Talk:Mathias Sandorf

This work was published by George Munro, 17 to 27 Vandewater Street, New York, in the "Seaside Library". The translation is by W. G. Hanna. The Library of Congress has scanned images and OCR text files; the text files were redacted and formatted by the contributor.

The Munro edition included a number of illustrations by an unknown artist, which are not reproduced here. These were not the original illustrations (by Léon Benett) used in Hetzel editions of Mathias Sandorf.

This is also the same edition published by Sampson Low, available on archive.org and google books. Some of the errors mentioned below may have been corrected in the Sampson Low edition. Also the Sampson Low edition, with corrections as to the division of the book into parts, has been republished by ROH press with illustrations. Also a completely new translation is now in process of publication. --Varnesavant (talk) 17:16, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

Copyright
This work is marked "Copyrighted 1885, by George Munro" and "Translation copyrighted by W. G. Hanna, 1885." Since I don't know the date of Hanna's death, use of the pd-old category may be questionable. For this reason I've used the unambiguous pd-1923.

Translation Quality
Overall, the quality seems to be well above average for 19th century translations of Verne's work. It is fairly complete; I only found one place—the description of the gratings in Part I—where a significant passage has been deleted. This is probably related to Munro not having access to the original illustrations.

Translation and other problems that I noted in the Munro addition include:


 * 1) Correspondence between Verne and Alexandre Dumas omitted.
 * 2) Combining of parts III, IV and V into a single part, and splitting of many chapters into two.
 * 3) Ommission of a complete description of decoding grill in Part I, meaning that it's impossible to reconstruct the message exactly.
 * 4) Some typographical errors in the code given.
 * 5) Inconsistent renaming of characters. Entienne Bathory is anglicized as Stephen Bathory, while the French appelation "Mme." is retained for his wife. Pierre is usually retained for his son, but is anglicized to Peter in one or two places.
 * 6) Toronthal's house in Ragusa is sometimes referred to as a hotel.
 * 7) Metric measurements are sometimes converted to Imperial, and sometimes incorrectly. Also in the  Monte Carlo casino, francs are converted to pounds in one place only.
 * 8) In one place, a paragraph of text was added to a footnote.
 * 9) A few spelling and other typographical errors (in addition to dated spellings, eg. "clew" for "clue").