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Re: new 20K

From: Walter J Miller <wjm2~at~nyu.edu>
Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2005 21:20:24 -0400
To: Jules Verne Forum <jvf~at~Gilead.org.il>
Cc: jvf~at~Gilead.org.il, (Jules Verne Forum)

Sorry, Ron.  Your third paragraph (especially) is full of non-sequiturs and adds up to sheer bullshit.  Sheer!  Walter James Miller----- Original Message -----

From: spaceart~at~att.net

Date: Monday, October 10, 2005 10:19 am

Subject: new 20K

> 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 a! re Victorian
> novels and part of the fun of reading them, I th ink, 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
>
> --
> Black Cat Studios
> http://www.black-cat-studios.com
> Received on Tue 11 Oct 2005 - 03:20:34 IST

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