Travel Scholarships. Jules Verne
of the works of Jules Verne. At that time, there were still four novels of Verne’s Extraordinary Voyages (Voyages extraordinaires) that had never been translated into English. In early 2001, the ECSF series debuted with the first of them, Verne’s 1905 Invasion of the Sea (Invasion de la mer); the following year, we published the second, his 1898 The Mighty Orinoco (Le Superbe Orénoque); five years later, the third appeared, his 1902 The Kip Brothers (Les Frères Kip); and now we present the final one, his 1903 Travel Scholarships (Bourses de voyage).
It might seem perplexing that these Verne novels remained untranslated for so long, especially since Verne is ranked (with Shakespeare) among the top three most translated authors of all time, according to UNESCO’S Index Translationum. The exact historical reasons are difficult to discern in retrospect, but they no doubt involved issues of profit, ideology, and genre.
Toward the end of Verne’s illustrious writing career (1863–1905), he had many rivals who, emulating his success, flooded the marketplace with similar scientific-adventure novels. Not least among these popular new authors was the young British writer H. G. Wells, whose The Time Machine (1895), The War of the Worlds (1898), and The First Men in the Moon (1901), among other speculative works, were suddenly all the rage. Since the 1890s, Verne’s own popularity had been waning, and sales of his Extraordinary Voyages were beginning to lag. It is therefore not surprising that Anglo-American publishing houses saw little profit potential in bringing these final Verne novels to market.
As pointed out by Brian Taves in The Jules Verne Encyclopedia (1996), another reason why many of Verne’s later works were not immediately translated into English had to do with their ideological content:
The tenor of his new works were less agreeable to English-speaking audiences, or at least their publishers, who were not prepared to faithfully present Verne’s views. The censorship grew beyond simply changing or removing controversial passages until eventually entire books were suppressed by simply not translating them into English. (16)
It is true that most of Verne’s later works differ greatly from his earlier, best-selling novels that were published under the guiding (and sometimes autocratic) hand of his publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel. After Hetzel’s death in 1886, one can observe a gradual but palpable shift in Verne’s worldview. He more frequently champions issues of environmentalism, anticapitalism, and social responsibility, often questioning the benefits that science and technology can bring to an imperfect world.
The third most likely reason why these late novels by Jules Verne were not published in English had to do with the literary genre that Verne (rightly or wrongly) was seen to represent among the Anglo-American reading public. Since the early years of the twentieth century, Verne was widely celebrated as the “Father of Science Fiction.” His name became synonymous with prescient technological predictions; he was known to have inspired many future scientists and explorers; and his works were recognized around the world as prototypes for what would later be called the “sci-fi” genre. In contrast, many of his late novels such as Travel Scholarships simply did not fit the mold. Their plots, lacking any futuristic technology or scientific extrapolation of any sort, seemed so un-Vernian. Marketing such atypical texts to the Anglo-American public was probably viewed as a risky proposition, so publishers simply chose not to translate them at all.
It is important to note that the availability of good English translations and serious English-language critical studies of Jules Verne and his Extraordinary Voyages has improved dramatically since the 1960s.1 During the centenary of Verne’s death celebrated in 2005, for example, more than fifty new titles appeared. Much credit should be given to Oxford University Press, the University of Nebraska Press, and especially Wesleyan University Press for their pioneering work in providing accurate modern translations of Verne’s texts in affordable, scholarly editions. Coupled with the ongoing efforts of organizations such as the North American Jules Verne Society and its new Palik Series,2 these new editions are helping to restore Verne’s reputation in the Anglophone world and are largely responsible for a recent and remarkably vibrant “Verne renaissance” in contemporary literary studies.
Arthur B. Evans
DePauw University
Introduction
Who among us has read Travel Scholarships, one of the last novels by Jules Verne to be published in his lifetime and the last to be translated into English? Among French readers, and even among experts who study Verne, there are very few who could answer that question affirmatively. It is true that Verne’s oeuvre is vast and includes more than sixty titles—and that is counting only his novels and leaving aside all the short stories, popular science works, stage plays, poetry, and other products of his prolific pen. It is likely that the only people for whom Travel Scholarships would constitute an essential title of unquestionable value are book collectors seeking to complete their sets of handsome octavo Hetzel editions, since this novel is one of the rarest in that published format. Nonetheless, Jules Verne did not write for collectors of expensive editions, but for his readers. His Extraordinary Voyages, epic novels portraying the vast sweep of the universe, have never ceased to transport their readers to the discovery of “known and unknown worlds” (the original subtitle of this series).1 So it seems especially appropriate to embark on our own voyage of discovery within Verne’s oeuvre and explore this unknown opus in his great cycle of novels.
PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR IN 1899
While writing Travel Scholarships in 1899, Jules Verne (1828–1905) celebrated his seventy-second birthday. France was preparing to welcome a host of international visitors to Paris for the Exposition Universelle of 1900, a world’s fair that everyone expected would offer a synthesis of the industrial and cultural achievements of the past and present while giving a foretaste of what the future would bring. One might imagine that such an event would be of great interest to the author who earned much fame as the “father of science fiction.”2 But Verne did not even go to the Exposition himself, though his son Michel (1861–1925) was employed there as a member of one of the many preparatory committees. Further, Jules Verne’s name was not even mentioned in the section of the Exposition dedicated to the future or in the opulent Palace of Electricity. His name appeared only in a retrospective exhibit devoted to the history of the French capital, published in a gazette about the history of Paris across the centuries and featuring two brief excerpts from his Geography of France and Its Colonies (Géographie de la France et de ses colonies), which dated from many years before: 1868.3
As the date of the Exposition neared, the Dreyfus Affair increasingly tore France asunder. To calm the protests coming in from abroad and to assure the international success of the big event, the Jewish officer—innocent, but accused of treason and condemned to hard labor—was pardoned just before the opening of the Exposition. But it was not until 1906 that Dreyfus would be fully acquitted and cleared of all charges. The widespread social dissension created by this scandal triggered anti-Semitic excesses among some of Verne’s countrymen and inspired the foundation of the Human Rights League (Ligue des droits de l’homme). The Dreyfus Affair not only divided public opinion for more than a decade, it also tested the solidarity of many French families, including Verne’s own. The new century was beginning under very inharmonious auspices.
More or less everywhere in the so-called civilized world, the approach of the year 1900 had induced an acute anxiety about the future. Political conflicts, fueled by imperialist expansionism and excesses of nationalism, threatened the stability of the international scene. Dubious prophets earnestly proclaimed the impending end of the world by any number of causes: volcanic eruption, flood, earthquake, or collision with a meteor. Great catastrophes were in fashion, and the public was on edge. Nervosité (a highly nervous state) was the word of the day. Verne poked fun at this morbid fascination in his novel The Meteor Hunt (1908, La Chasse au météore), which would not be published until after his death. It mocked such end-of-the-world obsessions by substituting a satire of human greed (which seemed much more scary to Verne) for a cosmic apocalyptic event. In the end, Verne turned out to be right and