Candide

or Optimism

Voltaire, Burton Raffel

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9780300127782
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The translation of choice for twenty-first-century readers of Voltaire's satiric masterpiece.

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.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction Candide, Voltaire, and the Enlightenment
• Translator’s Note
• Chapter One. How Candide was raised in a noble mansion, and how he was driven away
• Chapter Two. What happened to Candide among the Bulgars
• Chapter Three. How Candide saved himself from the Bulgars, and what became of him
• Chapter Four. How Candide met his old philosophy teacher, Doctor Pangloss, and what had happened to him
• Chapter Five. Tempest, shipwreck, earthquake, and what happened to Doctor Pangloss, Candide, and Jacques the Anabaptist
• Chapter Six. How they had a beautiful auto-da-fé in order to put an end to the earthquake, and how Candide was flogged
• Chapter Seven. How an old woman took care of Candide and how he got back his beloved
• Chapter Eight. Cunégonde’s story
• Chapter Nine. What happened to Cunégonde, to Candide, to the Grand Inquisitor, and to a Jew
• Chapter Ten. In what diffculty Candide, Cunégonde, and the old woman reached Cadiz, and how they boarded a ship
• Chapter Eleven. The old woman’s story
• Chapter Twelve. More about the old woman’s misfortunes
• Chapter Thirteen. How Candide was forced to leave lovely Cunégonde and the old woman
• Chapter Fourteen. How Candide and Cacambo were greeted by the Jesuits of Paraguay
• Chapter Fifteen. How Candide killed his dear Cunégonde’s brother
• Chapter Sixteen. What happened to the two travelers with two girls, two monkeys, and the savages known as Oreillons
• Chapter Seventeen. Arrival of Candide and his valet in the land of Eldorado, and what they saw there
• Chapter Eighteen. What they saw in Eldorado
• Chapter Nineteen. How they got to Surinam, and how Candide came to know Martin
• Chapter Twenty. What happened at sea to Candide and Martin
• Chapter Twenty-one. Candide and Martin approach the French coast and argue
• Chapter Twenty-two. What happened to Candide and Martin in France
• Chapter Twenty-three. Candide and Martin reach the British coast, and what they see there
• Chapter Twenty-four. Paquette and Friar Giroflée
• Chapter Twenty-five. Visit to Lord Pococuranté, a nobleman of Venice
• Chapter Twenty-six. A dinner that Candide and Martin shared with six foreigners, and who they were
• Chapter Twenty-seven. Candide’s journey to Constantinople
• Chapter Twenty-eight. What happened to Candide, Cunégonde, Pangloss, Martin, etc.
• Chapter Twenty-nine. How Candide found Cunégonde and the old woman
• Chapter Thirty. Conclusion
• Suggested Reading