In this new translation of Voltaire’s Candide, distinguished translator Burton Raffel captures the French novel’s irreverent spirit and offers a vivid, contemporary version of the 250-year-old text. Raffel casts the novel in an English idiom that--had Voltaire been a twenty-first-century American--he might himself have employed. The translation is immediate and unencumbered, and for the first time makes Voltaire the satirist a wicked pleasure for English-speaking readers.

Candide recounts the fantastically improbable travels, adventures, and misfortunes of the young Candide, his beloved Cunégonde, and his devoutly optimistic tutor, Pangloss. Endowed at the start with good fortune and every prospect for happiness and success, the characters nevertheless encounter every conceivable misfortune. Voltaire’s philosophical tale, in part an ironic attack on the optimistic thinking of such figures as G. W. Leibniz and Alexander Pope, has proved enormously influential over the years. In a general introduction to this volume, historian Johnson Kent Wright places Candide in the contexts of Voltaire’s life and work and the Age of Enlightenment.

伏爾泰

一六九四 ～ 一七七八

法國思想傢、文學傢、哲學傢，十八世紀法國資産階級啓濛運動的泰鬥和靈魂。主要作品有哲理小說《老實人》《天真漢》《查第格》，曆史著作《查理十二史》《風俗論》，哲學著作《哲學詞典》《哲學書簡》等。

傅雷

一九〇八 ～ 一九六六

著名文學翻譯傢、文藝評論傢。從二十世紀三十年代起緻力於法國文學的翻譯介紹工作，畢生翻譯作品三十餘部，譯文以傳神為特色，更兼行文流暢，用字豐富，工於色彩變化。