Wall Street Journal Lawrence Ellsworth Dumas Translation Review
100 Days of Alexandre Dumas' "Twenty Years After" - first sequel to "The Three Musketeers" - June 1 - August 31, 2025
100 Days of Alexandre Dumas' "Twenty Years After"
First sequel to "The Three Musketeers"
June 1 - August 31, 2025
June 28
Extra post
Well, guess what?! The latest installment of “The Three Musketeers” sequels translated by Lawrence Ellsworth was just reviewed by The Wall Street Journal!!! We are on the cutting edge of a cultural phenomenon!!!
Lawrence Ellsworth translated the entire "Musketeers Cycle" - dividing some of the volumes into multiple sections:
The Three Musketeers
The Red Sphinx - an unfinished sequel that fits chronologically between The Three Musketeers and Twenty Years After
Twenty Years After - divided into two sections - Twenty Years After and Blood Royal
Ten Years Later - divided into five sections - Between Two Kings, Court of Daggers, Devil's Dance, Shadow of the Bastille, and The Man in the Iron Mask
This is the first attempt to translate the entire series by one translator - and the most complete English translation to date. The volumes are available in hardback editions and Audible recordings. I will try to follow the Project Guttenberg translation for now - because of its wide availability - but might switch to Ellsworth in July. We definitely need to read his translations next summer - since he just completed the final section for the second sequel!!!
Here is The Wall Street Journal review link - do not read the second half if you want to avoid spoilers!!!
Here are the opening paragraphs of the review:
Fiction: ‘The Man in the Iron Mask’
Alexandre Dumas concluded the adventures begun in 'The Three Musketeers' with a romantic tale of injustice, revenge, camaraderie and honor.
The literary output of Alexandre Dumas père (1802-70) is so prodigious that it makes a mockery of attempts to enumerate it. Editions of his complete works-which include plays, poetry, history, travel narratives, memoirs and most any other genre you can name -can contain as many as 300 volumes. But attribution is a tricky matter with this author, and there are likely works left out or wrongly included. In a sense it doesn't matter. As a biographer once kidded, no one has read everything by Dumas, not even him. Dumas was open about his reliance on collaborators, who provided premises and background research. Some of his greatest books, including "The Three Musketeers" (serialized in 1844) and "The Count of Monte Cristo" (serialized between 1844 and 1846), were closely co-written with Auguste Maquet, who produced the rough drafts that Dumas enhanced to add style and flair.
About those musketeers-there are, of course, four of them: Athos, Porthos, Aramis and D'Artagnan. The precise number of books in their superhero-like fictional universe is similarly unstable. Since 2018, Pegasus Books has brought out nine volumes in a set of new translations by Lawrence Ellsworth, which Mr. Ellsworth calls the Musketeers Cycle. The classic first novel, set between 1625 and 1628, introduces the swashbucklers, who become embroiled in the intrigues of King Louis XIII's devious chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu. The drama with Richelieu continues in "The Red Sphinx," an unfinished, posthumously published follow-up. Dumas's official sequel (split by Mr. Ellsworth into two volumes) is "Twenty Years After" (1845), in which the musketeers must now defend against palace skullduggery during the regency of Queen Anne of Austria, when Louis XIV is a child.
Yet that hefty work is a trifle compared with the massive final novel, "Le Vicomte de Bragelonne" (1847-1850), which Mr. Ellsworth has divided five ways. This seemingly infinite chronicle is set during the volatile early reign of France's Sun King and centers on a love triangle involving the monarch, his mistress and Athos's son, Raoul de Bragelonne. Its concluding installment, "The Man in the Iron Mask," contains some of Dumas's best-known writing and can be enjoyed as a stand-alone work.
The final installment of the second sequel!!!
