I’ve been reading the new Budé (Les Belles Lettres) edition of Arrian’s Anabasis. The translation in itself is excellent and I suppose that the scholarly notes that accompany the text are good, although I’m not the right person to judge. However, the text is really infested with mistakes. There are letters or words missing or in the wrong case in the Greek text in many places, and words or even phrases have been left untranslated into French. This doesn’t seem to stem from a lack of skill on the part of the translator/editor, rather it looks like all these mistakes are there out of forgetfulness. Basically it seems to me that the editor is primarily at fault and one wonders whether the book has been proofread at all. There are so many mistakes that whenever I struggle with a passage my first suspicion is a misprint and I start by checking another text to see whether the printed Greek text is correct. I’ve been keeping a list of the mistakes I’ve spotted, which I intend to send to the editor (I don’t know if that will help anything).
Is this just this one book or a general trend? Has anyone had similar experiences with newer Budés?