Biting and bawdy, smart and smutty, lofty and low, Gargantua and Pantagruel is fantasy on the grandest of scales, told with an unquenchable thirst for all of human experience. Rabelais's vigorous examination of the life of his times—from bizarre battles to great drinking bouts, from satire on religion and education to matter-of-fact descriptions of bodily functions and desires&#151is one of the great comic masterpieces of literature.

Parts of Gargantua and Pantagruel were banned upon their publication, and the whole of it has suffered in our century at the hands of translators too timid to say in modern English what Rabelais so frankly wrote in Middle French. Master translator Burton Raffel unapologetically brings to life in today's American idiom all the gusto of Rabelais's language. Raffel succeeds in making Gargantua and Pantagruel, so long a great unread classic, accessible and alive to the contemporary reader.

鲍文蔚（1902—1991），男，江苏宜兴人，早年考入北京大学文学院攻读西洋文学，毕业后留学法国先后在北京大学、中法大学、东北大学、北洋大学、山东大学、解放军外语大学、北京外国语大学等校执教。他翻译了法国作家拉伯雷的百科全书式的杰作《卡冈都亚与庞大固埃》，首创译名《巨人传》，译作一经问世，即在我国文化界引起强烈反响。其他译作有《雨果夫人见证录》《浪子回家》《旷工之歌》《论巴尔扎克》等，并将郭沫若的《周易的构成时代》《先秦天道观之进展》译成法文。