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Sphinx

From: Arthur B. Evans <aevans2~at~mail.tds.net>
Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 08:23:29 -0500
To: "Jules Verne Forum" <jvf~at~math.technion.ac.il>

Garmt & Ian,

The best existing translation of Verne's _Le Sphinx des glaces_ is the
Cashel Hoey one published in 1898 by Sampson Low. This version was
reprinted in 1975 as _An Antarctic Mystery_ by Gregg Press (ed. David
Hartwell).
It begins:
  “No doubt the following narrative will be received with entire
incredulity, but I think it well that the public should be put
in possession of the facts narrated in ‘An Antarctic Mystery.’ The public is
free to believe them or not, at its good
pleasure.
   No more appropriate scene for the wonderful and terrible adventures which
I am about to relate could be imagined
than the Desolation Islands, so called, in 1779, by Captain Cook. I lived
there for several weeks, and I can affirm, on the
evidence of my own eyes and my own experience, that the famous English
explorer and navigator was happily inspired
when he gave the islands that significant name.”

The translation called _The Sphinx of Ice_ published in the 1911 Vincent
Parke collection (ed. Charles F. Horne) is both abridged and bowdlerized.
The one first published in 1961 as _The Mystery of Arthur Gordon Pym by
Edgar Allen Poe and Jules Verne_ is severely abridged.

Best,
Art Evans
Received on Wed 16 Feb 2000 - 17:22:09 IST

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