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19 This translation follows the original 1699 edition as closely as possible, referring to the 1734 edition and to the 1788 editions for consultation only in moments when clarification due to typographical or punctuation errors was needed. At times when typographical errors had the potential to change the meaning of a passage, we made an educated guess based on our own understanding of the text and on the decisions of later editors. These decisions are clarified in the footnotes. The goal of our translation is to strike a balance between Eugene Nida ’s principle of equivalent effect1 and our desire to preserve the reader’s awareness of the text as a cultural and historical artifact. Since the language of the late seventeenth-century text would have been close to the vernacular of its original readers, we have striven to cultivate a style and tone that is easy for the modern Anglophone reader to understand and that retains, to the greatest degree possible, the lively, readable, and enjoyable qualities appreciated by the novel’s original readers. In keeping with our desire for readability, we have added quotation marks to frame dialogue, a practice not current at the time. We have also added bracketed stage directions to the interpolated proverb comedy. In the interest of conserving the modern reader’s awareness of the text as a cultural and historical artifact, we have chosen to stay as close to the word choice and syntax of the original edition as possible, retaining cognates , calques, and markers of the original French as signs of foreignness, prioritizing mild archaisms over modern-sounding words, and reserving contractions only for passages of informality or heightened emotion. We A Note on the Translation 1. Nida, Toward a Science of Translation, 159. a note on the transl ation 20 retain the nonstop sentences of the original and eighteenth-century editions of the novel almost ubiquitously, substituting periods for colons or semicolons only in cases where the early modern punctuation obscures the meaning of the passage for the modern reader. In the interest of preserving the materiality of the original edition, we retain original paragraph structures except in cases where a paragraph break in the original edition appears to have been made in error.2 The wide spaces that appear before the interpolated fairy tale, interpolated verse poetry, and epistolary fragments within the body of the text reflect the materiality of the 1699 edition, as does the use of italic print wherever present. In the three instances where rhymed verse poetry is interpolated into the work, our translation prioritizes the form and structure of the original poem. In cases where multiple translations of a single word are possible, we have offered varying definitions based on our interpretation of the word’s context. The problem of navigating the opposition between tu and vous was not an issue in this translation, since the aristocratic main characters only make use of the second-person singular when addressing their servants. Titles of nobility have been translated except for “Chevalier,” which has no English equivalent. Similarly, we have translated direct addresses such as “Monsieur le duc” as “Sir,” since the English equivalent “His (or Your) Lordship the Duke” indicates an address to one’s superior rather than a gesture of respect to someone older, the manner in which such addresses are employed in the text. Symbols such as “***” or “. . .” that often substitute for proper names in the original have similarly been retained and have been standardized to three periods or asterisks. 2. In two instances, the original edition contains paragraph breaks that occur in the middle of a word or a sentence. ...

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