Jules Verne Forum

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new 20K

From: <spaceart~at~att.net>
Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2005 14:19:57 +0000
To: jvf~at~gilead.org.il (Jules Verne Forum)

I will have the new 20K available by the end of the week. I hope not to have the problems I had initially with Journey (which took three tries before an acceptable version was made available).

The text of 20K is essentially that of the old Unicorn edition---albeit with as many of typos corrected as I have been able to find (Unicorn did not proof the typescript before printing, which certainly annoyed me). Since the Unicorn book came out so long ago, I thought I'd explain just what it is. It is based on the justly-reviled Lewis Mercier translation, which I went through literally word-for-word, comparing it with the original French edition. I made about 3000 individual textual corrections, in addition to replacing all of the missing text.

I discovered that while Mercier was an incompetent translator, he was also an extraordinarily lazy one. There was an advantage to this: he made no attempt to superimpose his own voice onto Verne's. The result is that his version conveys, I think, very accurately Verne's style of writing. In other words, the Lewis Mercier translation---for all of its myriad faults---reads very much like what Verne would have produced had he written the book in English.

At the time the Unicorn edition was published, it was the most complete and accurate English edition of the novel available. There have, of course, been far more scholarly translations published since, but none, I think, that makes any effort to preserve Verne's writing style---the cadence of his sentences, for instance. There is certainly justification for modernizing the language of the book---but in some ways this is like modernizing, say, Mark Twain or H.G. Wells or Dickens. These are Victorian novels and part of the fun of reading them, I think, is the language in which they are told.

The version that will be available this week will contain most of the illustrations from the Unicorn edition (albeit in B&W), numerous maps, a schematic of the Nautilus, diagrams of 19th century submarines, etc. etc.

R

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Received on Mon 10 Oct 2005 - 16:35:55 IST

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