[translation] Das Kapital 2 and Les Misérables manga, and why manga versions of novels are awesome

[unjapanologist]

For the Dutch-speaking among us: my two latest manga translations just got published, the second part of Das Kapital and Les Misérables. Previous issues in this series were the first part of Das Kapital and War and Peace.

I'm having huge fun working on this literary manga series, and nearly as much fun rolling my eyes at all those who lament that they deviate from "the originals" and that is why they're no good. Much as I love the story of War and Peace, the novel is centuries old and as good as illegible to most contemporary audiences. It just wasn't written with 21st-century readers in mind. This novel and other so-called great classics are no longer accessible to the vast majority of readers for whom they're supposed to form a literary canon.*

 

What makes these novels great and important and relevant isn't the exact words that were written hundreds of years ago by long-dead people. It's the content, the stories. Stories can live and need to live in all kinds of forms to stay relevant. You don't learn to appreciate the story of a classic by painfully slogging through a seemingly endless doorstop of a book full of archaic language and strangely-paced plots.There's plenty of legitimate criticisms that can be leveled at adaptations like these manga, but that doesn't make the function they fulfill any less important. They allow present-day readers to finally find out what's so great about these great classics, by making the stories fun to read again.

 

 

* Although one could question if they ever were accessible to all potential readers, or what the value of that literary canon is in the first place. That's a whole other post.