the demand for Verne’s books had been slowly but inexorably diminishing during the final decade of his life, as he continued to churn out two or three novels per year. In contrast to the continuously sold-out print runs of thirty thousand to fifty thousand copies per title for Verne’s earlier works between 1863 and 1880 (Le Tour du monde en 80 jours alone topped a hundred thousand), the first-edition sales of his later novels, from 1880 to his death in 1905, averaged only seven thousand to ten thousand each. The first printing of Le Superbe Orénoque in 1898, for example, was limited to a mere five thousand—and unsold copies still remained in Hetzel’s stockroom many years later.11 Given these sales trends, it is understandable why British and American publishers might begin to be wary of offering their readers another new English translation of Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires.
But in addition to the factors of decreasing sales and a growing abundance of other Verne-like books in the marketplace, Anglo-American publishers also refused to publish many of Verne’s later works on purely ideological grounds. As described by Vernian scholar Brian Taves:
By 1898, political questions had become the deciding factor in whether the latest Verne books were published in English at all. The tenor of his newer works were less agreeable to English-speaking audiences, or at least their publishers, who were not prepared to faithfully present Verne’s views. The censorship grew beyond simply changing or removing controversial passages until eventually entire books were suppressed by simply not translating them into English. British publishers were fearful of offending their readers in the empire, and the anticipated taste of the British market largely governed what appeared on either side of the Atlantic. Although translations had been appearing with regularity to commercial success for a quarter century, a sudden change in policy was made. The Superb Orinoco became the first of Verne’s annual books not to be translated, and thereafter few of his new works appeared in English.12
As a result, of the seventeen Voyages Extraordinaires published in France after 1898, more than half were destined to remain untranslated into English until the late 1950s and 1960s (in severely abridged editions), and several have remained untranslated until the present day.
The “Two Jules Vernes”
Brief mention should also be made of the quality (or lack thereof) of the early English translations of Verne’s works. It is now recognized that most English-language versions of Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires were very badly translated, and some were so bowdlerized that they bear little resemblance to the original French works. In a rush to bring Verne’s potentially profitable stories to market, British and American translators often severely abridged them by deleting most of the science and the long descriptive passages (sometimes 20 to 40 percent of the original); they committed thousands of translating errors, both literary and technical; they frequently censored Verne’s texts by either removing or “adjusting” passages that might be construed as anti-British or anti-American; and, in many cases, they actually rewrote Verne’s novels to suit their own tastes—changing the names of principal characters, adding new scenes and episodes, reordering or relabeling the chapters, and so forth.
In recent decades, Vernian scholar Walter James Miller has probably done the most to call attention to the shockingly poor quality of some of the English translations of Verne—both in his 1965 introduction to a new translation of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea and, more importantly, in his two-volume translation series entitled The Annotated Jules Verne (1976–78). Miller’s conclusions are concise and categorical: “The English-speaking world has never had a fair chance to know the real Jules Verne.”13
It is also useful to understand how these English translations were originally published because, at least in Verne’s case, how his novels were published often determined what was published. Verne’s French publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, was a very shrewd businessman and had great success in marketing his books to French readers both young and old. American and British publishers adopted many of Hetzel’s successful strategies but chose to promote Verne’s translations almost exclusively to a juvenile audience. And they did so in one of three ways: elegant, cloth-bound luxury editions that could be offered as holiday gifts, collectible editions such as those in the “Every Boy’s Library” series by the publisher Routledge, or serials in a magazine such as The Boy’s Own Paper (a popular periodical for youth begun in the late 1870s, somewhat reminiscent of Hetzel’s own Magasin d’Education et de Récréation).
Did the editors of the English-language publishing houses purposely shorten, cleanse, and “adapt” Verne’s works in order to better suit this youthful public? Or were the translated manuscripts they received for publication judged to be so unsophisticated in content and tone that only adolescents and preadolescents were targeted as their potential readers? It is impossible to determine. But whatever the sequence of these events, the outcome was the same: Verne’s English translations were marketed primarily to British and American youngsters. As a result, in most anglophone countries until quite recently, Jules Verne’s literary reputation among adult readers has suffered.
But all that is now changing. As I have explained in more detail elsewhere,14 Verne’s critical reappraisal began to gain momentum in France during the structuralist and poststructuralist 1960s and 1970s through the influential studies of both academic and nonacademic scholars such as Michel Butor, Michel Carrouges, Jean Chesneaux, Charles-Noël Martin, Roland Barthes, René Escaich, Michel Foucault, Marcel Moré, Michel Serres, Simone Vierne, and Pierre Macherey. By 1978 (the 150th anniversary of the author’s birth), the literary stature of Jules Verne and his Voyages Extraordinaires had already begun to metamorphose. No longer a paraliterary pariah, Verne was rapidly moving to—as one critic rather hyperbolically mused—“a first-rank position in the history of French literature.”15 And this Verne renaissance has continued through the 1980s and 1990s through the work of Piero Gondolo della Riva, François Raymond, Christian Robin, Olivier Dumas, Jean-Michel Margot, Volker Dehs, Daniel Compère, and Jean-Paul Dekiss.
In America and Great Britain, however, still burdened with the poor English translations described above, a similar reassessment of Verne’s place in literary history has lagged far behind.16 But a glimmer of hope now shows on the horizon. First, new and more accurate English-language versions of a (very) few of Verne’s works have begun to appear in the Anglo-American marketplace during the past few years.17 Second, during the mid- to late 1980s, a handful of American and British university scholars completed their doctoral theses on Verne and subsequently published them as books,18 paving the way for more advanced study of this French author in academe. And, finally, the 1990s witnessed a variety of developments in Great Britain and America that brought Jules Verne out of oblivion and into the limelight: the discovery and publication of his early futuristic dystopia Paris in the Twentieth Century, the birth of the North American Jules Verne Society (along with its informative newsletter Extraordinary Voyages), the online presence of Zvi Har’El’s excellent Jules Verne website (http://JV.Gilead.org.il/), and a growing number of English-language studies on Verne by British and American scholars such as myself, William Butcher, Andrew Martin, Brian Taves, Stephen Michaluk Jr., George Slusser, Herbert Lottman, Ron Miller, Lawrence Lynch, Peggy Teeters, and Thomas Renzi.
In the three and a half decades since Walter James Miller first remarked that two entirely different Jules Vernes seemed to exist in America and in Europe,19 a great deal of progress has been made toward familiarizing anglophone readers with the “real” Jules Verne. But much remains to be done. Of highest priority are first-edition printings of all previously untranslated works by this prolific French author. Next in importance are updated and unabridged editions of those many Verne novels that are currently available only in severely bowdlerized English translations. Finally, there continues to be a pressing need for new collections of translated Vernian criticism in order to provide a critical “bridge” for Anglophone researchers to the wealth of extant foreign-language scholarship on Jules
