What's the best translation of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame? : Some People Juggle Geese

You’ve seen the Disney movie. Maybe you’ve read the novel. But do you recognize the name Frederic Shoberl? Probably not.

He’s the guy who chose the title we now use to refer to Victor Hugo’s novel, which was originally titled Notre-Dame de Paris. Shoberl wasn’t the first translator (the first was the politically motivated William Hazlitt), but his version gets the credit for hitting the bestseller list in England in the 1830s. (Hazlitt’s title was: Notre-Dame: A Tale of the Ancien Regime. Yawn.)

More about the publication history of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame below.

Why did Victor Hugo write Notre-Dame de Paris?

Hugo was distressed about the likely disappearance of neglected Gothic buildings, which he felt were an important part of France’s cultural heritage. So he wrote a book about a crumbling Paris landmark which is now as iconic as the Eiffel Tower: Notre-Dame Cathedral. Hugo knew people wouldn’t care about his cultural/philosophical point as much as he did, so he and his publisher accidentally-on-purpose left out a couple of chapters in the first edition, including the famous one that says “this will kill that [the printing press will kill architecture]”. After the book became a hit in France and England for its characters and melodramatic plot, he stuck the reflective chapters back in, thus producing the novel as we know it today.

Translations of Notre-Dame de Paris

You might think the 1833 translations by Hazlitt and Shoberl are, well, ancient history by this point. There have been like a dozen translations since then, and most of them are still in print.

1833 – William Hazlitt
1833 – Frederic Shoberl
1839 – Anonymous (Foster and Hextall)
1862 – Henry L. Williams
1882 – A. Langdon Alger
1888 – Isabel F. Hapgood
1888 – Anonymous (Little, Brown, & Co.)
1892 – J. Carroll Beckwith
1902 – Jessie Haynes
1941 – Anonymous (Modern Library)
1956 – Lowell Bair (ABRIDGED, Bantam)
1964 – Walter J. Cobb (Signet)
1978 – John Sturrock (Penguin)
1993 – Alban J. Krailsheimer (Oxford)
2002 – Anonymous (Modern Library) edited by Catherine Liu (Modern Library)

As you can see, some of the translations were anonymous. Translators these days don’t always get their names on the cover the way authors do, but translators in the nineteenth century were sometimes even less visible. They didn’t always get their name anywhere on their work. However, sometimes the reason for not crediting a translator by name was that the “translator” was a team and not a person, or the text was plagiarized with minimal changes—or it was simply copied wholesale from another publisher!

Surely those shenanigans at an end? Individuals do translations, individuals get the credit? Well, I’m a bit puzzled, actually, why modern reprints don’t credit the translators whose public-domain texts they use. Some of the current editions that have no name attached aren’t actually anonymous translations…

Modern reprints of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

The “anonymous” translation printed in 1941 by Modern Library is, to all appearances, just the 1833 Shoberl translation again. That same translation was upcycled in 2002, still with no mention of Shoberl. So depending on whether you want to count the 2002 revised edition separately, two or three of the 15 “different” translations in the list of 15 translations above are actually the same.

1833 – William Hazlitt
1833 – Frederic Shoberl
1839 – Anonymous (Foster and Hextall)
1862 – Henry L. Williams
1882 – A. Langdon Alger
1888 – Isabel F. Hapgood
1888 – Anonymous (Little, Brown, & Co.)
1892 – J. Carroll Beckwith
1902 – Jessie Haynes
1941 – Shoberl (Modern Library)
1956 – Lowell Bair (ABRIDGED, Bantam)
1964 – Walter J. Cobb (Signet)
1978 – John Sturrock (Penguin)
1993 – Alban J. Krailsheimer (Oxford)
2002 – Shoberl (Modern Library) edited by Catherine Liu (Modern Library)

Meanwhile, the 2012 hardcover Everyman’s Library is an anonymous reprint that looks suspiciously like the 1833 translation by Hazlitt.

The 2006 Dover edition credits Alger, but the 2008 Barnes & Noble one, which reads the same, doesn’t bother.

The 1998 Wordsworth Classics edition doesn’t seem to credit Beckwith anywhere in the book or on the US website, but mentions him on the UK website. The Macmillan Collector’s Library edition is also Beckwith but doesn’t say so.