Is it acceptable to buy a Wordsworth edition?

Is it acceptable to buy a Wordsworth edition?

its cheap, why not?

Only depending on what it is

Their translations are trash. If you open up their Essential Kafka, the first line says he was changed into a "verminous, terrible bug" which we know to be objectively shit translating

Their english ones are okay if you can take the shit aesthetics and whatnot

I bought the edition of crime and punishment pictured and it's very poor. I couldn't tell you what's good but I'd recommend not purchasing that one

only if you collect them all

Have it open in front of me, it, uh, doesn't. Reads "huge verminous insect", at least in my copy.

Same thing really

The original German says NOTHING about being a bug. Simply "vermin". Any translation that says more than that is horseshit

Also the cover has Gregor as the vermin pictured on the cover—something Kafka explictly said to never do

Hmm fair enough. Not as bad as "bug" though.

/thread.

I have the Wordsworth edition of Anna Karenina. Makes me smile every time I see it. So, yeah, it's acceptable.

Wordsworth classics are patrician as fuck

>not muh Kafka

In the shit translations, are they so shit that in the end of the story he changes back into a human and has a party or what?

If I get dubs you can buy it.

fuck mine reads "gigantic insect". FUCK

whats a good translation of all the short stories?

No, it's just a lot less cloudy and loses much of Kafka's charm

Norton Critical has a fucking 10/10 edition of the Metamorphosis

Also oddly enough, the Barnes & Nobles classic "The Metamorphosis & Other Stories" translated by Donna Freed has a great translation of his stories

Their Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural series has all manner of good stuff from weird fiction writers (Hodgson, Howard, Lovecraft) as well as genre fiction by Victorian authors; Conan Doyle.

Buying Wordsworth logically makes no sense for someone who browses Veeky Forums

There are reasons for buying physical editions of books, and that it because they feel nice, look nice, and have the potential to impress other people. However, if those aren't things that you care about, obviously you will feel more inclined to just download the book and read the fucking thing for free.

Wordsworth offers essentially none of the nice attributes you typically get from buying physical books, therefore it would make more sense to save your money and just download.

buy it for the cover

A cheap paper copy is still preferable to reading on a screen. Buying expensive editions makes less sense really - if it is a book in English the text is the same and any reading around you want to do would be better done on the internet anyway.

The above argument does not apply for translations (although I do have a soft spot for the old public domain ones), or books which need lots of footnotes. However for eg Austen I don't see why you'd spend £8 or whatever when you could buy four books at £2 each

...

As with all series, quality of translations vary. It also rather depends on why you're buying a translation. For example, I have a couple of their Homers, because one is a complete Chapman, another TE Lawrence's Odyssey (both now out of print), and their Apuleius (because it's the old Loeb translation, with supplements to reverse the expurgation).

I have their Ulysses edition. It was $2. I wouldn't pay much more for it.