Post by SuperDevilDoctor on Feb 24, 2023 3:06:12 GMT
"Boner" as in MISTAKE.
I recently finished reading Verne's The Mysterious Island (1875), in a "new" 2001 English translation that actually made it entertaining and very pleasurable to read. (FYI: Most of the foreign-language public domain classics still being published these days use stilted, archaic translations that are 100+ years old.)
It's Verne's sequel to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870).
What I simply cannot fathom is this: How a writer so meticulous in his research and presentation of "science-y" stuff could totally screw up such a simple thing -- his Captain Nemo timeline. The very first sentence of Twenty Thousand Leagues begins with, "The year 1866 was marked by a strange event...". Everything that occurs in that novel happens in 1866-67.
In Mysterious Island, the castaways arrive in the South Pacific by balloon in March 1865, while the US Civil War still rages. They spend almost four years on the island; during the last 6 months they meet Nemo, who has been living secretly on the island since before their arrival. And yet -- somehow -- two of the castaways (the engineer and the journalist) recall the amazing story of Captain Nemo and his submarine boat, which had "electrified the world" in the previous decade.
This simply is not possible.
How could Verne -- and his publisher -- have possibly missed that? Most strange (as Mr. Spock would say).
Anyway, on the one in a gazillion chance that anyone here is actually thinking about ever reading these classic books, I suggest the following:
Either skip the first book entirely and read only Mysterious Island (the new translation, natch) or else subtract 10 years from any date given in Twenty Thousand Leagues and mentally rename the US Navy frigate (that figures in the opening chapters) from the USS Abraham Lincoln to the USS Zachary Taylor.
I recently finished reading Verne's The Mysterious Island (1875), in a "new" 2001 English translation that actually made it entertaining and very pleasurable to read. (FYI: Most of the foreign-language public domain classics still being published these days use stilted, archaic translations that are 100+ years old.)
It's Verne's sequel to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870).
What I simply cannot fathom is this: How a writer so meticulous in his research and presentation of "science-y" stuff could totally screw up such a simple thing -- his Captain Nemo timeline. The very first sentence of Twenty Thousand Leagues begins with, "The year 1866 was marked by a strange event...". Everything that occurs in that novel happens in 1866-67.
In Mysterious Island, the castaways arrive in the South Pacific by balloon in March 1865, while the US Civil War still rages. They spend almost four years on the island; during the last 6 months they meet Nemo, who has been living secretly on the island since before their arrival. And yet -- somehow -- two of the castaways (the engineer and the journalist) recall the amazing story of Captain Nemo and his submarine boat, which had "electrified the world" in the previous decade.
This simply is not possible.
How could Verne -- and his publisher -- have possibly missed that? Most strange (as Mr. Spock would say).
Anyway, on the one in a gazillion chance that anyone here is actually thinking about ever reading these classic books, I suggest the following:
Either skip the first book entirely and read only Mysterious Island (the new translation, natch) or else subtract 10 years from any date given in Twenty Thousand Leagues and mentally rename the US Navy frigate (that figures in the opening chapters) from the USS Abraham Lincoln to the USS Zachary Taylor.
