Nick Bond's Reviews > Pantagruel

I don't think I've ever read anything quite as... unique as Francois Rabelais' Pantagruel. If it had been produced for television, I might describe it as a combination between Ren and Stimpy and Monty Python's Flying Circus. In the story, Pantagruel is a giant of mythic proportions and he takes part in a series of adventures both lewd and surreal. In one chapter, he is described as giving off a fart that spawns the race of pygmies, while in another he drowns an entire legion of troops with his urine.

Unfortunately, the prose was a bit awkward for my taste. The problem with word-based humor is that it tends not to translate very well to other languages. Actually, to call Rabelais' humor "word-based" would be a dramatic understatement, as his inventive prose is credited with introducing hundreds of words to the French language, many borrowed or adapted from Latin, Greek, and Italian. Sir Thomas Urquhart's English translation had an undeniable charm of its own, but I highly doubt that it can compare to the original French text.

Gargantua and Pantagruel is a curiosity for English speakers and should probably be approached as such. Its true beauty is otherwise encoded.