Un hivernage dans les glaces de Jules Verne

I'm currently studying Jules Verne's approximately fifty-page novella/long story Un hivernage dans les glaces, which was translated into English (very competently) by the Victorian translator William Struthers, a translator upon whom the late Dr Norman Wolcott, US Verne scholar and expert on Victorian renderings of Verne and Victorian-era translators of Jules Verne's literature into English, has written at length, including, for instance, in the 2008 republication of The Tour of the World in Eighty Days (1873/2008). 

The reason I'm reading this story at present, in its original French, is that I've been asked by my friends in the North American Jules Verne Society (NAJVS) to write a short piece commenting on the nature (form and quality, etc.) of the Struthers rendering of this less famous Verne story in English, as it is planned to republish Struthers' version in a forthcoming number of the NAJVS journal Extraordinary Journeys. By coincidence, I'm simultaneously carrying out a similar descriptive translational analysis on various recent English renderings of Vingt Mille Lieues Sous Les Mers, for an article on translation of literary classics.

 My particular interests at present are in investigating the ways in which translators manifest their unique, individual literary creativity within their translations, through myriad strategies including novel choices of target language synonymy, interpretation, expansion, reduction, and many other translation shifts. 

Getting back to A Winter's Sojourn In the Ice, as Struthers titled his rendering, I'm currently nearing the end of reading the story in French, and I'm enjoying it immensely - if you are a fan of Jules Verne, I would wholeheartedly recommend this quintessentially Vernian story of exploration in the icy Arctic wastes and of human endurance of extreme climatic conditions, a characteristically Vernian trope which finds similar expression in so many other novels from his pen, including such works as Five Weeks in a Balloon and Mistress Branican, to cite but two examples.

A group of sailors from Dunkirk in the north of France set off on a mercy mission, a voyage to the North Pole, in the depths of the icy midwinter, to find and rescue some of their missing crewmen; accompanying these brave men is the fiancée of their missing captain, while at their head is the sixty-year-old father of the said captain, convinced his son is still alive. When the group of rescuing sailors reach their Arctic destination, they must fight for their very survival in the face of temperatures plunging to lower than minus thirty-five degrees, the threat of suffocating in an icy prison of snow and ice hemming them in from all sides, hence their enforced period of wintering in the icy wastelands, often reminiscent of the poems of Canadian poet Robert Service, dwindling provisions of food and fuel, and the murderous treachery of some of their crew members. Will this courageous, loyal 'band of brothers' live to tell the tale, and will there finally be a 'happy ever after' wedding back in Dunkirk for the captain, Louis Cornbutte, and his devoted fiancée, who has bravely and selflessly risked her life to come to the rescue of the man she believes is still alive at the North Pole? 

As for Struthers' English rendering, from what I have seen of it thus far, it is highly accurate and complete, and thus a worthy, notable exception to the many truncated Verne renderings of Victorian times, when that author was less-valued than he is today. It is couched in formal, literary language which seems at times somewhat archaic by 21st-century standards, and is also, at times, quite imitative of the syntax and lexis of the source text, but combining such imitativeness with a generally idiomatic target language usage. 

I look forward to finishing this exciting Verne tale and to writing about Struthers' rendering, and I expect to conclude that he was, indeed, a fine translator, just as more recent Verne translators such as William Butcher, David Coward, Frederick Paul Walter and Walter James Miller have produced equally excellent translations of the more famous novels of Jules Verne. 

Teaching classic literature as part of the EFL curriculum

In my proficiency level English class this week, I had students explore some classic English literature, viz. literary extracts from the works of Thomas Hardy and Charlotte Bronte. I was happy that the students in question really enjoyed those classes. 

Doras DCU Open access

Just a quick note, before I hit the hay - the Dublin City University DORAS website provides open access to DCU researchers' output, including articles, books, theses and dissertations. If you log on to doras.dcu.ie and type the names of an author or topic into the search fields you will be provided with immediate and unrestricted access to relevant research outputs. So, for instance, my M.A. dissertation on the translations of the novels of JK Rowling into French is on DORAS, as well as my monograph, an online journal article on translation theory and my doctoral thesis on Verne retranslation into English. 
And on another note, again related to academic research: next week at Griffith College Dublin's Institute of Language where I currently lecture in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and General English (to speakers of other languages), from lower levels up to advanced and proficiency, I am about to give some lectures on citing and referencing according to the Harvard style. For those interested in learning more about this topic, I would recommend two excellent authoritative sources: one, the DCU Library's section on training and resources; the other, the Anglia Ruskin university's online guide to citing and bibliography construction. As my colleague Dr Simon A. Thomas puts it, citing, referencing, paraphrasing and summarizing are all planks against plagiarism, enabling researchers to acknowledge the work of others in their writings and to giver the sources of the ideas they refer to, through direct or reported speech. Following a lecture on avoidance of plagiarism charges, students will be give various practical tasks to complete on how to cite and reference, how to summarize, how to evaluate other writings to decide if they display plagiarism or not and how to paraphrase. These tasks are taken from EAP course books published by Cambridge University Press. 
I'm really enjoying my lecturing work at Griffith College and my ongoing research into Verne studies, literary studies and translation studies.  

4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster

Having recently finished reading Anne Bronte's novel Agnes Grey, I decided to take a break from 19th-century Victorian classic literature and, before getting stuck in to that same author's other novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, I've decided to read a contemporary novel instead. 
The work I chose is Paul Auster's 2017 Man Booker prize-shortlisted novel 4 3 2 1, in which the picaresque David Copperfield-style narration of the life story of the central character, Archie Ferguson, born in 1947, offers a bildungsroman with a difference: in this novel, not only is the reader presented with one version of Ferguson's life story, but in addition, there are three other alternative, parallel versions of how that life story would have differed through different choices or events having had disproportionately larger consequences for the characters. So the reader is constantly being presented with these alternate realities - four different versions of the hero's life story. The book is divided into groups of four chapters, within which each chapter offers a slightly (significantly?) modified version of events ... slight differences initially, which have much more significant repercussions subsequently. I'm only in the early chapters, so it is as yet too early to comment on how the book ultimately unfolds, or how this very original, creative idea of four alternate realities ultimately succeeds or otherwise by the end of this (very long) tome. 
Critics have been reminded, by this novel's premise, of Robert Frost (name-checked in this book) and his poem The Road Less Travelled: '... two roads diverged in a yellow wood ... and I took the one less travelled ... and that has made all the difference'. A concept we can all identify with as we reflect on our own life journeys. 
This novel also reminds me of a short story I read over forty years ago in my Intermediate Certificate English anthology of short stories Exploring English, edited by the late Professor Augustine Martin of UCD, a story entitled The Story of the Widow's Son by the great Irish writer Mary Lavin. In that story, two versions of the son's life are recounted, to very moving, haunting effect ... I would highly recommend that story. No matter which of two courses of action the son decided to take at a critical juncture in his life, the outcome in each case was tragic. 
I look forward to finishing Auster's novel and posting a proper review of it here in due course. (And perhaps to eventually studying it in French translation!)

The Bronte sisters

I read Wuthering Heights in 2005, but it was only last year that I returned to the Bronte sisters by reading Charlotte Bronte's novel Jane Eyre. I have to admit that the latter was much more to my taste than the former. I think one reason that spurred me on to reading Charlotte's most famous novel was that at the time, on my favourite soap opera EastEnders, one of the characters was studying that novel for her GCSEs in English literature. I thoroughly enjoyed Jane Eyre. I therefore went on to read, and equally enjoy, Charlotte Bronte's other, less celebrated but to my mind of comparable quality, works viz. Villette; Shirley and The Professor. What is most interesting, to me, about this authoress (as she would have called herself, using as she does, the feminine forms of many occupations, forms little used nowadays, and more's the pity, such as authoress, directress and instructress) is that so much of her apparently fictional writings are so grounded in her own experiences, and can thus be described as partly - or significantly - autobiographical. 

Having studied the works of both Emily and Charlotte, I've now begun to read the novels of the third, the youngest, and perhaps least celebrated Brone sister, viz. Anne Bronte. At the moment, I'm into the opening chapters of her own largely autobiographical short novel Agnes Grey, in which the eponymous heroine recounts her experiences as a governess in 19th-century England, the incidents and feelings she describes reflecting those of Anne Bronte herself. 

The use of English language by the Bronte sisters is a delight.