Lists of canonical works of fiction should inspire skepticism—we all bring our own notions of quality to the books we read. But every so often, we encounter an acknowledged classic that so captures our imagination as to make us wonder why we didn’t come to it earlier. Smarty Pants host Stephanie Bastek, for example, recently read Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, originally published in 1929, for the first time. And she’s glad she waited: Kurt Beals’s new translation faithfully mirrors the original German. 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 Bäumer and his comrades navigating the trenches of the First World War. Reworking a classic is challenging, but, as Beals writes in his introduction, the greater ordeal was “to spend months with these young soldiers, in the trenches and in their heads, to know them intimately enough to give them new voices in a new language, and then to watch them die.”

Go beyond the episode:

• Kurt Beals’s new translation of All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
• Watch the original 1930 American adaptation of the novel
• War poets who wrote in the trenches: August Stramm, Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke

Tune in every (other) week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

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