One of the successes of this new translation by Frederick Paul Walter of Verne's first novel (and one of his most successful), Five Weeks in a Balloon, is that it's a pleasure to read. We can add to that wooden, pedantic, and dull. The English Verne, the one encountered in most of his translations, seems shallow, one-dimensional, melodramatic, and naive' (p. 80)Įvans points out that, these grosser problems aside, Verne comes across much differently in the original French than the Verne of shoddy English translations: 'The French Verne is intelligent, humorous, witty, theatrical, socially aware, and surprisingly self-reflexive as a writer.

they censored Verne's texts by either removing or diluting references that might be construed as anti-British or anti-American and, in several instances, they totally rewrote Verne's narratives to suit their own tastes (changing the names of the characters, adding new scenes, deleting others, relabeling the chapters, and so on). In a rush to bring his most popular (and profitable) stories to market, British and American translators repeatedly watered them down and abridged them by chopping out most of the science and the longer descriptive passages (often from 20 to 40% of the original) they committed thousands of basic translating errors. Scholars now unanimously agree that the early English translations of Verne's Voyages Extraordinaires were extremely shoddy and often bear little resemblance to their original French counterparts.

That, and haste, ignorance, and, apparently, sheer arrogance led many of them to 'massacre' his work, as translator William Butcher describes it (quoted in Evans, p.

Evans, French scholar and editor of the book under review.Įarly on, English-language publishers seem to have decided Verne was a writer for boys.

An excellent overview of the problems is given in ' Jules Verne's English Translations' ( Science Fiction Studies, XXXII:1 #95 : 80-104), by Arthur B. Verne has been subjected to bad, even horrible, translations perhaps more than any author of his stature and popularity, and perhaps because of that very popularity. There's been a renaissance in English translations of Jules Verne, which began slowly perhaps fifty years ago and lately seems to have picked up steam (appropriately enough).

Five Weeks in a Balloon by Jules Verne