Les Liaisons Dangereuses - translations

This is a book I really love and I've owned the (Penguin) P W K Stone translation for many years. However, I just found a way of sliding it into my next assignment and, knowing I would be making notes in my old and very battered copy, I decided to order a new one to keep in good shape for reading purposes. Mea culpa I know, I should have checked which translation I was getting but I ended up with the 1995 (Oxford World's Classics) one by Douglas Parmee and I'm finding it clunks along like a square-wheeled bicycle. So I just wondered whether anyone else had any thoughts on the comparison? Perhaps I just need some time to get used to this one as I knew the other so well and so comparisons are bound to be somewhat odious? Or does anyone else agree that the Parmee translation simply lacks the poetry and fluency of the Stone one?

Probably no help to you, but I found it much easier to read in French than I expected, when I finally screwed up my courage to tackle it earlier this year.

(My inner engineer, whom I usually try to keep under firm control, is screaming out at me that a square-wheeled bicycle would not clunk along, but fall over...)

I think your inner engineer is probably right but in my imagination it does at least a few clunks before hitting the floor. I've left this assignment too late to begin as it is, so I'm not sure trying to read the book in French at this point would be a great idea - especially since the last time I used my schoolgirl French to any effect was, as I recall, some time in 1974. I've now moved on to another great reread, The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which I don't have to worry about translation, at least, but I'm still left with this pristine, though possibly useless, copy of LLD to adorn my shelves. If anyone out there can convince me it is worth reading I'll take that as encouragement to hang on to it for a while longer at least.

Maybe you could balance it like a unicycle or a BMX bike, if you had a very low gear ratio and no freewheel, but you probably wouldn't get the front wheel to turn, so it couldn't function as a bicycle.

More to the point, I'm sure there must be scope for a better haiku summary of Les Liaisons Dangereuses than my feeble attempt...

>5 MrAndrew:
I stand corrected. Never say anything's impossible until you've Googled it. :-(
But it's not very practical - you'd have to go to Australia to find a road like that outside the lab.

A nice Youtube video of a square wheeled trike.

>OP: Honestly, if you're going to start a thread about alternative models for human-powered locomotion, you should make the heading less misleading.

Youtube video of a triangular-wheeled bike.