predicting the near extinction of many marine mammals. Here Kennedy’s stand-in is Ned Land, a Canadian harpooner; when Land wants to attack a pod of inoffensive baleen whales, Captain Nemo’s refusal expands on Fergusson’s reprimand: “It would be killing just for the sake of killing…. When your colleagues, Mr. Land, destroy decent, harmless creatures like the southern right whale or the bowhead whale, they’re guilty of criminal behavior … and they’ll ultimately wipe out a whole class of beneficial animals.”
Translating for Today
Even in the twenty-first century, then, Five Weeks in a Balloon is a novel with a good deal going for it:
• It’s Verne’s first novel, his breakthrough book.
• It was his second biggest seller, after Around the World in Eighty Days.
• It launched his famed series of Voyages extraordinaires.
• It’s the classic ballooning novel.
• It’s the first steampunk story.
• It’s a triple-threat mix of adventure, comedy, and hard science fiction.
• It wrestles with ecological and economic issues that are still unresolved.
The present Wesleyan edition is the first complete English translation of this seminal work. It’s not, however, the earliest translation in our language: the immediate popularity of Five Weeks led to the rapid publication of several English versions—nearly all in Verne’s lifetime, during the high noon of his fame. As Evans reports in “The English Editions of Five Weeks in a Balloon” at the website Verniana, there have been six prior translations of this novel: three identify their translators (William Lackland, Frederick Amadeus Malleson, and Arthur Chambers), the other three keep them anonymous (the publishers are Chapman and Hall, Routledge, and Goubaud).
A seventh, much later version appeared in the 1960s under I. O. Evans’s byline, but it proved to be an abridged spin-off of the Malleson rendering. Nor, alas, are any of the other editions responsibly complete. The Chapman and Hall text eliminates a good quarter of the book and goes to the rear of the class; Malleson, Routledge, and Goubaud condense almost every chapter, while Chambers’s 1920s rendering often slurs details, seemingly out of carelessness. Lackland’s is the fullest text, yet it has its problems too: the author’s many footnotes are omitted, and there are a variety of small mishaps—dropped lines, missing details, technical errors, fleeting mistranslations, unnecessary glosses, etc.
Beyond these questions of omitting and condensing, there are language and style issues—severe ones. True, these are texts from another time and place, so reading them will naturally grow more difficult as the years go by. But they also present an uglier language barrier: in dealing with Africa and its peoples, these old British editions—Lackland’s included—resort to racial epithets and pejorative slang, allowed in their day, despised in ours. Yet Verne’s French is neutral and restrained, so as Evans concludes elsewhere (2005), the fault lies with the translators themselves: had they “chosen to be more faithful to what Verne had originally written, such terms would never have found their way into the English versions of [this novel] in the first place” (96).
So a complete, accurate, reader-friendly translation of Verne’s early masterpiece is long overdue. This book has a twofold audience: first, the countless general readers who think Verne is fun to read, a population ranging from school kids to scientists to oldsters with fond memories. This new translation is particularly meant for them and works to balance the two methodologies Kieran O’Driscoll describes in his recent study of Verne in English: in brief, my text began life as a “highly accurate, source-oriented, imitative” rendering, which I then polished using “informal, idiomatic language” (251–52). As for other audience members, they include the growing battalions of scholars and specialists who, although they know their Verne from the original French, are still appreciative of textual detective work and stimulating critical materials. I encourage them to consult the endnotes, which address the policies, priorities, textual puzzles, and interpretive decisions affecting the translation. In short, to borrow another of O’Driscoll’s phrases, this new, complete rendering of Five Weeks in a Balloon is “aimed at both a general and a scholarly readership” (190).
Frederick Paul Walter Albuquerque, New Mexico
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