Smarty Pants From The American Scholar

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