Re: Captain Nemo's Timeline

On 6/16/25 7:26 PM, Scott Dorsey wrote:

Jerry Brown  <jerry@jwbrown.co.uk.invalid> wrote:

My memory of the book is that Aronnax, etc escaped in a detachable pod
while Nemo and the crew were busy battling a storm, but it was about
40 years ago that I read it.
>
Maybe time for a reread.

 If you are reading in translation, let me suggest that the recent translation
is MUCH better than the old version we grew up with.
--scott
 

You mean the one where they translate "lentille" as "bean" (instead of "lens") and hence claimed Ned Land used a bean to make a fire?
Or as I wrote in my 2006 review of 20KLUTS:
If [Mercier] Lewis [the original translator] was not writing that the density of steel was "from .7 to .8 that of water" where Verne had said that it was "7.8 that of water," then he was having Nemo talk about "jumping over" an island where Verne says "blowing up" (the same word in French, but Lewis completely misses the meaning). In fact, Lewis consistently gets the numbers and calculations wrong. He frequently confuses the French "six" (6) with "dix" (10), and substitutes English measures for metric. The latter would be almost close if he substituted "yards" for "metres," but he sometimes substitutes "feet" instead! When you read this book, use either Miller's annotated version or a newer translation. (If the fourth paragraph mentions Cuvier and other naturalists, it is undoubtedly a newer translation.)
--
Evelyn C. Leeper, http://leepers.us/evelyn
"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a
child, I thought as a child: and when I was a man I decided
how foolish it would be to give all that up." --Mark R. Leeper