Jules Verne Forum

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Re: way to go rick! [Fighting the good fight on translations]

From: Terry Harpold <tharpold~at~english.ufl.edu>
Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 10:10:19 -0500
To: Jules Verne Forum <jvf~at~gilead.org.il>

On Mar 23, 2006, at 9:42 PM, thomas mccormick wrote:

> Well!! The era of good translations of Verne has begun, but it
> seems there is a lamentable time lag in the process of getting
> those translations properly marketed and distributed!! It aint just
> a problem with 20,000 Leagues, either. Looking for Mysterious
> Island at the local Barnes & Noble, I find the same awful old
> translations with the inane name changes (Smith to Harding, Harbert
> to Herbert, etc.), and you still have to special-roder the Stump OR
> the Kravitz version, which are the only two English translations
> worth more than the paper they're written on. I guess there is a
> certain amount of, comme on dit, sheer inertia in the book
> distribution business!

If I see another student come to my courses lugging one of the
ghastly Hardwigg "translations" -- one must use the term in such
cases cautiously -- of _Journey to the Centre of the Earth_, I shall
scream.

My syllabus explicitly requires the Butcher OUP edition, and then I
am careful to point out passages in the original in which typically
Vernian untranslatable French word-play is important.

The basic problem here is that many students -- even very smart ones,
and even when you stress the necessity of good translations and tell
them *which* texts to buy -- don't get that a misrepresentation of an
author's text can be worse than, well, no representation at all.

We are not -- I speak here, with regret, as an American -- a nation
generally sensible to the vicissitudes of languages other than
English. This is, I think, a symptom of the sorry state of
transnational awareness in our elementary and high school education
system. (In the last decade or two, things have gotten worse, as anti-
intellectual and xenophobic "national pride" have wrought havoc on US
international politics.)

So long as that is true, publishers will continue to pass on the
awful translations as fair versions of texts because consumers don't
care that much: popular mythology of the "story" as more important
than the "text", with no awareness that the latter drives the former,
every time.

TH

----------------------------------------------
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 Fri 31 Mar 2006 - 18:10:25 IDT

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