Publication news

It's been quite a while since I last posted an article to this blog. The last few months have been very busy but productive. Thus, in the intervening period since I last wrote a piece for St Jerome's Warblings, there have been a few positive developments on the academic front.

Firstly, I submitted the hard-bound copies of my PhD thesis - Around the World in Eighty Changes: a diachronic study of the multiple causality of six complete translations (1873-2004), from French to English, of Jules Verne's novel Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (1873) - to the University (Dublin City University), and am due to graduate next month. So it's a great relief to have the PhD process finally completed, and to now be able to look forward to new challenges.

Secondly, i've published two articles on the 1874 translation of the above Verne novel, into English, by the Philadelphia-based translator, Stephen W. White. The articles appear in a 2009 republication by the Choptank Press, US, of White's very accurate, close rendering (which he has entitled The Tour of the World in Eighty Days) of Verne's celebrated novel. One of the articles is entitled Putting White to Rights: re-evaluating the Verne translations of Stephen W. White, and is mainly a descriptive-explanatory analysis of White's translation decisions, and of the various causal influences which together culminated in his producing this unusually (for a Victorian-era rendering of Verne into English) accurate, complete and imitative translation.

The second article in the foregoing republication is co-authored with the editor of this new edition, Dr Norman Wolcott of the US, a Verne savant, and is entitled 'Who was Stephen White?' This article gives a detailed biographical outline of White's professional activities as a jobbing translator of commerical, legal and literary texts, as a stenographer and phonographer, as an employee and later director of a Pennsylvania railroad company, in 1870s Philadelphia, and includes photos and copies of documents from the archives, e.g. a photo of White himself from a high-school almanach, copies of notices in his local newspaper advertising his services as a translator, and so on.

The editor of this publication, Norman Wolcott, continues to perform Trojan work in bringing the unjustly forgotten yet highly competent Victorian translators of Verne, out of the crypt of history and into a 21st century spotlight. Such translators include White himself, together with Frederick Amadeus Malleson, another 19th-century translator of such Verne novels as A Journey into the Interior of the Earth, a rendering first published in 1877.

Wolcott has also penned an Introduction to this republished White rendering. This beautiful edition also contains all of the original illustrations by Neuville and Bennett.

Regretfully, this book is thus far available only through online ordering, on www.lulu.com, but it deserves, I feel, a much wider distribution network, including a presence in bookstores. It deserves to do well for Wolcott.

I'm also currently in the process of translating some early novellas, and end-of-career novels, of Jules Verne, for the North American Jules Verne Society. The first text i've almost finished translating is entitled Jédédias Jamet, or the tale of an inheritance, three chapters written by Verne in his early twenties and subsequently abandoned by him, though it seems that he had intended to make this work into a full-length novel, for which he had composed an outline. The text is satirical, and rather bizarre in parts, and is peppered liberally with legal, mythological, historical and religious references. I have explained these references in footnotes, and intend to post an article in the near future, describing some of these references and discussing the manner in which the translatorial footnotes help to fulfill the so-called 'didactic function of translation' (Brownlie, 2003).

Other than that, i'm busily applying for whatever academic posts seem to be currently advertised, in the areas of Translation Studies and/or French and Spanish Studies. The hopeful, bright spot on the horizon for all of us newly-minted PhDs is that, in many areas such as Translation Studies and French, there seems to be quite a few academic posts out there, in such locations as the United Kingdom, the USA and even a recently-posted advertisement for a French lecturer or Assistant Lecturer in the University of the West Indies (UWI), Bridgetown, Barbados. Plus, a vacancy in Queen's University, Belfast, for a lecturer in Translation Studies with French and Spanish.

The foregoing vacancies can all be viewed on the website www.jobs.ac.uk.

I'm currently editing an article i've had accepted for the online US journal of Verne Studies, Verniana, dealing with abridged and adapted translations of Verne's 80 Days for younger readers, and that should appear in September, 2010; it currently requires to be drastically shortened (ironically, given that the subject matter of the article is the very process of shortening text). The number of examples I tend to give in articles generally, of actual translated stretches of text, is too voluminous. One thing i've learned through the thesis-writing and editing process, especially during the post-viva corrections, is that there is a better, clearer, more concise method of presenting the findings, in synthesized form, of Descriptive-Explanatory Translation Studies (DTS) research; namely, it is preferable to not cite all of the coupled pairs of source and target text segments you've analysed, even in an Appendix.

Instead, the researcher needs to identify, from his/her copious empirical micro-textual examples of shifts and their causes, the most salient recurring features of the shifts in question, and discuss these shift types, and their probable underlying causes, with one or two examples.

Thus, in an abridged version of 80 Days, the researcher might want to discuss salient features such as simplification of language, reduction and omission of complex characterization and of physical description of people and places, with a privileging of plot and action over psychological complexities of characterization, and so on. Giving too many examples in a report on DTS findings, is akin to not being able to see the wood for the trees.