Great French Tales of Fantasy/Contes fantastiques celebres: A Dual-Language Book Book

I started this several times. My French is not great, but I can usually work my way through stories and enjoy them. And I *thought* having the dual-language feature would make it easier. But the first story in this book defeated me over and over. Meanwhile, I have been working on my French and thought I was getting better. But each time I picked this up and started reading I was just so at sea I would give up. I did understand that these are old stories, from the early to mid 19th century, and the language is somewhat antique but still, it was very discouraging. After a long time, I picked this up and tried again; still really head-spinning. I started just reading through the English, figuring I'd just get the story and give up, and I noticed something. The English was almost as hard to follow as the French! This guy writes sentences that go on for freaking ever and meander all over the place. I kept having to stop and go back to remember what the beginning of the sentence was. There were several places, too, where the translator broke one of Nodier's sentences into two. And they were still insanely long and convoluted.

All of that to say that, once I moved on to the other stories, things got a LOT better. Whew. I'm not actually much into "creepy" stories, but most of these were quite enjoyable. The only other one I didn't care for was the one by Villiers, which struck me as a very thin story inflated with melodramatic language. Cheesy. And the last two, by Guy de Maupassant, were very entertaining; the second, in particular, was full of sly humour.

And I did find the dual-language feature helpful, mostly because my vocabulary is somewhat restricted to the sort of language found in textbooks. I can get a lot from context, but it was nice to actually nail down the meanings. I was impressed, by the way, with the way the translator managed to stick quite close to the direct translation of each sentence while still making the whole thing read quite fluently. Quite the trick.