It’s been a couple of months now since I wrapped up my last project: my translation of Journey to the Center of the Earth. I’ve written a couple of blog posts about that title, and may do more in the future. I was thinking of exploring the idea of the Rumhkorf lamps in detail — specifically how the battery apparatus was supposed to work. I had also written a simple Python script when I was translating the cyphers in the early chapters to generate new cypher text that matched my English translations. I’ve thought about writing something about the state of cryptography in Verne’s time, and putting my Python code somewhere accessible for others to play around with.
I’ve also been working on another translation project. It’s another of Verne’s novels. I’m currently nearly a quarter of the way through translating Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. I’m hopeful that it will be done later this year, but at the rate that I’m going, late summer or early fall would be optimistic. My work on that translation has inspired a forthcoming post on Jules Verne and the subject of physiognomy, but I’m afraid that my research in that area has gone down a bit of a rabbit hole and it will take me at least a couple more weeks to sort out my thoughts.
Lastly, I’ve been continuing with the quiet work of compiling my own corpus of the French text of Jules Verne’s novels. I do most of my translation work on my laptop, and I have a rudimentary translation dashboard that I’ve built to assist me with the process. It has some built-in tools to help my with my work, such as the ability to jump to dictionary definitions from standard sources like the Trésor de la Langue Française, as well as things like statistics about word usage, and so forth. This requires some preparation in regard to the French text. I’ve been working lately on keying in the text of Mathias Sandorf for this purpose. It’s an interesting book that reads more like a piece of historical fiction today, but would have been more similar to a spy thriller at the time that it was written. I’m not completely sure why it is not more popular in the English-speaking world, but I’m sure that part of the reason is because for a very long time there was only one translation in English, and that translation cut a lot of the material from the French original. It’s also very hard to find at this point. I’ve seen at least two more recent revisions that claim to be complete, but they appear to the older translation with the “missing” material added in.
I’m strongly considering Mathias Sandorf for my next translation project, but that would (optimistically) not be started until later in 2023, and not completed until sometime in 2024. I intend to continue working on Verne’s novels in the long term, but I’ve also thought about taking a break after Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea to do something like Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss, or one of Emilio Salgari’s novels. Salgari is sometimes referred to as the “Italian Jules Verne,” and yet only a handful of his novels were ever translated into English. I suspect this was due to strong anti-Italian sentiments in English-speaking countries at the time that he was writing, as well as his somewhat anti-imperial and anti-colonialist views, but these features would actually make his works more appealing to a modern audience than those of many of his contemporaries.
I might be sharing too much at this point since these are just plans. I don’t want to get anyone overly excited about something that might take months or years for me to complete (or never happen), but I also want to encourage anyone who is reading this with similar interests to mine to stay tuned over the next few months as I will try to provide occasional updates, as well as more content on topics related to Jules Verne.