The Meteor Hunt: The First English Translation of Verne's Original Manuscript (Bison Frontiers of Imagination)

252 Pages·2006·0.69 MB·English

by  Jules Verne

U Nebraska Press: Verne: The Meteor Hunt page i
bison frontiers of imagination
U Nebraska Press: Verne: The Meteor Hunt page ii
(cid:1)
ules Verne
The
La Chasse au météore
Meteor Hunt
(cid:1)
The First English Translation of Verne’s
(cid:1)
Original Manuscript Translated and edited
&
by Frederick Paul Walter Walter James Miller
university of nebraska press (cid:1) lincoln
U Nebraska Press: Verne: The Meteor Hunt page iii
Publication of this book was made possible by a grant
from The Florence Gould Foundation
La Chasse au météore© Societé Jules Verne, 1986, pour
une première édition à tirage limité. © Les Éditions
internationals Alain Stanké, 1988.© L’Archipel, 2002.
Translation and critical materials ©2006 by the Board
of Regents of the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States
of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Verne, Jules, 1828–1905.
[Chasse au météore. English]
The meteor hunt = La chasse au météore : the fi rst
English translation of Verne’s original manuscript /
Jules Verne ; translated and edited by Frederick Paul
Walter and Walter James Miller.
p. cm. — (Bison frontiers of imagination)
Includes bibliographical references.
isbn-13: 978-0-8032-4677-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-8032-4677-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn-13: 978-0-8032-9634-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-8032-9634-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
I. Walter, Frederick Paul. II. Miller, Walter James,
1918 — III. Title. IV. Series.
pq2469.c4e5 2006 843'.8 —dc22
2006008025
Designed& set in Monotype Fournier by A. Shahan.
U Nebraska Press: Verne: The Meteor Hunt page iv
contents
Foreword vii
1. In which justice of the peace John Proth performs one
of his most pleasant professional duties before going
back to his gardening 1
2. Which welcomes the reader into the home of
Mr. Dean Forsyth, whose household includes his nephew
Francis Gordon and his housekeeper Mrs. Mitz 12
3. Whose subject is Dr. Stanley Hudelson, his wife
Mrs. Flora Hudelson, and his two daughters Miss Jenny
and Miss Loo 22
4. How two letters, one sent to the Pittsburgh Observatory,
the other to the Cincinnati Observatory, were fi led in the
folder on shooting stars 33
5. Three weeks of impatience during which Dean Forsyth
and Omicron on the one hand, and Dr. Hudelson on
the other, don’t fi nd their shooting star again despite the
most relentless skywatching 35
6. Which contains a variety of colorful tidbits on meteors
in general and on the particular shooting star whose
discovery was a bone of contention between Messrs.
Forsyth and Hudelson 46
7. In which we see Mrs. Hudelson get annoyed with the
doctor’s attitude, while at Dean Forsyth’s we hear old
Mrs. Mitz give her boss a royal scolding 57
U Nebraska Press: Verne: The Meteor Hunt page v
8. In which the situation gets worse and worse as Whaston’s
newspapers start to take sides, some with Forsyth, some
with Dr. Hudelson 67
9. In which a few days go by before the wedding, and a
fact is revealed that’s both undisputed and unexpected 78
10. Wherein it’s Arcadia Walker’s turn to wait impatiently
for Seth Stanfort, and what happens next 84
11. In which the number crunchers have a fi eld day arriving
at dollar amounts with great appeal to human greed 97
12. In which we’ll see Judge Proth try to reconcile
two members of his jurisdiction, fail, and go back to
his garden as usual 109
13. In which we see a third claimant emerge and assert rights
of ownership, just as Judge Proth predicted 119
14. In which we see droves of curiosity seekers grab at the
chance to visit Greenland and watch the amazing meteor
fall out of the sky 132
15. In which we’ll see a passenger on the Mozik meet up with
a passenger on the Oregon while waiting for the marvelous
meteor to meet up with the planet earth 144
16. Which, though the purchaser may read it and weep, the
author needs to write for the sake of historical accuracy
and proper recording in the annals of astronomy 157
17. The fi nal chapter, which records the latest developments
in this totally fi ctitious narrative, after which Mr. John
Proth, Whaston’s justice of the peace, gets the last word 169
Notes on the Text 175
Afterword 203
Appendix: Michel Verne as Editor and Rewriter 213
Annotated Bibliography 217
U Nebraska Press: Verne: The Meteor Hunt page vi
foreword
You’re looking at the fi rst-ever English version of The Meteor Hunt
just as Jules Verne left it to us on his death in 1905. It’s a delightful
satirical novel, a valid extrapolation of the science of his day, replete
with typical Verne comments on American mores and human greed.
It’s not to be confused with the fraudulent pastiche, a version that’s
literally a semiforgery, perpetrated by Verne’s own son Michel but
published in his father’s name in 1908. That grotesque distortion of the
real Jules Verne’s real novel was translated into English the following
year as The Chase of the Golden Meteor.
For seven decades, in both France and the Anglophone world,
Michel’s version was assumed to be the master’s original work. But
scholars of the Société Jules Verne fi nally uncovered the sordid de-
tails of a conspiracy to deceive the public. In 1886 they issued for the
record a limited edition of Verne’s own La Chasse au météore. Since
1994 French readers have enjoyed commercial editions. Now the Eng-
lish-speaking world can also appreciate its own version of The Meteor
Hunt by “the real Jules Verne.”
Unfortunately, that phrase “the real Jules Verne” is all too famil-
iar to savvy Anglophone devotees of the founder of science fi ction.
For a century and a half, they’ve been subjected to phony, adulter-
ated, incomplete translations of the Great Romancer’s other novels.
As Brian Taves, Library of Congress expert on Verne, tells us, WJM
“fi rst vividly exposed” these crimes in his 1965 essay “Jules Verne in
U Nebraska Press: Verne: The Meteor Hunt page vii
America.” He “elaborated on these problems in [his] Annotated Jules
Verne series, and other scholars have since followed his lead.”
Actually, scores of scholars, whole troops! This edition of The Me-
teor Hunt is a small albeit important part of a massive effort to give
Anglophone readers the world over “the real Verne.” Thanks to pub-
lishers like the University of Nebraska Press, Wesleyan University
Press, the United States Naval Institute Press, Prometheus Books, and
Oxford University Press, this historic project should be completed in
the fi rst quarter of the twenty-fi rst century . . . six generations after
the fi rst criminally slapdash versions of Verne appeared in English.
But several commercial publishers still reissue the old frauds! So
editors and translators of post-1965 versions take pains, in annota-
tions and other commentaries, to explain the differences between their
genuine articles and the old counterfeits. And of course Verne’s sto-
ries deserve and evoke critical commentaries on literary and scientifi c
grounds alone. Hence this edition will provide you with all such buf-
fet services, to be sampled or ignored as you see fi t.
If you’ve been provoked by these opening remarks to learn more
about the Meteor Hunt scandal and about the Verne translation mess
in general, you’ll fi nd more details in this foreword. This curtain rais-
er (to augment rather than mix the metaphor) also supplies you with
general background information about Verne and his oeuvre, the ori-
gins of Meteor, and our policies and priorities in translating it.
While you’re reading our English equivalent of the rediscovered
book, words tagged with an asterisk may prompt you to consult our
notes on the text (e.g., “because she was female*” on p. 5).
And we hope, after you enjoy The Meteor Hunt proper, that you’ll
want to compare your own reactions with ours. We discuss Verne’s
style, plotting, characterization, and themes in greater detail in our
afterword.
bolts from the blue
The Meteor Hunt poses this question: What might happen if a large
body from outer space hits the earth and it proves to be gold? Verne had
viii
U Nebraska Press: Verne: The Meteor Hunt page viii
fi rst considered this possibility in his original ending for Hector Ser-
vadac (1877). In that novel a comet grazes our planet and carries off
Gibraltar, a slice of Algeria, and the sea in between. Some French-
men, Spaniards, Englishmen, and an Italian girl spend two years on
a journey through the solar system. In spite of their diverse back-
grounds, most of them get along well with each other, except with the
Englishmen, whom they regard as too aloof. As the comet in its new
orbit heads back to earth, it shoots off a splinter of itself. The main
characters use a balloon to escape the coming collision, landing back
in Captain Servadac’s French military post in Algeria. But the English
remain on the splinter, which is captured by the moon’s gravity and
becomes a “satellite of a satellite”!
The comet proper sinks into the squishy bottom of the Caspian
Sea. Chemists analyze its protruding parts and fi nd that it’s composed
almost one third of gold, with a total value of 245 sextillion francs
(49 sextillion dollars). Hurray — this now increases tremendously the
world’s supply of gold on hand. But wait — this also decreases its val-
ue! Gold now becomes worth “exactly nothing, deserving, more than
ever before, to be dubbed ‘a vile metal.’”
But Verne’s publisher, Pierre Hetzel, couldn’t accept this “ruin of
the capitalists,” as Dr. Olivier Dumas, president of the Société Jules
Verne, has termed it. Hetzel forced Verne to rewrite chapter 20, the
ending, so that in the published book the title character now lamely
“realizes” that his solar journey must have been just a “dream.” As
Dumas sees it, Verne got his revenge by waiting until Hetzel died be-
fore writing La Chasse au météore. Dumas published the original chap-
ter20 and discussed it in his society’s Bulletin in 1985.
In addition to revealing the source of the scientifi c idea behind The
Meteor Hunt,Servadac foreshadows two social and economic questions
that also fi gure in Meteor: To what degree do nations create distinc-
tive national characteristics in their respective citizens, and why does
humanity venerate an essentially useless substance, gold, as a mone-
tary standard? The artifi cial — no, as Verne sees it, the fi ctitious — value
ix
U Nebraska Press: Verne: The Meteor Hunt page ix