Overview

An immediate sensation when it was published in 1929, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front has sold more than twenty million copies worldwide since then, making it the best-selling German novel of all time. Its impact is indisputable: it has been adapted for film, television, and other media; has influenced all subsequent works of war literature; and has been taught in high school and college classes ever since. Until now, one translation—published in 1929, and very much a product of its time—has introduced most readers in English to Remarque’s wrenching portrait of the horrors of trench warfare. Now, nearly a century later, renowned translator Kurt Beals recaptures the energy and descriptive force of the German original, rendering Remarque’s distinctly terse, telegraphic prose into a contemporary idiom, conveying for a new generation the immediacy and intensity of this classic novel.

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9781324097792

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Reviews

[A] starkly effective new translation.--Matt Hanson ""Arts Fuse"" A leaner, far more kinetic reading experience than that old Wheen translation . . . lively, unsentimental . . . a welcome invitation for a re-read.--Steve Donoghue ""Open Letters Review"" A new translation by Kurt Beals . . . renders Remarque's German in a colloquial register--sometimes caustic, sometimes lyrical--that is itself a product of the Great War . . . He gives us a version that can stand as Remarque's contemporary.--George Packer ""Atlantic"" Kurt Beals brings an immediacy to what has been called the greatest war novel of all time, refreshing the text for a new generation of readers who might have only seen the Netflix version of Paul Bäumer and his comrades navigating the trenches of the First World War.-- ""Smarty Pants Podcast, The American Scholar"" Remarque has been served generally well by his previous English-language translators, but never better than by Kurt Beals of the University of Richmond. Mr. Beals's shimmering version of this novel should become the standard for English readers. He commits to each page a burnished prose that beautifully stewards the original, and he captures more vividly than any other translator the sensory onslaught of Remarque's narration, the unholy cacophony of trench battle. Mr. Beals also vividly renders Remarque's indelible imagery: corpses bombed out of their caskets, the baffling presence of butterflies that 'pause to rest on the teeth of a skull.'--William Giraldi ""Wall Street Journal"" We all know how the story ends, but Beals's taut, approachable translation casts the wartime classic in a fresh light.-- ""New Criterion"" Almost a hundred years ago, All Quiet on the Western Front invented the anti-war novel. This fluent new translation captures the devastating experiences of ordinary soldiers with renewed urgency.--Martin Puchner, author of The Language of Thieves: My Family's Obsession with a Secret Code the Nazis Tried to Eliminate It is very fortunate that Kurt Beals has written a new translation of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, and produced a crisp, fresh and very much more faithful to the German original version that brings new life to one of the classic novels to come out of the First World War, and makes it well worth reading again, or reading for the first time. Beals's translation makes it clear why the book has sold millions of copies in almost every language, and been made into two major motion pictures--it is a moving story about war, all war, and not dated at all.--Michael Korda, author of Muse of Fire

Author Information

Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970) was one the best-selling German-born authors of the twentieth century. Several of his novels portrayed the experience of war and its aftermath. All Quiet on the Western Front was his best-known and most widely read work. Kurt Beals is a visiting associate professor of German and a humanities fellow in literary translation at the University of Richmond. He has translated twentieth–century and contemporary works by Jenny Erpenbeck, Hermann Hesse, Reiner Stach, Regina Ullmann, and Anja Utler, among others. He lives in Virginia.

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