The question is why?

Why come out with a new translation of a classic (in this case, Stendhal’s 1831 novel The Red and The Black—or Red and Black, or Scarlet and Black, according to how each translator chooses to render Le Rouge et le Noir) that has already had quite a few major English translations, including a spate of them rather recently? Two appeared in 1898: one by E. P. Robins, the other by Horace Tergie, and another, in 1913, by Horace B. Samuel. C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s excellent 1926 version for many decades provided the standard, but eventually it began to seem dated. Margaret R. B. Shaw brought out a new translation for Penguin Classics in 1953, supposed to supersede Scott Moncrieff’s, and Robert M. Adams followed it up in 1969 with his own version for the Norton Critical Edition of the novel. In the last few decades we have had renderings by Roger Gard (Penguin Classics), Catherine Slater (Oxford Classics), and Jonathan Keates (Signet Classics, supplanting a 1970 one by Lloyd C. Parks), as well as a 2003 one by Burton Raffel (Modern Library) that was intended to blow all the others out of the water by virtue of its daring modernity. Raffel’s twenty-first-century locutions pleased many but by no means all. One example: “ ‘If you give me twenty francs,’ [Julien] says to a visitor while awaiting his trip to the guillotine, ‘I’ll tell you, in detail, the story of my life. It’s