Lee Fahnestock

Lee Fahnestock (1928–2022) spent her career carrying French writing into English. She served as president of the American Literary Translators Association from 1991 to 1993 and sat on the PEN Translation Committee. In 2000 the French government awarded her the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. At the time of her death she was working on an extended study of Victor Hugo's Paris.

The work she is known for is translation. Francis Ponge was a long-running project: The Making of the Pré came out of Indiana University Press in 1979, and Archipelago Books brought out Vegetation, The Nature of Things, and Mute Objects of Expression in 2006. With Norman MacAfee she rendered a multi-volume collection of Jean-Paul Sartre's letters, and she handled Paul Fournel's novel Little Girls Breathe the Same Air As We Do.

The book most readers will know is Les Misérables. The 1987 Signet edition, done with MacAfee, revises Charles E. Wilbour's classic nineteenth-century translation. A later printing includes Fahnestock's own introduction and an afterword by Chris Bohjalian.

If you landed here from a book you liked and want to pick up her Les Misérables, the Signet edition is the one on this page. It is a very long novel, so give it weeks rather than a weekend. The printing that carries the introduction and afterword is the one to reach for if those framing texts matter to you alongside Hugo.