Day 60 of “Le Tour du numéro 7 de Saville-row en 80 traductions”

7 views
Skip to first unread message

Harpold, Terry Alan

unread,
Dec 1, 2022, 10:13:49 AM12/1/22
to jules-ve...@googlegroups.com

Dear fellow travelers,

 

We enter Day 60 of “Le Tour du numéro 7 de Saville-row en 80 traductions” – https://80traductions.blogspot.com – and the machinations of our journey to nowhere continue to surprise. (See https://80traductions.blogspot.com/2022/10/prologue.html for an overview of the voyage’s rationale and method.)

 

Phyllis Fogg parle bien l'anglais, oui, très bien, a une forte personnalité et une relation heureuse. Sa tête était sous son menton. Sa barbe et sa barbe sont comme des abeilles, et le grand Byron a mille ans.

 

– Phileas’s transformation to Phyllis seems pretty well complete by now – “Phyllis Fogg est-elle riche ? Oui, il sait ce qui lui est arrivé, et je vois enfin Aubrey. Ce n'est pas déraisonnable, arrogant ou ignorant” – though she also goes by the names Phyllis May – “Phyllis May est membre du club d'amélioration” – and Filius Fogg – “Filius Fogg vit seul dans une maison abandonnée sur Saville Lane, sans aucun doute” – and “Philip Fogg, l'homme le plus puissant d'Angleterre” – the fellow won’t stand still, will he ? (Moreover, someone named Filippo makes a brief appearance, as mysteriously as the fellow named Yanis, who is apparently Jean Passepartout? And who is Aubrey?)

 

– “Une maison abandonée,”: Saville House has been “pas génial” for some time now, but it seems to be tending even more toward entropic decline? And, whereas on Day 50 Phyllis’s beard was, anatomically speaking, above her head, now the head has moved below her chin – does the beard stay in the same place? Hard to visualize that, exactly; maybe René Magritte or Max Ernst could help us. And whereas on Day 50 Phyllis’s beard and moustache were like butter (too much beard oil?), now the beard – the text insists on this twice – is like bees, which seems more… itchy. Sempiternal Byron, who has now absent the perfect legs he had on Day 40, remains a thousand years old. Such persistence in extreme old age is admirable.  

 

Le vieil homme ne perdit pas courage. Il était aussi calme que possible, mais hésita. Mais il fonctionne comme un symbole de la vie quotidienne et sa fonctionnalité vous surprendra.

 

– the old man – Phyllis, probably, but maybe Lord Byron’s shadow is cast long here – is fearless, as calm as possible, but still hesitating about something. We will be surprised, it appears, that Verne’s great clockwork-and-timetable hero functions as a symbol of daily life. This is one of the remarkable and charming effects of serial translation, which has crept in piece by piece all along the voyage: notional translation “errors” seem to be meta-commentaries on the novel as writerly and cultural project.

 

Déjeuner ou dîner? L'auteur du livre... en belle robe chinoise, manteau et souliers noirs, Port Prince, cannelle, berger libre, cannelle argentée. La crème glacée la plus populaire et la plus délicieuse d'Amérique.

 

– this passage is getting a bit fractured now, what with being jammed with locations that neither Fogg nor Verne visited – or might “Port Prince” be the name of a fancy fortified wine? But it was Port-au-Prince ten days ago… – cinnamon, plain and silvered, and free-ranging shepherds. But the most popular and delicious ice cream of America has stayed on the table, mostly unchanged, during the last ten days. Like Lord Byron, some things can last a long time.

 

Mon passeport est en règle, montrez-moi. Ils connaissent mon histoire. Ils savent qui je suis. – Cool – Je suis plus heureux que mon âge. Il a sorti de l'argent de sa poche et l'a mis en deux. "Vous dites aux étrangers que vous avez un chien." "Veillez excuser mon retard." "Restez à l'écoute…"

 

– Yet more fracturing, this time in Phileas’s (Phyllis’s) and Passepartout conversation about Jean’s origins and his lateness to his first appointment. “Cool” seems a little informal for both speakers. (Only one person, by the way, is tutoied in the entire novel: Parsi, the guide that Fogg gives Kiouni the elephant in Chapter XIV. Fogg, Phileas or Phyllis, is a proper gentleman/gentlelady. He/she maintains all the right protocols of speech and all the imbalances of power they imply.)

 

– Something odd is happening with money – “l’argent de sa poche” was originally the “énorme montre d’argent,” the critical watch that Passepartout carries all along the voyage – but what that means is unclear at the moment. And though “je suis plus heureux que mon âge” seems like a lovely sentiment – perhaps Lord Byron feels this as well? – it’s not clear what would be the benefit of telling all the strangers you meet that you have a dog. There are no living dogs in the novel, only three mentions of dogs: an extremely unpleasant description of the victim of suttee – “On lui raserait les cheveux, on la nourrirait à peine de quelques poignées de riz, on la repousserait, elle serait considérée comme une créature immonde et mourrait dans quelque coin comme un chien galeux” in Chapter XII; dog-skin gloves worn by William Hitch, the Mormon missionary whose sermon on board the train distracts Passepartout in Chapter XXVII; and a somewhat more appealing metaphor of devoted attendance the narrator applies to Passepartout in Chapter XXXV: “Mr. Fogg s’était couché, mais avait-il dormi ? Quant à Mrs. Aouda, elle ne put prendre un seul instant de repos. Passepartout, lui, avait veillé comme un chien à la porte de son maître.”

 

Phyllis Fogg se leva sans un mot et disparut avec son costume dans la main droite.

 

– On day 50, Phyllis exited the scene with her beautiful Chinese dress in hand. She’s back to wearing a suit, it appears.

 

Terry Harpold

Associate Professor of English

Director, Imagining Climate Change

 

https://people.clas.ufl.edu/tharpold/

https://imagining-climate.clas.ufl.edu

https://sciencefiction.group.ufl.edu

 

"Have you noticed my pink brains?

 You can see 'em work."

Jan Rychlík

unread,
Dec 9, 2022, 5:56:56 AM12/9/22
to jules-ve...@googlegroups.com
I have checked Czech edition of the novel available in our bookstores. It is based on late 1890s translation, but the editors doesn’t seem to have worried away at embarassing points of the text:
  • he was said to be similar to Byron as to intelligence [logically no mention of his legs follows] and also to Byron with moustache and beard, hearthless Byron...
Sometimes they even invented jokes-would-be without having been provoked by an unclear translation:
  • whenever money was needed for a noble or mean purpose, he contributed it 
while leaving unchanged other shortcomings of the old translation:
  • his house was not beautiful, but was characterized by an utmost comfort
  • Passepartout took his watch out of the deep pocket of his long johns


--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Jules Verne Forum" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to jules-verne-fo...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/jules-verne-forum/10B3B885-439E-4A98-AA3C-DC015C63F54F%40ufl.edu.

Harpold, Terry Alan

unread,
Dec 10, 2022, 11:01:11 AM12/10/22
to jules-ve...@googlegroups.com

I'm sure that I speak for Garmt also in saying that one of the things I regret about this project is that I’m unable to make sense of the overwhelming majority of the languages into which and out of which we’ve translated the French text. It would be entertaining, I think, to have a better grasp of how semantically, creatively mangled are the intermediate translations…

 

TH

 

Terry Harpold

Associate Professor of English

Director, Imagining Climate Change

 

https://people.clas.ufl.edu/tharpold/

https://imagining-climate.clas.ufl.edu

https://sciencefiction.group.ufl.edu

 

Terry Harpold has separate windings for thought, action, and speech.

 

From: <jules-ve...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Jan Rychlík <jan.r...@seznam.cz>
Reply-To: "jules-ve...@googlegroups.com" <jules-ve...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday, December 9, 2022 at 5:57 AM
To: "jules-ve...@googlegroups.com" <jules-ve...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [JVF] Day 60 of “Le Tour du numéro 7 de Saville-row en 80 traductions”

 

[External Email]

Marie-Hélène Huet

unread,
Dec 10, 2022, 3:03:18 PM12/10/22
to jules-ve...@googlegroups.com

At this point, though, I should think "Hatzilla"could transcend all linguistic barriers!....Quite a trip!

 
Marie-Hélène Huet

From: jules-ve...@googlegroups.com <jules-ve...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Harpold, Terry Alan <thar...@ufl.edu>
Sent: Saturday, December 10, 2022 11:01

Harpold, Terry Alan

unread,
Dec 11, 2022, 10:02:25 AM12/11/22
to jules-ve...@googlegroups.com

I’ve been trying to imagine how one might incorporate Hatzilla into the Verniverse. With Riou’s illustrations of the ichthyosarus and the plesiosaurus battling on the surface of the Lidenbrock Sea, I get something like this –

 

https://youtu.be/IHBwaL_cF60

 

– only involving really big and ferocious *hats* punching and biting one another.

 

But, really, half-seriously, I’m not sure we can talk about the modern visual grammar of a battle on the ocean’s surface between two mighty monsters, while a group of stunned and helpless humans watch from nearby, without acknowledging the influence of Riou’s illustrations of the battle in Verne and in Louis Figuier’s La Terre avant le Déluge (1866). There’s a good reason why the image appears on the covers of multiple modern editions/translations of Voyage au centre de la Terre; it’s the type of such a conflict.

 

Terry Harpold

Associate Professor of English

Director, Imagining Climate Change

 

https://people.clas.ufl.edu/tharpold/

https://imagining-climate.clas.ufl.edu

https://sciencefiction.group.ufl.edu

 

Terry Harpold has separate windings for thought, action, and speech.

 

Harpold, Terry Alan

unread,
Dec 11, 2022, 6:34:07 PM12/11/22
to jules-ve...@googlegroups.com

Heh. For a distantly-related project, I’ve just been re-reading Art Evans’s fine 2005 essay on Verne’s gruesome early English translations –

 

Evans, Arthur B. “Jules Verne’s English Translations.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 32, no. 1, 2005, pp. 80–104.

 

– and was reminded that the truly awful Griffith and Farran 1871 “Hardwigg” edition of Journey to the Centre of the Earth includes an unaccountable translator’s interpolation of Harry witnessing – in fact, dreaming – a hand-to-fang match between “the great ‘shark-crocodile’ of the early writers on geology” (“about the size of an ordinary whale, with hideous jaws and two gigantic eyes…”) and “the Ape Gigans, the antediluvian gorilla” – “Fourteen feet high, covered with coarse hair, of a blackish brown, the hair on the arms, from the shoulder to the elbow joints, pointing downwards, while that from the wrist to the elbow pointed upwards, it advanced. Its arms were as long as its body, while its legs were prodigious. It had thick, long, and sharply pointed teeth—like a mammoth saw”… which I fancy may be, by some long, indirect path of maladaptation, the type of the epic battles between Godzilla and King Kong in the 2021 film. The movie does, in fact, involve a trip to the hollow of the Center of the Earth… But it’s easy to mistake sloppy pastiche for influence…

 

TH

 

P.S. Oh, and that should have been “ichthyosaurus” in my previous message.

 

Terry Harpold

Associate Professor of English

Director, Imagining Climate Change

 

https://people.clas.ufl.edu/tharpold/

https://imagining-climate.clas.ufl.edu

https://sciencefiction.group.ufl.edu

 

Terry Harpold has separate windings for thought, action, and speech.

 

Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages