Candide: Or Optimism

by Burton Raffel

In this new translation of Voltaire's Candide, distinguished translator Burton Raffel captures the French novel's irreverent spirit and offers a vivid, contemporary version of the 250-year-old text. Raffel re-creates Voltaire's stylistic brilliance by casting the novel into an English idiom that, had Voltaire been a twenty-first-century American, he might himself have employed. The translation is immediate and unencumbered, and for the first time makes Voltaire the satirist a wicked pleasure for English-speaking readers. Candide recounts the fantastically improbable travels, adventures, and misfortunes of the young Candide, his beloved Cungegonde, and his devoutly optimistic tutor Pangloss. Endowed at the start with good fortune and every prospect for happiness and success, the characters nevertheless encounter every conceivable misfortune. Voltaire's philosophical tale, in part an ironic attack on the optimistic thinking of such figures as Gottfried Leibniz and Alexander Pope, has proved enormously influential over the years. In a general introduction to this volume, historian Johnson Kent Wright places Candide in the contexts of Voltaire's life and work and the Age of Enlightenment.

Genres: Fiction, Philosophy, Classics

132 pages, ebook

First published March 1, 2005

About the author

Burton Raffel was a translator, a poet and a teacher. He has translated many poems, including the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf.

Reviews

[Henry Stull · Rating 5 out of 5]

What can I say, its a classic. I thuroughly enjoyed it. really funny. you can definetly tell it was written in the late 17th early 18th centuries. The ending really makes me laugh.

[Louise · Rating 5 out of 5]

I decided to read this after reading Catherine the Great: Love, Sex, and Power and learning that Catherine the Great had a long and intimate pen pal relationship with Voltaire. As the French Revolution progressed, she regretted this friendship noting that philosophers and writers like Voltaire posed too great a threat to the monarchy.

You can see how Voltaire's mockery of the established order would resonate in 18th century Europe. Interestingly, he mocks not only the privilege of power, but also the risky business of being a king, with a long list of assassinated and otherwise deposed monarchs.

While it's a piece for its time, its truths hold true today. The developed world no longer has kings and slaves, but a pecking order is still in place and wars and conscriptions continue. There are still and will always be con men, sycophants, schemers, hypocrites and misogynists.

Not much satire survives a year, let alone a quarter millennium, but this one does.