Need help on a translation issue from Robur

[quentin skrabec]

Did Verne mean sugar literally from rags in Robur the Conqueror   Or is it some sort of idiom like rags to riches? My translator at the University of Michigan leans toward literal?

What do you guys think???? I am researching this recent technology and its history

“And William T. Forbes, the manufacturer of sugar from rags, had received a cordial shake from Phil Evans who had said to him twice, "Au revoir! Au revoir!" “”Chapter XXI THE INSTITUTE AGAIN

Page 187 Kindle edition   --in  all my translations

Quent 

[mken...@aol.com]

Hi Quent, Robur has just 18 chapters: https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Robur_le_conqu%C3%A9rant

Search for "sucre" and post the whole sentence that you mean in French. (AI may be able to help, don’t hesitate to try it :)

Cheers,

Matthias

[Tad Davis]

From Alex Kirstukas's version:

"On this occasion, Jem Cip was supported by another club member, William T. Forbes, the director of a large factory, where glucose was produced by treating cloth with sulfuric acid—which allows one to make sugar out of old rags."

Footnote: "Fourbe is French for “dishonest, swindling”—so the name Forbes is almost certainly a comment about the man’s profession."

— 
Tad Davis
tad.dav...@gmail.com

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[quentin skrabec]

Thanks Tad

Your chemistry is correct: you can make low-grade sugar by treating rags with sulfuric acid, but it is highly contaminated and unusable. At  the time of Verne's writing, it does seem only a few experiments were conducted until the 1890s when it was tried on a larger scale. Only recently has a process been developed to make food-grade sugar, but even now the process is only in pilot stages. The comment of Fourbe meaning is interesting and I will research further. There was a rich William Forbes connected to the sugar industry  "The majority of William Forbes's wealth came from lucrative government contracts to sheath the hulls of Naval ships, hence the nickname “Copperbottom.” Forbes also profited from the transatlantic slave trade through the manufacture of sugar boiling pans and rum stills for export to the Caribbean plantations."

Of course my interest is that Verne again appears extremely knowledgeable of evolving and cutting edge science a sees a future

quent

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From: jules-ve...@googlegroups.com <jules-ve...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Tad Davis <tad.dav...@gmail.com>
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Subject: Re: [JVF] Need help on a translation issue from Robur

 

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[Tad Davis]

Quentin - just to be clear, I was quoting from Alex Kirskutas’s translation and notes. I haven’t looked at the French myself. 

— 
Tad Davis
tad.dav...@gmail.com

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