Candide or Optimism: A Fresh Translation, Backgrounds, Criticism

Robert M. Adams’s superlative revised translation of Candide provides the basis for this widely adopted Norton Critical Edition.

The accompanying apparatus has been revised in accordance with recent biographical and critical materials. The Backgrounds and Criticism sections provide important essays that shed light on major critical issues relevant to Candide and to the intellectual climate of the period. In addition to the reports of five English visitors to Ferney, essays by Haydn Mason, Erich Auerbach, Ernst Cassirer, and Robert M. Adams are included. The final section of the edition, "The Climate of Controversy," summarizes the debate surrounding Voltaire’s works and includes essays by Peter Gay, Raymond Naves, Gustave Lanson, and John Morley. Also included are a series of quotations about Voltaire by such prominent figures as Gustave Flaubert, Frederick the Great, and Stendhal, as well as the text of "Pangloss’s Song," a ballad from the 1956 Candide-based operetta by Richard Wilbur.

Robert M. Adams was Professor of English (Emeritus) at the University of California at Los Angeles. He was the author of many books, including Ikon: John Milton and the Modern Critics; Strains of Discord; Proteus, His Lies, His Truth: Discussion of Literary Translation; The Land and Literature of England; and Shakespeare―The Four Romances. In addition to the Norton Critical Edition of Utopia (he was translator and editor of the First and Second Editions), Professor Adams was editor of five other Norton Critical Editions, including The Prince by Machiavelli, Candide by Voltaire, and The Praise of Folly and Other Writings by Erasmus, the texts of which he also translated. He was a founding editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature.