All Quiet on the Western Front [Paperback]

The greatest war novel of all time rendered in a taut, muscular, and urgent new translation. 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. Bealss 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 Remarques narration, the unholy cacophony of trench battle. Mr. Beals also vividly renders Remarques indelible imagery: corpses bombed out of their caskets, the baffling presence of butterflies that pause to rest on the teeth of a skull. A new translation by Kurt Beals...renders Remarques German in a colloquial registersometimes caustic, sometimes lyricalthat is itself a product of the Great War...He gives us a version that can stand as Remarques contemporary. A leaner, far more kinetic reading experience than that old Wheen translation...lively, unsentimental...a welcome invitation for a re-read. We all know how the story ends, but Bealss taut, approachable translation casts the wartime classic in a fresh light. 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 B?umer and his comrades navigating the trenches of the First World War. \ It is very fortunate that Kurt Beals has written a new translation of Erich Maria Remarques Almost a hundred years ago, [A] starkly effective new translation.