As a translator, I love Donougher; as a fan, I find myself frequently giving her the stink-eye. She pays scrupulous attention to word choice, to not inflating the ponderousness of Hugo's prose with unthinking calques on the French, and to either footnoting the wordplay or trying to render it in English, but her campaign against artificially inflating the register often comes at the expense of Hugo's more lyrical passages. So some of the most striking sentences from the original can end up dull as ditchwater. I recommend her translation if only because it's the most thoroughly-annotated one that exists in English, and because she's got a knack for getting the gist of a turn of phrase that would be a non-sequitur if translated literally, but if you've got favorite Brick quotes that you're attached to then be prepared to slam your book shut and go "Goddammit, Donougher" from time to time.
Fahnestock/Macafee is a nice, reliable, readable, mostly-faithful translation. It suffers from some of the problems Donougher was trying to eliminate--excessive ponderousness and occasional non-sequiturs especially in the wittier dialogue--but it's solid and not obnoxiously archaic like the public-domain translations, or obnoxiously modernized like Julie Rose.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2014-03-31 06:14 pm (UTC)Fahnestock/Macafee is a nice, reliable, readable, mostly-faithful translation. It suffers from some of the problems Donougher was trying to eliminate--excessive ponderousness and occasional non-sequiturs especially in the wittier dialogue--but it's solid and not obnoxiously archaic like the public-domain translations, or obnoxiously modernized like Julie Rose.