Jules Verne, Reconsidered
The (London) Times Online observed the centenary of Jules Verne's death with an article that assesses the author's literary contributions as being perhaps more important--and of higher quality--than many of his contemporary critics believed.
... The prolific visionary of high-tech adventure is still a household name thanks to Hollywood, but it has taken a century for France to accord full honour to the writer who fired the enthusiasm of schoolboys around the world.
... Verne failed to foresee the internet, but he is being credited with paternity of the information society. In 1863 he predicted in In the 20th Century that in 1955 people would be chatting with friends on Mars with “telephonoscopes” or “intercontinental voice-carriers” with pictures. He also imagined helicopters, aeroplanes and the first Moon rocket. The French are happy to note that he astutely predicted the European Union in 1889, writing about a future European “league” set up to “confront the common enemy, otherwise known as The
American Company”.
... In his lifetime, Verne was treated with disdain as a scribbler of ripping yarns for adolescents. Though an international celebrity in later life, he was shunned ... by the Academie Francaise.
Michel Butor, a leading French novelist and Vernophile, said this week: “I have always seen him as a great writer, the equal of Balzac and Zola. His output as a novelist was of the same stature. Verne’s adventures become poetic.”
The article also explains that the translators who made the first English renditions of Verne's works apparently did a hatchet job on them, something I was not aware of:
Verne’s English translators did not treat him kindly. Jean-Michel Margot, a Swiss writer based in North Carolina who heads the North American Jules Verne Society, said: “Verne was massacred by the English translators in the Victorian age. Whenever one of his British characters turned out to be not very nice, he was erased or turned into a German.”
Sounds like good reason to seek out more recent, and presumably truer, editions of Jules Verne.
[Tags: Verne Jules Verne science science fiction technology Victorianism literature books France futurism French sci-fi scifi adventure predictions prophecy fiction translation translators 19th century speculative fiction futurism futurists stories novels inventions imagination]
... The prolific visionary of high-tech adventure is still a household name thanks to Hollywood, but it has taken a century for France to accord full honour to the writer who fired the enthusiasm of schoolboys around the world.
... Verne failed to foresee the internet, but he is being credited with paternity of the information society. In 1863 he predicted in In the 20th Century that in 1955 people would be chatting with friends on Mars with “telephonoscopes” or “intercontinental voice-carriers” with pictures. He also imagined helicopters, aeroplanes and the first Moon rocket. The French are happy to note that he astutely predicted the European Union in 1889, writing about a future European “league” set up to “confront the common enemy, otherwise known as The
American Company”.
... In his lifetime, Verne was treated with disdain as a scribbler of ripping yarns for adolescents. Though an international celebrity in later life, he was shunned ... by the Academie Francaise.
Michel Butor, a leading French novelist and Vernophile, said this week: “I have always seen him as a great writer, the equal of Balzac and Zola. His output as a novelist was of the same stature. Verne’s adventures become poetic.”
The article also explains that the translators who made the first English renditions of Verne's works apparently did a hatchet job on them, something I was not aware of:
Verne’s English translators did not treat him kindly. Jean-Michel Margot, a Swiss writer based in North Carolina who heads the North American Jules Verne Society, said: “Verne was massacred by the English translators in the Victorian age. Whenever one of his British characters turned out to be not very nice, he was erased or turned into a German.”
Sounds like good reason to seek out more recent, and presumably truer, editions of Jules Verne.
[Tags: Verne Jules Verne science science fiction technology Victorianism literature books France futurism French sci-fi scifi adventure predictions prophecy fiction translation translators 19th century speculative fiction futurism futurists stories novels inventions imagination]
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