Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas, by Jules Verne

Twenty thousand leagues under the sea! What a movie, and we’ve all seen it right? It is a cinematic masterpiece and I don’t think it could be made today. All this in 1954, the year I was born. Yet, in 1993 and again in 1998, in the USA and in the UK, both independently and neither press knowing it, the Naval Institute Press and Oxford University Press decided to retranslate this classic work from 1870.

Why? Both presses realized that this work had been grossly mistranslated, or at least very poorly translated into English by a certain English minister by the name of Lewis Mercier in 1872. Even the title was mistranslated. The French being: Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, or, twenty thousand miles [traveled] beneath the oceans [or seas]. This changes the meaning completely. As it is distance and not depth. These translations, by Mercier, omitted between one quarter and one third of the original text, omitting political commentary, humor, sarcasm, tension and amazing [for 1870] scientific observation. Also, the text itself was written for what we would call today junior high school students. And we do not know why. Although jealousy, or cultural hubris would explain the deliberate acts of hatred or sabotage.

We have acquired the OUP editions in paperback format, both with 48 pages of introduction and 45 pages of explanatory notes, which should be enough for anyone. We hope to acquire the NIP edition, which, while having less info has the serendipitous benefit of the original line drawings from the 1870 French edition. It must be said these are quite dramatic and it is amazing how much these one hundred and fifty-three-year-old illustrations look a lot like a modern submarine. There are subtle, yet interesting, differences in the text. Obviously, the main one being the difference between American and British English. Yet, these are not glaringly so. And in comparing these with the so called standard version, which many of us read long ago is a revelation. This explains to me at least, as to why it is that the works of Verne have not become as popular in the Anglosphere as obviously as in French. And it is sad to say that Verne in English is avoided or even discredited.

Regrettably, the works of Verne in English have been relegated to Junior high school, when they are read at all. Yet these retranslations are leading to a reappraisal of “The Great Old Storyteller”. And it may come as shock in 2023, but in 1900, it was not New York City or London but to Paris where people who wanted culture, art, literature went. Davis McCullough’s “Americans in Paris” is also a sterling work, even though it has nothing to do with submarines, but it does explain much of that time period. Even today, Paris is seen as perhaps the most desirable, if the most expensive city to live in. We should keep in mind in 1870, the Trans-continental railway had just been built. There were no airplanes. The Franco-Prussian war had yet to be fought. Italy was in the throes of its “Risorgimento” or national unification. And the American civil war had only just ended. I believe that Verne was a man who thought big and saw into the future. Not necessarily the future, but a future. It was not for nothing that Verne named his submarine boat “Nautilus” after the living dinosaur, the chambered nautilus. And I can only think that M. Verne might be pleased and perhaps even a bit amused, to know that we were still reading his amazing works on the future today.

William Littlefield, Albacore Historian and Sales Associate

Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas (Oxford World's Classics) Paperback – July 1, 2019 by Jules Verne (Author), William Butcher (Editor)