/Marketenderin, aka Houzarde/Husarin Bicorneau jumping in to save the day:



(At least I think the images are not redundant and belong to this translation only, as some have German text on them.)

''♪ Im Wald da sind die Räuber, halli hallo die Räuber… ♫♪

Commentary
Marsmeadow Those pictures! That moustache! “Himmelherrgottsakramentsochsen!”

Shirley-keeldar These are super quality illustrations, especially The Mustache!

And thanks for notes about interesting translation details, it inspired me to check up on the Russian one. I like that the sticking-words-together thing makes it look like German curses ought ideally to be muttered angrily under one’s breath…

Jesuit-space-pirate 'Himmelherrgottsakramentsochsen' is a great curse, though, if not sufficiently secular!

And that’s a great illustration of Radoub and his moustache. (I like the one of Houzarde, too.)

I checked how they translated ‘camarades’, because of shirley-keeldar’s remark that they used ‘tovarisch’ in Russian and how wrong that sounds, but then again what else were they supposed to use, and of course the Germans would use ‘Kameraden’. Today that word has a right-wing connotation for me, which could make it sound wrong in a different way, but in an actual historical military context I don’t find it that distracting.