Walter Frederick Paul - The sphinx of the ice realm: the first complete English translation: with the full text of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by Edgar Allan Poe

JULES VERNE

THE SPHINX OF THE ICE REALM

THE FIRST COMPLETE ENGLISH TRANSLATION

With the Full Text of
THE NARRATIVE OF ARTHUR GORDON PYM
by Edgar Allan Poe

Translated and Edited by
Frederick Paul Walter

Published by
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS
Albany

Translations and critical materials 2012 by Frederick Paul Walter

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

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State University of New York Press
www.sunypress.edu

Production and book design, Laurie Searl
Marketing, Fran Keneston

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Verne, Jules, 18281905.

[Sphinx des glaces. English]

The sphinx of the ice realm : the first complete English translation, with the full text of the narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by Edgar Allan Poe / Jules Verne; translated and edited by Frederick Paul Walter.

p. cm.

Excelsior Editions.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-4384-4212-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4384-4211-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)

I. Walter, Frederick Paul. II. Poe, Edgar Allan, 18091849. Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. III. Title.

PQ2469.S64E5 2011

843'.8dc23

2011030247

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my wife

BARBARA BRYANT

model of patience, tolerance, common sense, and clear writing

FOREWORD

JULES VERNE, MANHUNTER

n 1855 he was a nobody. He'd sold a short story, three novelettes, and the scripts for a couple small-time comedies. Even so, that was the year Jules Verne published Wintering in the Ice.

This sixteen-chapter novella appeared in the coffee-table monthly La Muse des familles, moves at high speed, and establishes the template for much that followed after Verne became somebody. The hook: a young sea captain goes missing off the coast of Norway, and his father organizes an expedition to find him. Up north the rescuers have to contend with snowbound living conditions, crew mutinies, marauding carnivores, somersaulting icebergs, and other subarctic menaces. The tale's climax is a holocaust of cutlass duels and man-eating polar bears, but the son gets rescued and lives happily ever after with his feisty fiancewho, unusually for the time, goes along on the expedition and has no trouble coping.

It isn't surprising that the youthful Verne would lay a story in the polar regions. Back then there was tremendous interest in the poles simply because nobody had visited either place. In 1827 Britain's William E. Perry had advanced as far north as latitude 82 45, a record that stood for about half a century. But it wasn't for lack of trying: as U.S. Rear Admiral Thomas D. Davies wrote 160 years later (16), by then the Americans had caught the arctic fever, and over the next decades Yankee explorers such as Elisha Kane, Isaac Hayes, and Charles Hall vainly attempted to drive deeper into the arctic. As for the South Pole, England's Sir James Clark Ross got as close as latitude 78 4 in February of 1842, another record that stood for half a centuryand in this case there was a lack of trying.

In those days true-life polar adventures were mostly a seagoing activity, and young Verne was automatically fascinated. After all, his birthplace was the French river town of Nantes, just upstream of a major Atlantic seaport. During his boyhood, according to biographer Herbert R. Lottman (68), he could see sailboats, clipper ships, and three-master schooners all around him. He would row down the Loire River in dreadful leaky boats, one time aboard a skiff that actually sank, marooning him on an islet in classic Crusoe fashion. It didn't keep the adult Verne from turning into an enthusiastic tourist who voyaged to America and repeatedly visited the UK and Scandinavia.

But when he wrote Wintering in the Ice, Verne was a bachelor in his mid twenties, schooled for the law but secretly hoping to build a career as a writer. It would take a while. On the way, luckily, young Jules was exposed to other influencesthe novels of Scott, Cooper, and Dickens, and especially the startling tales of Edgar Allan Poe, which, according to his grandson (Jules-Verne, 30, 35), the youthful Frenchman began reading in the years following 1848. He was struck by the American storyteller's abnormal situations, moral deviation, inclination to the bizarre for its own sake, and the pseudoscience of his ballooning yarns. Reading Poe, his grandson concluded, Verne saw what could be done mixing fantasy and reason. And the time was right: though he had little English and needed to read Poe's stories in translation, they were appearing in French magazines with increasing frequency. In the late 1850s, moreover, a French translation of Poe's only novel appeared, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), a full-length sea story that toyed with the mysteries of Antarctica. Already enraptured with sailing and polar exploration, the young Frenchman gobbled it up and couldn't get it out of his head.

So there you have the youthful Jules Verne: interested in manhunts, ocean travel, polar exploration, and the disturbing fiction of Edgar Allan Poe. Those interests would never significantly change. And he would obsess over Poe's only novel into his old age, forty years down the pike.