20,000 Leagues under the Sea

[shiner]

Anyone know of a really good version of this book? I have read it a couple of times in the past and have loved it, but I have heard that the new translations of the book are superb and make some of the older translations look terrible. It seems that past translators injected their own plot twist, etc... into the book and thus added and subtracted from Verne's original work. I have found a recent translation, translated by a guy named Walter J. Miller, that is recommended, but the paperback is $25 and that seems a bit much to me.

 

[XMan]

Stupid question . . . but didn't Jules Verne write in English?

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

Hey, you can't read that book! Verne was French!

 

[shiner]

Originally posted by: X-Man
Stupid question . . . but didn't Jules Verne write in English?

French.

His best book is probably Mysterious Island. Always been a fan of that one and picked up a new translation of it and was amazed. Sadly it to had been abridged, added to, interpreted wrong, etc... over the years. I didn't know that until I was doing some reading and saw that a new unabridged edition translated from the original French was available. Bought it and was amazed.

 

[jacob0401]

Myserious Island and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea are both excellent books, I read copies from the public library. They were in english and pretty sure unabridged.

 

[tk149]

Wow! Thanks for the info, shinerburke, I never knew that what I had read 20 years ago was just an abridged translation.

Quick Googlesearch turned up this page:More info

I found these in-print volumes at amazon.com. Click on the links for information about purchasing them. I prefer the Naval Institute Press edition, translated by Walter James Miller and Frederick Paul Walter. The volume is well illustrated with some of the original woodcuts and includes interesting background material. The more recent Oxford's World's Classics edition, translated by William Butcher, has some fascinating notes about Verne's early manuscripts, and is quite inexpensive. Anthony Bonner's translation is published by Grosset & Dunlap as a juvenile edition, but it is a complete translation. The Signet Classic edition, with an afterward by Walter James Miller, is another inexpensive possibility.

If you are located in Europe and you are interested in any of these books, please click here.

Frederick P. Walter's complete translation has been released to the public domain and is now available for online access and download at Project Gutenberg and at Zvi Har'El's Jules Verne Virtual Library.
...
How can you judge a volume you are holding in your hands? Some publishers describe their editions of 20,000 Leagues as complete but this may simply mean unabridged. There is at least one "new" translation that is actually a "translation" of Lewis from 19th century English to 20th century English! Here are a few ways to recognize a complete translation. Look in the table of contents for a chapter titled "The Nautilus" between "The Man of the Seas" and "All by Electricity". In Part II make sure there isn?t a chapter entitled "From Latitude 47° 24' to Longitude 17° 28'" but rather something like "At Latitude 47° 24' and Longitude 17° 28'". In "Some Figures" make sure the density of steel is 7 to 8 times that of water, not 1/10th that. In the same paragraph, see that the second hull is not confused with the keel, only that they are considered together. Look in the chapter "All by Electricity" for the missing passages shown on my page that discusses the Nautilus power system. None of these items by itself guarantees a complete or accurate translation, but together they are a good indication.

 

[shiner]

I had no idea either until I started doing some looking around....really sucks to find out people have been f'ing up literature.