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Re: new 20K

From: <spaceart~at~att.net>
Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2005 02:47:15 +0000
To: Jules Verne Forum <jvf~at~gilead.org.il>

I take it you took offense at what I said, which I certainly did not intend. I recognize that there have been several much better researched and scholarly translations of 20K since the 1987 Unicorn Press edition, which I thought I had clearly acknowledged. But I don't think anyone can deny that many of these modernized much of the language, or recast Verne's phrasing into that of the translator. That is, they were 20K retold. This makes the books more accessible to late 20th century readers, and I readily acknowledge the rationale behind that, too. But I have always felt that something of the character of reading a Victorian novel was lost in the process. This opinion is not meant to cast any negative aspersions on any other versions of the book. If you took it that way, I am sorry.

At the time the Unicorn Press edition, which was published in 1987, there had not been many new 20th century translations of 20K. There had been Anthony Bonner's 1960 edition, Mendor Brunetti's 1969 effort and your 1965 work. The faults of the former two books are neatly outlined in your introduction to the Naval Institute Press edition. In the preface to the 1965 20K, you say that "where a literal translation would be unfair to Verne" you "recast a passage to communicate its spirit" and that you felt free to "gloss over" things you felt would not be of interest to a 20th century reader. I find no fault with this: at the time the book was instrumental in rekindling my interest in Jules Verne.

So I stand by my statement that when the Unicorn Press edition was published, it was the most complete version of the book published up to that time. It was a position that was, of course, superceded by later editions---yours and Paul's especially. But I also stand by my statement that I took great care to retain the character and style of the language and deliberately made no attempt to modernize it.

Since 1987 there have been at least three superb new translations that have, at least for scholarly reasons if no other, superceded my own version of 20K, including the one that you and Paul did---which in my opinion is the best of the lot.

In your introduction to the Naval Institute Press edition, you described your 1965 translation as being a revised and restored version of the Mercier 20K. Following your lead, and the possibilities broadly hinted at in your Annotated 20K, I only carried that process further. In fact, it was wondering why you didn't merely fix the Mercier translation outright rather than employ the method you chose to use in the Annotated 20K that got me thinking about doing that very thing myself: that is, correcting and completing the Mercier version. As I said, this required more than 3000 individual corrections above and beyond the missing text that was replaced. The only complaint you made in the introduction to the NIP edition about the resulting Unicorn Press book was that it had been "sabotaged by careless typesetting"...a fault I admit to and which I have taken some pains to correct.

RM

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 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: Walter J Miller <wjm2~at~nyu.edu>

Received on Tue 11 Oct 2005 - 04:48:06 IST

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