#Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas

[prokopetz]

Okay, so: in early drafts of Jules Verne's 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Captain Nemo is a Polish guy bent on revenge against the Russian Empire for the murder of his family in the January Uprising. Verne's editor objected on the grounds that Russia was a French ally at the time of the book's writing, and in the actual, published version of the story, Nemo's national origin and precisely which empire he's pissed off at are left unspecified.

Later, in the 1875 quasi-sequel The Mysterious Island, Nemo is retconned as an Indian noble out for revenge against the British for the murder of his family in the Indian Rebellion of 1857 – basically the same as the original plan, simply substituting a different uprising and a different empire. Verne's editor raised no objections this time around, because fuck the British, right? Though Twenty Thousand Leagues and The Mysterious Island aren't 100% compatible in their respective timelines, this version of Nemo has customarily been back-ported into adaptations of Twenty Thousand Leagues ever since.

Now here's the funny part: perhaps as a jab at his editor, Verne made a specific plot point in Twenty Thousand Leagues of Professor Aronnax repeatedly trying and failing to figure out where the fuck Nemo is from. At one point his attempt to pin down Nemo's accent is frustrated by Nemo's vast multilingualism. At another point, he tries and fails to trick Nemo by quizzing him about latitude and longitude.

(To contextualise that last bit, at the time the book was written, there was no international agreement on which line of longitude should be zero degrees, and many nations had their own prime meridians; Aronnax hoped to identify Nemo's national origin by calculating which meridian he was giving his longitudes relative to. Nemo, however, immediately spots the ploy, and announces that he'll use the Paris meridian in deference to the fact that Aronnax is a Frenchman.)

The upshot is that at no point in the course of any of this Sherlock Holmes bullshit does Aronnax ever bring up the colour of Nemo's skin as a potential clue. In light of the book's publication history, this is almost certainly simply because Verne hadn't decided that Nemo was Indian yet. However, taking into account The Mysterious Island's retcon, it retroactively makes Aronnax the least racist Frenchman ever.

[thebibi]

No nuance option

[enchantedbook]

Frontispiece of Jules Verne's 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Seas' illustrated by Alphonse de Neville and Edouard Rio, 1871

[rocky-57]

Pierre Aronnax in my style.

I know the clothes arent accurate (and doesnt really define his profession), but its how i imagine him in my head. And i think its quite decent, especially following the circumstances during the oceanic expedition in the Nautilus.

[nautilus-server]

WELCOME TO THE NAUTILUS CHARACTER QUIZ

Beware that several character results spoil their role and fate in the serie, if you haven’t seen it yet. (Go watch it)

There are 15 questions in total, and 19 characters. We did our best to align each character to each answer from our interpretation of them, but please don’t take the results too seriously. This aim to be a light-hearted personality quizz.

So, which Nautilus character are you? :3

[a-book-of-creatures]

So I think I might have read 20k Leagues Etc when I was younger, but it might have been an abridged version, might have been the Wishbone version for all I recall, and in any case it was over twenty years ago. And I remember you saying that the most common translation into English messes up some parts of it. I want to de-rust my French; a) how similar is the written French of when it was written, to modern written French, and b) where can one find that to read it?

That is correct, the most popular, public domain English translation (Mercier) is poorly translated (e.g. the French word for "lens" is translated as "lentil", "dappled" becomes "diapered", etc), significantly abridged, and censored for political correctness (e.g. Nemo's framed pictures of abolitionists are excised, as is a passage where Aronnax is horrified at the exploitation of pearl divers). For more on that, Walter James Miller's The Annotated Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is an excellent resource.

But if you want to read the original, you're in luck because it's also public domain. The language is still readable; at least, I had no issues with it. It's definitely florid but that's more on Verne than his language.

You can read the original, glorious Hetzel version here, courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

If you'd rather have a more physical book in hand, the Livre de Poche edition is affordable (depending on where you live I guess), portable, has all the original illustrations, and a spiffy Hetzel-esque cover to boot.

[stone-cold-groove]

Illustration from the 1922 edition of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas.

[theivorybilledwoodpecker]

@reine-du-sourire

I've seen your recent posts about 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas. While not vital to the story, I think everyone who reads the book should know that when Aronnax talks about having the hotel care for his babirusa while he's gone, he's talking about a huge warthog-looking pig:

So while Aronnax is sailing the seas with his stockholm-syndrome boyfriend, there's some poor hotel worker worried about whether the professor's babirusa is going to gore him to death if he's a bit late with the food.

[minneral]

sometimes, for one reason or another, the Suez Canal is not an option

[oceanusborealis]

Nautilus Season 1 – TV Review

TL;DR – When this series comes together, it is a delight to watch. Unfortunately, a lot of the episodes are a bit hit or miss.   ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 3.5 out of 5. Disclosure – I paid for the Stan service that viewed this series. Nautilus  Review – In today’s re-make/re-boot culture, there are stories that you hear over and over again because they are in the public domain. Sure, it is great to see…

[veryslowreader]

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas by Jules Verne

Rushmore

[prokopetz]

I love seeing how the Wikipedia coverage of various fictional characters differs from language to language.

Like, in Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Captain Nemo obviously has his own article in numerous languages, because it's fucking Captain Nemo, but he's also the only character from the novel who has his own individual article in the English-language Wikipedia. Professor Arronax and his servant Conseil, meanwhile, have their own articles in both French (which I'd expected) and Turkish (which I hadn't). Then there's Ned Land, who has the same, but inexplicably also has his own individual article in Italian – being the only character from Twenty Thousand Leagues other than Nemo to have an individual article in Italian, in fact.

I just think it's neat.

(Note: all statements made in this post were verified to be accurate at the time of its posting, so don't come at me if articles with later creation timestamps render it incorrect!)

[hellcatsandcars]

guess who's re-reading twenty thousand leagues under the seas, again

[karinrebloggardjur]

And they get to snag a Nautilus! Surely that's a win for the classics reading cephalopod 🦑

[rocky-57]

More Aronnax + Nemo because i have nothing else to do (My add math hw sitting on the corner begging for me to do it)

Aronnax looks uptight in my style, yes, but i intentionally draw him like that because hes often seen as zealous, enthusiastic, nerdy and easy-to-comply kind of guy. Maybe gullible too. So i kinda got tired of that and decided to just, do the opposite.

[stone-cold-groove]

Illustration from the 1922 edition of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas.