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"D'Artagnan and the Iron Mask or Two Years Later - Book 1"
Translator's Preface
While in Clermont-Ferrand, I don’t remember exactly what year, I think it was in 2012, in the early spring, as part of a delegation for the joint educational program “ Mechatronics and Automation,” I initially did not plan to visit second-hand bookstores. However, in this town, a significant part of which is made up of students, for some unknown reason there are a huge number of antique shops. You would think that all students want to do is buy old furniture, old paintings and shabby books. I don’t know why, but I also became addicted to visiting antique and second-hand bookstores. I did not need books in French, but this kind of morbid love for books, known to my family, invariably drew me there. I was simply curious to look at old books. Could I have guessed how this would end?
The more worn out the book, the more readers have read it. That's why it was the worn out books that caught my eye the most.
In second-hand bookstores in France, customers can take a stepladder and peer into the top shelves, inspecting the most secluded corners, if, of course, they are not afraid of dust. That's what I did. Looking at one of the most remote shelves, I was surprised to find, instead of a book, a huge folder on which was written " Deux ans plus tard par Alex Dumas."
The folder was so large that I had great difficulty in removing it from the top shelf. I was also afraid that the worn-out ties would break and the sheets would fall to the floor. It would be very difficult to collect them and put them back together, although, as I discovered later, all the sheets were numbered.
I don’t know what prompted me to make this crazy purchase. At first, I asked out of simple curiosity how much this miracle cost. I expected the price to be around a hundred euros. But the seller told me that the sale of the manuscript, according to the laws of when it was acquired and according to the owner’s will, would be equated to the sale of copyright, that is, the purchaser of this folder, according to the terms of sale, acquires all rights to use it. In fact, the authorship was being sold. Then I asked how much this manuscript cost, and received the answer that it was offered for forty thousand euros. This was outrageous, and only out of mischief, and not at all intending to buy the manuscript, I asked if it was possible to get a discount. I did not expect a positive answer to this joking question. But it turns out that the term “offered at cost” does not mean the final price at all, because this is an antique store, it can have quite flexible prices! Therefore, the seller quite easily agreed to reduce the price to thirty-two thousand euros. Like any professor at a regular Russian technical university, I, of course, had a similar amount on my bank card, which still allowed citizens of our great country to make purchases in European countries. So I didn’t think long and just asked if they accepted cashless payments. The seller informed me that it was even recommended to make transactions over five hundred euros by bank transfer. He immediately entered the transaction amount into the terminal and asked me to attach the card. It seemed impolite to me not to pay, so I swiped the card in front of the terminal, entered the code, and the manuscript became my property. I was even given a receipt and a certificate confirming my rights to use the manuscript at my own discretion. It turns out that the manuscript was not in one folder, but in a dozen folders! The last ten were titled differently, as far as I could tell, the name “ Aramis ” was mentioned there. I could hardly suppress my joy. But the manuscript had to be sent home by mail, since it did not fit into the suitcase. Luckily, the shop owner took care of this, so all I had to do was give my address and pay for the postage, half of which the kind bookseller covered.
When the manuscript arrived, I naturally put all twelve folders on the top shelf of my enormous bookcase and got busy with more pressing matters. But recently I had to bring some semblance of order to my library, and since these folders were the most unsightly part of the contents of my wall-sized bookcase, I was forced to make the difficult but necessary decision to part with the text, which I had no hope of reading, since I do not know French. You can part with unnecessary books using the red metal book-exchange cabinets, or so-called book-crossings. There are four of them in the Novosibirsk Akademgorodok. Handwritten materials, as well as unnecessary household items and even clothes, are also brought there. A true book lover will take a manuscript to the book exchange only in the most extreme cases, and such an extreme case is the persistence of family members.
But first, of course, I had to try to read what was written in it, otherwise my purchase would have to be called unreasonable. Unfortunately, I do not know French. I had to scan, recognize the text, and most often retype it manually, and then use an automatic translator. After that, I took the trouble to edit the text a little myself, since the translator does not always translate correctly. However, it was not easy to judge the correctness of the translation, I was guided by intuition and the rules of the Russian language, nothing more. The main difficulty was to convert the handwritten text into printed text, and it was the speed of this process that limited the pace of my work. Probably, there are programs for recognizing text in manuscripts, but the handwriting was terrible, I did not like the results of using the programs available to me, correcting errors was more difficult for me than typing myself, looking at the sheets of the manuscript, fixed in front of my eyes on a special stand. So, I was finally able to first retype the manuscript on the computer, and then read its translation. I admit that I did not understand some fragments, and some places were probably translated incorrectly, and I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the translation of names. But since I already have some writing experience, I decided that I could well afford to edit the text at my own discretion. This also further strengthens my copyright - the right to creatively rework the source material.
Since I can type faster than I can think, I decided to finish what I started, wrote the introduction, and here are the results of my long work. If someone didn't like it, I bear no responsibility for it, since all the shortcomings of this work are the result of the original source. But if someone liked it, then it is entirely my merit, since I retyped it, translated it, even with the help of a computer program, and decided to publish it. Everyone has the right to their own erroneous opinion. And I am no exception to this rule. Enough chatter, let's finally read! Enjoy reading! Or stop reading the very second you understand that you are not interested in it.
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