Biting and bawdy, smart and smutty, lofty and low, Gargantua and Pantagruel is fantasy on the grandest of scales, told with an unquenchable thirst for all of human experience. Rabelais's vigorous examination of the life of his times—from bizarre battles to great drinking bouts, from satire on religion and education to matter-of-fact descriptions of bodily functions and desires&#151is one of the great comic masterpieces of literature.

Parts of Gargantua and Pantagruel were banned upon their publication, and the whole of it has suffered in our century at the hands of translators too timid to say in modern English what Rabelais so frankly wrote in Middle French. Master translator Burton Raffel unapologetically brings to life in today's American idiom all the gusto of Rabelais's language. Raffel succeeds in making Gargantua and Pantagruel, so long a great unread classic, accessible and alive to the contemporary reader.

鮑文蔚（1902—1991），男，江蘇宜興人，早年考入北京大學文學院攻讀西洋文學，畢業後留學法國先後在北京大學、中法大學、東北大學、北洋大學、山東大學、解放軍外語大學、北京外國語大學等校執教。他翻譯瞭法國作傢拉伯雷的百科全書式的傑作《卡岡都亞與龐大固埃》，首創譯名《巨人傳》，譯作一經問世，即在我國文化界引起強烈反響。其他譯作有《雨果夫人見證錄》《浪子迴傢》《曠工之歌》《論巴爾紮剋》等，並將郭沫若的《周易的構成時代》《先秦天道觀之進展》譯成法文。