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.
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