Heh, I've long finished P&P and can conclude that it is a decent enough work. I can't say I'm a fan, but it wasn't terrible either. I don't even know how I feel about it, truthfully. I'd personally like to hear Lydia and Wickam's story more than Elizabeth's. Maybe I felt a bit... something. It ended happily ever after for everyone IIRC, and it seemed like a fairy tale like Cinderella, except much longer.

I loved War and Peace (So much so that most of the time my computer usernames are usually bolkonsky, from Andrei Bolkonsky, my favorite character), and plan to read Anna Karenina and all of his other works one day... What you say doesn't bode well, but I'll give it a shot. It can't be worse than other stuff I read. As for the translation of War and Peace that I read... I read it from Project Gutenberg, which apparently has the translation from Louise and Aylmer Maude. I have no idea if that's any good or not, but translations don't bother me that much as long as they aren't completely unreadable. I think the only time I stopped reading something from a bad Translation was Dante's Inferno by a person named Melville Best Anderson. When not even Google can give you any useful information on whether his translation was praised or dismissed, when you go to the amazon page and their talking about other reviewers in their reviews for his translation, and not even the 1-star reviews mention his review, you know you're in for some wild times.

I tried reading it, and it just... No.

I tried looking again and found this from 2012:

http://eclectic-indulgence.blogspot.com/2012/05/review-infer...

The translation by Melville Best Anderson was not the greatest - it had a very pleasurably sounding meter and rhyme to it, but it was very difficult to digest. Despite the interesting subject, I did not really have the ravenous desire to read it as I assumed I would. I could only really read 10 pages or so at a time before I became somewhat exhausted. The illustrations by William Blake are famous, but I did not find them as beautiful as the ones in Paradise Lost. I have a tendency to prefer Gustave Dore, so I am excited to start with a different edition and hopefully enjoy the more modern translation by John Ciardi, for Purgatory.

There you go; Someone else having issues with it. Personally I think it was just terrible. I get lost just a few lines in. An example:

On coming to my sense, closed at sight

Deplorable of them, the kindred twain,

Pity for whome had overwhelmed me quite,

New souls in torment and new modes of pain

Wherever I am moving I behold,

Wherever I turn and look about again.

That was Canto VI of the Inferno, Third Circle: The Intemperate. It's like that for the entirety of the book.

Now for the Noton Critical Edition of that very same text, which I was lucky enough to snag at a yard sale for 50 cents:

With my sense restored, which had deserted me

at the pitiful condition of that pair of kinsfolk, stunned by their sad history,

I start to see new torments everywhere

and new tormented souls, wherever I range

or turn myself, wherever I may stare.

What's worse is my edition has so many errors. Even worse is that they know it has errors and have the corrected version to the side!

Holding the height, from bridge to bridge we

But halted other vain laments to mark [went,

It's exactly like that. They added the word "went" on the next line with a bracket [ exactly like that....

Why didn't they just, you know, added the word where it should be? Why put it on the other line? Why?

I don't know... Anyway...

I did read the Constance Garnett translation of Crime and Punishment, which is usually regarded as a bad one from what I see people say online, and let me tell you, I was going through those pages like lightning wanting to see what happens next. If it was bad, then I didn't notice it. I gotta try reading another translation to see if I really was missing out on some good stuff.

I actually also plan to read Name of the Rose as well, although right now I'm going through the motions of reading Jude the Obscure. I think that'll be a good work. I hope it will be, in any case.