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Title: Penguin's Iron Mask: Not a Good Edition
Review: A work of historical fiction, written in the eighteenth century, and set in the seventeenth, needs endnotes. All the more so if the edition is in English and the original in French. This proves a glaring lack in the case of Penguin's The Man in the Iron Mask; it lowers my opinion of the usually competent publisher. Without notes, translator Joachim Neugroschel finds himself at odd moments inserting the original French in brackets. The translation is less than successful in other ways as well. Neugroschel uses intrusive colloquialisms ("C'mon" and "Were they gonna shoot us?") and worse yet mixes them with graceless versions of Dumas's formal sentence structures (as in the terrible reply "It was I who was gonna shoot you.") Really, how did a publisher like Penguin let this get to press?
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