But it was no fable inhabiting some make-believe or symbolic location rather, it was a report on the current state of the world, deliberately set among the headlines of the day. This philosophical tale may be described as an attack on Leibnitzian optimism – and, more broadly, on all prepackaged systems of thought and belief – a satire on churches and churchmen, and a pessimistic rumination on human nature and the problem of free will. Even the British acknowledged Voltaire as Europe's most famous public intellectual, and his Candide as a prime example of literature as news.
This formed part of a 25-volume edition of Voltaire's works "translated from the French with Notes by Dr Smollett and others" and published between 17. That year no fewer than three English translations appeared, shortly followed by the early version that is now most often read, by Tobias Smollett. It was written between July and December 1758 and published simultaneously in Geneva, Paris and Amsterdam in January 1759. It was the norm for death to precede translation.Īll this makes Voltaire's Candide even more of an extraordinary case. But with the exception of Laclos, none of these writers could ever have set eyes on an English edition of his text. Balzac's Le Père Goriot(French 1834, English 1860), and Flaubert's Madame Bovary (French 1856-7, English 1886) were rather quicker. On the other hand, Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir (1830) had to wait until 1900 to find Anglophone readers. The earliest recorded English translation of Racine's Phèdre (1677) dates from 1776 whereas the immigration of Laclos's Les Liaisons Dangereuses was fast-tracked (French 1782, English 1784), no doubt because of its saucy reputation.
Rabelais, for example, took almost a century and a half to be translated whereas John Florio's version of Montaigne's Essays came out only 11 years after the Frenchman's death.
T he acknowledged classics of French literature crossed the Channel at widely differing speeds.
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