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Mondial presentations: Here's one...

From: Terry Harpold <tharpold~at~english.ufl.edu>
Date: Mon, 11 Oct 2004 08:33:14 -0400
To: Jules Verne Forum <jvf~at~gilead.org.il>

Dear colleagues,

To follow on my earlier suggestion that members of the Jules Verne Forum planning to attend the March 2005 "Mondial" in Amiens post to the listserve descriptions of proposals they hope to give there -- below is the presentation abstract I sent to conference organizers over the weekend.

I hope that this may spur others to forecast their talks at the Mondial.

Warm regards,

TH

...

'Verne Reads Baudelaire / Reading Poe - La Jangada and "Le Scarabée d'or"'

Terry Harpold
University of Florida (USA)

Verne's enormous debt to Edgar Allan Poe has been widely remarked by biographers and critics. His discovery of Poe's fiction in the early 1860s was a turning point in Verne's literary career: in the American "jongleur merveilleux" (Baudelaire's description), he found not only thematic inspiration, but also a model of textual and formal rigour whose influence is evident throughout the _Voyages extraordinaires_.

Much of the critical literature on intertextual relations of Verne and Poe has, however, neglected the role of Charles Baudelaire's translations of Poe. By his own admission, Verne could not read extended passages of English prose. His Poe is, in an important sense, Baudelaire's Poe; not only in that Verne's citations from or allusions to Poe are traceable to Baudelaire's justly-celebrated renderings of the American author into French, but also in the tenor of his responses to Poe's fictional project. (Verne's effusive praise of "l'inexplicable, l'insaisissable, l'impossible" in Poe, for example, is clearly indebted to Baudelaire's celebration of Poe's unyielding aestheticism.)

In this presentation, I consider the examples of Poe's 1843 short story "The Gold-Bug" ("Le Scarabée d'or") and Verne's 1881 novel _La Jangada_. Verne considered the story among Poe's greatest achievements, and his most elaborate novel of cryptographic intrigue was obviously inspired by Poe's strangely digressive tale of a misplaced cipher and buried treasure. In letters to Pierre-Jules Hetzel, he proposed that _La Jangada_ extended and surpassed "The Gold-Bug" in important respects.

What is remarkable in this case is that "Le Scarabée d'or" is among Baudelaire's least successful translations of Poe. His decision not to reproduce in French the distinctive patois spoken by one of the story's principal characters eliminates from the translation numerous puns and complex wordplay that are crucial to the original's textual operations. Ironically, _La Jangada_ is among the richest of the _Voyages_ in its use of these and similar jugglings of its verbal resources. We are confronted thus by an intriguing paradox that signals the significance and the limits of the Verne-Baudelaire-Poe chain of influences: Verne's novel may represent a more textually subtle, a more technically faithful, reading of Poe's short story than his source in Baudelaire's translation.

----------------------------------------------
Terry Harpold
Assistant Professor
Department of English
University of Florida

tharpold~at~acm.org
tharpold~at~english.ufl.edu
http://www.english.ufl.edu/~tharpold

"Reading in no way obliges you to understand."
Received on Mon 11 Oct 2004 - 14:33:16 IST

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