Introduction
As I promised at the end of my translation of Around the World in Eighty Days, here is a detailed write-up of my philosophy of translation for Verne’s novels. Most of this material is focused on that book, but some of the examples may be from my forthcoming translation of Journey to the Center of the Earth.
Motivation
Like many fans of Jules Verne, my first introduction to his work was through an adapted form intended for elementary school readers. My mother bought me two or three abridgments of his books from a used book store. I think they were Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, The Mysterious Island, and Around the World in Eighty Days. I absolutely loved them, so my mother then introduced me to the movie versions of each of these. I loved these as well, even though they didn’t exactly follow the original stories.
When I was a little older, I started reading some of Verne’s books in unabridged, unadapted form. I remember finding the translations a little wooden and choppy, but I immensely enjoyed the stories just the same. I eventually discovered that Verne had written more than the four or five books that most English-speaking readers are familiar with. I started to seek out his lesser-known novels, but found that the style of many of these translations was not merely choppy—it was absolutely awful. Many of them were horrible translations that took great liberties with the original text. The results were often nearly unreadable.
I had studied French in high school and college, and could read and write it well, so I decided to try reading one of his novels in French. I found a copy of Five Weeks in a Balloon at a local used bookstore, and I was blown away. Not only was the story itself interesting and fun to read, but the prose was elegant and expressive in a way that none of the English translations that I read had managed to capture. Even the long-winded scientific or geographical descriptions were interesting to work through in the original text. I thought to myself “why doesn’t someone retranslate all of these in a modern, readable style?”
I made a couple of attempts when I was younger to translate a novel by Verne, but lacked the consistency and technical skills to complete a project of that scale. However, after spending a good portion of my career working in the publishing industry in various roles, I realized that I could now finish a project like that. I had worked for a while for one of the “Big Five” publishers, and didn’t think that any large publisher would be interested (why pay royalties when you can reprint an awful public domain translation for free), so I resolved to publish it myself.
I would love to eventually have the opportunity to translate all of Verne’s novels, but am not quite sure yet if I’m up to translating 54 novels. I have to admit that I haven’t read them all, even in translation, but I’ve so thoroughly enjoyed every book that I’ve read by him that I would love to provide a consistent experience for readers who don’t speak French.
Methodology
My overall goal when I started the translation was to be faithful to Verne’s text as much as possible, but not in an overly literal fashion that would obscure the meaning or make it difficult to read. Or, to state this in a positive form — I wanted to render the text in a way that was readable and understandable to modern, educated American readers, but also maintained the “feel” of the nineteenth century original. I wanted something that sounded the way that modern readers expect a novel from that time period to sound, but with a more conversational tone.
On a mechanical level, this meant using American vocabulary and sentence structures — something natural to me as a native speaker of American English — but it also meant following Chicago style for dates, times, etc. and using the spellings from Webster’s Collegiate dictionary. This may seem a little pedantic, but the result is something that looks familiar and consistent to American readers since just about major publisher in the United States uses these.
As far as the overall tone of the work went, I tried for something a little less formal and more conversational than Verne’s French text is. This may seem inconsistent since one of my stated ideals is to remain faithful to the original, but the reason for this is that I felt it better matches readers’ expectations. While his works may have some literary value, Verne’s novels were written primarily as scientific adventure stories for a general audience. The closest equivalent that we have today would be science fiction. Genre fiction, such as science fiction or adventure stories, tends to be written in a more conversational style, and so I felt that it was appropriate to mirror this in my translation. This means that more unusual aspects of Verne’s vocabulary may be simplified when appropriate.
For example, there are several places in Around the World in Eighty Days where Verne uses the term “physiognomy”, which was pseudo-scientific discipline from the 19th century that attempted to deduce a person’s intelligence or aspects of their personality from measurements of physical features. There is one place in the book where the term “physiognomists” is used to refer to people who are practitioners of these theories, and so I translated it as such. In all other cases it is used in phrases such as “an honest physiognomy”, which I translated as “an honest appearance”.
Another example of this is the term “logograph”, which occurs in Journey to the Center of the Earth. This was a popular 19th century word game involving anagrams. In my forthcoming translation, I translate is as “anagram”, which correctly fits the context and is something that is understandable to educated modern readers.
I also made extensive use of contractions to try to produce a text that can easily be read out loud. This was especially the case in the dialogue through the book, but I will elaborate more on the peculiarities of this later.
I followed a similar paradigm when it came to place names. “New Holland” was changed to “Australia”, and “Annam and Cochin” became “Vietnam”. Interestingly, I was able to verify that the terms Australia and Vietnam were both in use at that time, but the older English translations still used the older names. On the other hand, I retained the 19th century names for certain places if I felt that most readers would understand what was being referred to. I kept “Bombay” rather than changing it to “Mumbai”, and “Calcutta” instead of “Kolkata”. In fact, in these cases I assumed that many readers would be aware of the anachronism if I did update them.
Scientific and cultural terms were updated to their modern forms as appropriate, but sometimes the older form was kept if Verne was referring to something that has no direct modern equivalent. So “Mikado” was changed to “Emperor”, “Tycoon” became “Shogun”, “Hottentot” became “Khoikhoi”, “carbonic gas” became “carbon dioxide”, and so forth. Once again, all of these updated terms were used in the 19th century, but not as commonly as the older forms.
I felt that Verne’s common sentence structure would also be a little hard for many readers to follow, but this was not something that could be changed as easily. Verne has a tendency to write in long sentences which string together numerous subordinate clauses, each of which gives some further information about the last thing mentioned in the previous clause. He also had a tendency to interject somewhat parenthetical statements into the middle of these subordinate clauses.
The use of numerous subordinate clauses all chained together could not be changed in most cases without completely breaking the train of thought. However, there were some cases where it was appropriate to split a particularly long sentence into two or more shorter sentences. There are a number of places where Verne would write a single sentence that would cover an entire paragraph. He commonly did this by using a series of subordinate clauses separated semicolons. Each of these subordinate clause would then have further subordinate clauses of its own. In this type of construction, I found that it worked well to turn each of the top-level subordinate clauses into its own sentence.
The parenthetical statements were another matter. It was often possible to move them to the beginning or ending of a clause, which resulted in a much simpler sentence structure.
Verne’s novels are filled with detailed descriptions of plants, animals, places, buildings, machinery, people, clothing, and anything else encountered by the characters. He intended these novels to be didactic, and wanted to cover the entire range of human knowledge in his writing. Whenever Verne gives a description, I did my best to ascertain what exactly was being described. I would then research the correct modern terminology as well as the usage of the French terms from Verne’s time, and would try to make my translation of the description both understandable to modern readers and as accurate as possible.
It was surprising to me how accurate Verne’s descriptions were, and how precise he was in explaining the details of geographical features or scientific principles. However, there were some places where he was incorrect, and I did not attempt to correct these. For example, there is one point in Around the World in Eighty Days where Verne talks about the forward momentum of the train counteracting the effect of gravity:
They could feel, so to speak, the entire train moving at a speed of a hundred miles per hour, no longer pressing on the rails. The momentum counteracted gravity.
Of course, if this was really an accurate description of the relationship between forward momentum and gravity, powered flight would have been developed much earlier than it eventually was. In my research, I found that this was a commonly held idea in Verne’s time, and since this accurately renders what he was trying to say, I left it just as it is.
The area where I departed the most from a literal rendering of Verne’s text is when he makes passing references to historic events or literary references. For example, there is a reference at one point to the Alabama Claims. This was a significant event in British-American relations at the time, but not well-known to most modern Americans. I added a leading phrase to explain what it was:
This matter of “the trip around the world” was commented on and discussed with as much passion and ardor as when the United States had demanded war reparations in the Alabama Claims.
The underlined part is my addition to Verne’s original statement. I realize this is not the smoothest translation, but I felt that it was not overly awkward and saves the reader the trouble of having to look up what the Alabama Claims were. It also allowed me to avoid using a footnote, which was something that I felt was inappropriate in a book that most people are reading for “fun” and not for its historic or literary value.
In another place, Verne says that Passepartout is not like “un de ces Frontins ou Mascarilles” — “one of those Frontins or Mascarilles”. These were stock characters used in 17th and 18th century comedic French plays, such as those of Moliere. They are both different types of servants, one scheming and the other inept. These same types of characters can be seen in modern sitcoms such as Daphne Moon in Frasier or Geoffrey Butler in Fresh Prince of Bel Air, or in P.G. Wodehouse’s “Jeeves” stories. I render it as “Passepartout was not one of those clever or scheming butlers seen in comedies…” This conveys the same idea and could refer to both Moliere, or the sitcoms that I referred to.
For other events that are more indirectly referenced, I often chose to simply refer them in a way that provided enough detail so that curious readers could find more information on their own. This might mean adding an extra word or two, but not to the degree that I just described. One of the most common cases was when Verne refers to various scientists of explorers. If I could verify who he was referring to, I would include both first and last name, even though Verne’s practice was generally to use only the last name.
Verne also has a habit of sometimes referring to characters in roundabout ways, such as “this honorable gentleman”. I kept this in some situations, but if it made the sentence awkward or ambiguous, I sometimes chose to translate instead as “Mr. Fogg” — or with the name of whatever character is being referred to.
Lastly, I should talk about dialogue. There is a lot of dialogue in both of these books, and, while it is very readable in the original French, it is a little odd. The conversations are very stylized, and I don’t think they would be representative of how French people actually conversed with one another in Verne’s time. Characters almost always speak in very terse utterances, and the questions and responses can seem a little disjointed at times. That being said, there is a certain logic to how Verne uses dialogue.
The simplest way that I can explain this is to say that when Verne wants to describe something, he uses prose. When he wants something to happen — particularly between two characters — he uses dialogue. This is not always the case. He sometimes describes traveling between different locations as a way to move the plot along, but this is usually a series of geographical references and descriptions strung together to form something akin to a travel montage that we might see in a movie. He also does have gripping action scenes that are described rather than spoken — the rescue of Mrs. Aouda and the attack on the train by the Lakota immediately come to mind. However, the human agency that drives the plot forward is expressed largely through dialogue — most often between two or more characters, but sometimes even an internal discussion that a character is having with himself. In this sense, these dialogues function much like a play within the context of the larger work.
When translating this dialogue, I tried to focus on what was being done by the statement. In other words, what was the speaker trying to accomplish? I would follow Verne’s text literally if it made sense in English, but would also commonly change the phrasing to make it read like a conversation in English, since this is what the reader would expect.
An easily understood example of this is the use of minced oaths. These are substitutions for swear words or profanity. Verne’s books were intended for general readership, and so he did not use any truly profane language, but the expressions he used instead don’t make a lot of sense to modern English readers. They are things like “by my faith!” or “by Saint Michael!” When translating these, I tried to consider the emotion that was being conveyed and chose a comparable English expression. If the character was expressing surprised or astonishment something like “my word!” or “by golly!” would be appropriate. If anger or annoyance is being expressed, an expression like “dash it all!” or “drat!” might be more appropriate.
There were also a few cases where I slightly modified the dialogue to fit modern speech patterns. For instance, Verne commonly has characters answer questions in a somewhat roundabout fashion. If it was unclear what the character was saying, I would sometimes make the affirmative or negative answers clearer by the addition of a “yes” or “no” to the statement.
I largely tried to follow 19th century standards in how characters address one another, with only minor changes in cases that would misleading or difficult to understand. For example, Verne uses the term “Inspector” as a title for Fix, but this was an actual rank in the Metropolitan Police at the time, and a fairly high one. Fix does appear to be a high-ranking officer, so I consistently referred to him as “Detective Fix” instead.
The use of honorifics throughout Around the World in Eighty Days is especially interesting in regard to Phileas Fogg. Passepartout consistently calls him “master” or “Mr. Fogg”. Fix, on the other hand, refers to him as “Mr. Fogg” publicly, but as simply “Fogg” during his internal monologues. This is an important distinction since Phileas Fogg was Detective Fix’s superior and should have been referred to by him as “Mr. Fogg”. However, Fix believed that Phileas Fogg was a thief and scoundrel, and as such would no longer be deserving of this honorific. One’s social equals or inferiors could be referred to simply by last names, which explains Fix’s behavior.
Mrs. Aouda is also a fascinating case. Verne always refers to her as “Mrs. Aouda” and not simply “Aouda”, but for some reason many translations use the latter. She was a high-born lady, according to the standards of the time, and it would only have been appropriate to refer to her as “Mrs. Aouda” and not by her name alone. Interestingly, the 1956 film adaptation starring David Niven also features a young Shirley MacLaine as “Princess Aouda”. This is an understandable use of dramatic license, since the rajah was described as “a prince”, but as Verne never uses the title “princess” in reference to Mrs. Aouda. As such, I didn’t feel it was appropriate to refer to her as a princess, and followed the same convention that Verne used.
There were other decisions that had to be made about how to best translate things such as Verne’s use of synonyms within a single passage, adverbial clauses, the sometime odd paragraphing (which I completely preserved), and so on. It’s tempting to break down the choices that I made on a page-by-page and paragraph-by-paragraph basis, but then this would become a set of translator’s note or annotations rather than a simple explanation of my methodology.
Conclusion
Translation is something that I thoroughly enjoy, and I could continue on almost endlessly about all of the principles I used and the choices that I made while working through these texts. However, I hope that this brief sketch has provided enough detail to give a sense of my overall philosophy of translation as well as some of the specific decisions that I made. Those who are not familiar with translational theory or methodology might simply assume that two different translators would generally translate the same text the same way. Hopefully, this post has helped to explain why this is not at all the case. I may do some additional posts that going into greater detail on some of these topics in the future, but, as this one has already become quite lengthy, this will have to do for now.
(For anyone who may have stumbled on this post, and is still interested, my translation of Around the World in Eighty Days is available on Amazon here.)