The Sphinx of the Ice Realm Ably Well-Known Item, It Regularly Turns up in Discussions of Poe’S the Narrative of Arthur
Translating Verne runs the old Italian adage: translators are traitors. And it’s raduttore, traditore possible that no big-name author has suffered more betrayals than Frenchman TJules Verne in his nineteenth-century English translations. Fans and academics have been pointing out this problem for decades. It was in the turbulent 1960s that NYU scholar Walter James Miller made a startling discov- ery: Captain Nemo’s famed submarine, the , was manufactured from a revolutionary Nautilus type of sheet iron that was lighter than water and could float. Well, not really. Checking Verne’s French, Miller verified that the translator had sim- ply made an idiotic mistake. And then other readers started finding other kinks: the first English version of (1864) recomposed every third paragraph Journey to the Center of the Earth and gave the characters silly new monikers—Verne’s Professor Lidenbrock became Profes- sor Hardwigg. As for more literal translations, often they were preposterously abridged: in (1869) Verne includes an amusing chapter on using algebra to calculate Circling the Moon flight times—the original translator kept the chapter but left out the formulas. And then there were issues of political correctness: in (1875) Verne condemns The Mysterious Island the British Raj—his UK translator simply revamped him so that he voices support instead. In short, the Victorian translations of many Verne novels not only abound in asinine errors, they condense him, censor him, rewrite him, drop whole passages, fabricate new ones, concoct different titles, rearrange chapters, redo characterizations, chop his descriptions, dump his science, axe his jokes, and generally delete things that are politically iffy or call for homework.
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