Although Verne wrote primarily for adults, many English-language publishers considered his science fiction writing to be juvenile and marketed his books to children. Translators dumbed down his work, simplifying stories, cutting heavily researched passages, summarizing dialogue, and in some cases, nixing anything that might be construed as a critique of the British Empire. Many translations even contain outright errors, such as measurements converted incorrectly.
Some literary historians now bemoan the shoddy translations of many of Verne's works, arguing that almost all of these early English translations feature significant changes to both plot and tone.
Even today, these poor translations make up much of Verne's available work in English. But anglophone readers hoping to read more authentic versions of his stories are in luck.
Thanks to scholarly interest, there has been a recent surge in new Verne translations that aim to be more faithful to the original texts. Starting in his twenties, Verne began experiencing sudden bouts of extreme stomach pain. He wrote about his agonizing stomach cramps in letters to family members, but he failed to get a proper diagnosis from doctors.
To try to ease his pain, he experimented with different diets, including one in which he ate only eggs and dairy. Historians believe that Verne may have had colitis or a related digestion disorder. Even more unsettling than the stomach pain, Verne suffered from five episodes of facial paralysis over the course of his life. During these painful episodes, one side of his face suddenly became immobile.
After the first attack, doctors treated his facial nerve with electric stimulation, but he had another attack five years later, and several more after that. Recently , researchers have concluded that he had Bell's palsy , a temporary form of one-sided facial paralysis caused by damage to the facial nerve. Doctors have hypothesized that it was the result of ear infections or inflammation, but no one knows for sure why he experienced this. Verne developed type-2 diabetes in his fifties, and his health declined significantly in the last decade of his life.
He suffered from high blood pressure, chronic dizziness, tinnitus, and other maladies, and eventually went partially blind. In March , a traumatic incident left the year-old Verne disabled for the rest of his life.
Verne's nephew Gaston, who was then in his twenties and suffering from mental illness, suddenly became violent, to Verne's detriment. The writer was arriving home one day when, out of the blue, Gaston shot him twice with a pistol. Thankfully, Verne survived, but the second bullet that Gaston fired struck the author's left leg. After the incident, Gaston was sent to a mental asylum. He wasn't diagnosed with a specific disorder, but most historians believe he suffered from paranoia or schizophrenia.
Verne never fully recovered from the attack. The bullet damaged his left leg badly, and his diabetes complicated the healing process. A secondary infection left him with a noticeable limp that persisted until his death in Verne's body of work heavily influenced steampunk , the science fiction subgenre that takes inspiration from 19th century industrial technology.
Some of Verne's characters, as well as the fictional machines he wrote about, have appeared in prominent steampunk works. Some of the technology Verne imagined in his fiction later became reality. These feelings would show up in many of Verne's works as an adult. An otherwise uneventful childhood was marked by one major event.
In his twelfth year, Jules worked as a cabin boy on an ocean-going ship. The ship was intercepted by his father before it went to sea, and Jules is said to have promised his parents that in the future he "would travel only in imagination"—a prediction fulfilled in a manner his parents could not have imagined. In Verne went to Paris, France, to study law, although privately he was already planning a literary career.
Owing to the friendship he made with French author Alexandre Dumas the Elder — , Verne's first play, Broken Straws, was produced—with some success—in From to he held a steady and low-paying Jules Verne. The circumstance that his wife's brother was a stockbroker may have influenced Verne in making the unexpected decision to embrace this profession. Membership in the Paris Exchange did not seriously interfere with his literary labors, however, because he adopted a rigorous timetable, rising at five o'clock in order to put in several hours researching and writing before beginning his day's work at the Bourse.
Verne's first long work of fiction, Five Weeks in a Balloon, took the form of an account of a journey by air over central Africa, at that time largely unexplored. The book, published in January , was an immediate success. He then decided to retire from stockbroking and to devote himself full time to writing.
Verne's next few books were immensely successful at the time and are still counted among the best he wrote. A Journey to the Center of the Earth describes the adventures of a party of explorers and scientists who descend the crater of an Icelandic volcano and discover an underground world. In From the Earth to the Moon and its sequel, Round the Moon , Verne describes how two adventurous Americans—joined, naturally, by a Frenchman—arrange to be fired in a hollow projectile from a gigantic cannon that lifts them out of Earth's gravity field and takes them close to the moon.
Verne not only pictured the state of weightlessness his "astronauts" experienced during their flight, but also he had the vision to locate their launching site in Florida, where nearly all of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's NASA space launches take place today.
Verne wrote his two masterpieces when he was in his forties. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea relates the voyages of the submarine Nautilus, built and commanded by the mysterious Captain Nemo, one of the literary figures in whom Verne incorporated many of his own character traits.
Around the World in Eighty Days is the story of a successful bet made by a typical Englishman, Phineas Fogg, a character said to have been modeled on Verne's father, who had a mania for punctuality, or the art of timeliness.
Verne's total literary output comprised nearly eighty books, but many of them are of little value or interest today. One noteworthy feature of all his work is its moral idealism, which earned him in the personal congratulations of Pope Leo XIII — Jules had begum writing short stories and poetry while studying at boarding school after which he went to Paris to study law following the footsteps of his father.
However, Verne seemed to be more interested in pursuing a career in theater rather than law much to the disappointment of his father. During this period, Verne collaborated with his musician friend Jean Louis Aristide Hignard several times. Verne and Honorine later had a son they named Michel Jean Verne. Jules worked at the stock market, but when he was not working there, Verne and his wife travelled in America, France and the British Isles.
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