Umberto Eco said of Alexandre Dumas’s novel The Count of Monte Cristo (1846) that ‘it is one of the most exciting novels ever written and on the other hand, it is one of the most badly written novels of all time and in any literature’. It was the unnecessary length and the repetitions that appalled him most. Yet when he tried to produce a more elegant, distilled translation, he gave up: he began to wonder if the repetitions and redundancies were a necessary part of its structure.