by Sev » Sun Aug 08, 2010 8:04 am
This looks like the shoddy 1872 translation by Louis Mercier that cuts out almost a third of the original book - unfortunately it's also the one which is most widely available and read. If you look at the start of Chapter 2 Professor Aronnax writes "I had just returned from a scientific research in the disagreeable territory of Nebraska" - what Verne actually wrote was he'd been in the Badlands of Nebraska, a well-known geological terrain not a remark about its citizens
It's a shame that the most widely available Verne is a pale shadow of what he wrote...
"It was early 1974 before I made any attempt to read Dune. After forty pages I gave up. I couldn't get into the book. It seemed convoluted, opaque and full of strange language." - Brian "Bobo" Herbert