Jules Verne - Yea or Nay?

Cafe Society
1

Soem time in the middel of last year, I managed to pick up a book by the good fellow at a yard sale, and as I ahd always been interested in what he really wrotea s opposed to just rumor, I decided to dig in.

And so I began with that book: “Jouney to the Center of the Earth”.

I liked it well enough; it was moderately exciting, had exotic locales, and was loaded with scientific data that was, I’m sure, astounding for the day and still of great interest to the laymen of today.

Next I hit, “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” This book I had always held in great esteem and figured would be an incredible adventure, but was sadly let down by so much great story being interplaced by long bloody lengths of fish lists.

Lastly I tried, “From the Earth to the Moon”, and unfortunately could not even finish it before it had to go back to the library. Atrocious.

All in all, I have to say that from this I was both duly impressed and aghast at what I was reading.

The man had absolutely amazing vision and forsight at at what was to come in the world, as well as an astouding scientific acumen.

What he lacked was the ability to build real characters and add story and plot to the data he based his work off of.

I think he had ideas to build the dreams of future generations, but was not so proficient at storytelling.

Where do you stand, and what do you think of his additions to both writing and science?

2

It’s been a while since I’ve read them, but I liked 20,000 Leagues and Journey to the Center of the Earth (I have From the Earth to the Moon too, but for the life of me I can’t remember if I’ve read it or not). They definitely have a bit of travellogue feel to them.

Somehow the writing reminded me of Arthur C. Doyle.

3

He seems to have written his stories without developing an outline for them. His style is “let’s see what happens now.”

However, I do think he builds some strong characters. Like Nemo. The are totally unreal in any sense of actually being possible, but they do drive the action well and invent crises of their own.

4

Someone here at the Dope (CalMeacham maybe?) said that most of Verne’s well-known books were first translated into English in the late 19th century in a slipshod manner that left out as much as a third of the original text.

There are now more faithful translations available. Maybe the books come off better under them?

5

I read 20,000 Leagues under the Sea when I was a kid and quickly learned to just skip the fish lists. Come to think of it, I found that book in a stash of my great-grandfather’s things; I think I’d like to read a more up-to-date translation.

Try The Mysterious Island. Those people make MacGyver look like the monkeys at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Overall, Verne’s science is wonky and his writing is patchy, but man, when you pick up one of his books he’s taking you places no one else had ever thought to go.

6

Mysterious Island is definitely the best. The other good ones I’ve run across (not sure as to the titles, having read the stuff in Russian in the first place) are the ones about a search for Captain Grant’s children, the fifteen-year old captain, and the crossing of Africa by balloon.

7

This is one of the few times I have been tempted to use the dreaded ROTFLMAO acronym.

Excellent summary!

8

You’re supposed to skip the parts that no one reads.

I’ve always been fond of the lesser-known titles…Dr. Ox’s Experiment is a hoot (early work; more of a novella than a novel). A radical British physiologist interrupts the slow life of a bovine Flemish village by intermittently flooding its atmosphere with pure oxygen.

The Floating Island is lots of fun, especially for the Frenchman’s take on the differences between Northern and Southern U.S. cultures, and for the music bits (the four protagonists just happen to be an internationally-celebrated string quartet).

I’ve always preferred Robur the Conqueror (aka The Clipper of the Clouds) to 20,000 Leagues: the title character is a sorta flying Nemo in a heavier-than-air craft called the “Albatross.” He makes a reappearance in the looney The Master of the World, one of Verne’s last books.

And The Begum’s Fortune kicks ass. An enormous lump of cash is bestowed upon two scientist-engineers, one Frenchman and one German. Each uses the dough to create his Perfect Society: one is a glorious democratic garden Utopia, the other a hellish smoggy hyperindustrial Dystopia. Guess which one opts for which.

9

Hector Servadac is good, too. Part of Earth, containing a cross-section of the European populace, gets ripped off by a comet and sent hurtling through space. There’s some fabulous ethnic stereotyping and mind-blowing anti-Semitism in this one.

10

I absolutely loved 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I find it funny that I felt so guilty about skipping the “fish lists”, but every single person I’ve talked to since reading it skipped them too.

I thought From the Earth to the Moon was decent, but I mostly read it because I like the way he tells stories. The story itself I found slightly boring.

I got about 3/4ths of the way through A Trip 'Round the Moon (is that what it was called?) and found some excuse or another to quit reading it. That was some pretty boring stuff.

I have an anthology of his stuff that I do plan to finish someday. He’s one of those authors that I can’t wait to read to my kids one day (like, say, after they’re born), and I will most definitely be skipping the “fish lists” :).

11

You know, I thought about the translation problems while I was reading them and some of the phrasiology stuck me as totally out of whack, but I forgot about that by the time I wrote this thread.

And I’m glad some of y’all are bringing up lesser known novels as well, because I have no reason not to check them out.

12

No mention yet of Around the World in 80 Days? I seem to recall it being pretty entertaining when I read it at the age of 12.

13

The Mysterious Island is my favorite, but make sure it’s the Jordan Stump translation and not the Kingston translation.

Around the World in 80 Days is also fun.

14

Go read a collection of his short stories. Thay are easier to swallow.

15

Funny… I never skip parts of a book, and I don’t particularly remember the “fish lists”. I’ll have to check when I get home what edition I have; perhaps the worst of it was edited out of mine?

It’s not as sciency as most of his work, but I think his best is Around the World in 80 Days. It’s been said that the quickest way to teach an English boy French is to give him a copy of that book, with only the first half translated. I can believe it: It’s a great adventure story, and you won’t be able to put it down until the end.

I wasn’t too impressed, personally, by The Mysterious Island, though that may be in part because it was partly spoiled for me. I’ll refrain from passing on the spoiler, though since it seems to be on the dust jacket of every single edition, that’s probably futile.

And I will advise against his recently-rediscovered second novel, Paris in the Twentieth Century. There’s a reason his publishers wouldn’t take it: It has a very stilted, artificial feel, with a narrator who seems to be encountering the Twentieth Century for the first time, despite growing up in it. Avoid this one, unless you read it as a matter of academic interest in Verne’s writings.

16

Fiver wrote:

Yup – that was me. I’m going by what I read in The Annotated 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Annotated From the Earth to the Moon, both with Annotations by Walter James Miller, who has sinmce published his own translation of 20,000 Leagues. If you can find them, I recommend his books to you, because they contain the most spirited defense of Verne and his writing. In particular he defends Verne’s storytelling and characterizastion, which are usually given as his weak points. As Miller points out, Verne’s books are often taken vwery seriously in Europe, especially in Francer (naturally), whereas in the US it was often seen as “children’s literature”. Part of the reason, Miller claims is that translator Louis Mercier (AKA Mercier Lewis) often gutted Verne’s books in the priocess of translating, cutting out all political views, runing much of the plotting and characterization, and making an awful mess of the science. (Mercier’s translation talks of “Pressure of tons per square 3/8 of an inch” when Verne has “per square centimeter”, and talks about “The Disagreeable Country of South Dakota” when Verne talks about “The Badlands of South Dakota”. Other examples are even worse) Lewis cut out up to 1/3 of the text of these books. The most famous illustration in from the Eaerth to the Moon isn’t even explained in the English text.

I read some of the bastard translations by Lewis and others, and could tell they’d been savaged. Good translations started coming out after about 1960, and are stioll appearing (the first complete translation of The Mysterioyus Island into English just appeared a year or two ago)
That said, I still think that Verne’s characterization is often sketchy and unconvincing, but Verne has an imagination and extrapolative skills that make up for it. It’s an acquired taste, and not everyone acquires it. But Verne wrote over 65 novels, almost all of them translated into English, and most unavailable today. I’ve been collecting them for years. Some were only easily available in comic book form from Classics Illustrated, and it was years before I found the originals.

Still, there’s wonderful stuff to be found there. The examples I keep trotting out are robur the Conqueror, where the heavier-than-air flying machjine is built not of light metal (like aluminum, from which he made his space capsule in From the Earth to the Moon), but of composites, like the modern-day Gossamer Condor. These were in limited use in verne’s day (they actually made railway car wheels from them!!!), and Verne was impressed by the combination of strength and lightness. Even as late as the 1960s, though, reviewers didn’t really understand what he meant, and called his material; “a kind of plastic”, which it isn’t. I’m still surprised that aeronautical engineers aren’t familiar with Verne’s work – it’s mentioned in no aero engineering text, and professor I’ve talked with about this are totally inj the dark.

17

I was spoiled for TMI as well, and I did think that it took away from my enjoyment of the novel, although I still liked it a lot.

I quite liked Paris in the Twentieth Century, but mostly for the amusing bits like the descriptions of twentieth-century music (so true!)

18

Thanks for all that! How do I find the best translations? I just did a quick spot-check at amazon.com, and several of the listings for Verne’s books don’t identify a translator.

19

“Look for recent translations” is a good rule of thumb. Look for the copyright date. As I noted, most translations since 1960 are generally pretty good. There’s a new translation of The Mysterious Island only a couple of years old. I have a collection of Verne short stories issued in 2000 that features some translations by I.O. Evans fronm the 1960s Ace paperbacks and some newer stuff. A translation of a Verne play just came out a couple of years ago.

To tell the truth, the only translations that I know were bad were the Louis Mercier / Mercier Lewis ones that apparently were very widely published and an awful translation of From the Earth to the Moon translated by some American circa 1900 that Miller notes and which I had the misfortune to read as a kid. It was pretty obviously a bad translation. A couple of years later I picked up a new paperback translation published by Bantam Books and found it much better. Miller acknowledges this as a good translation, but lamented that paperback translations aren’t often taken seriously enough.

A lot of my Verne books are translations from the first third of the 20th century, and don’t seem obviously awful.

Keep an eye out for new translations, though. I just finished The Essential Phantom of the Opera, edited, annotated, and (apparently) translated by Leonard Wolfe (a 2004 re-issue of his 1996 book), and it’s better overall than the 1911 translation that has usually been available in English. (Not Verne, I know, but still, an example of a translation from French of a rioughly contemporary work.)