A question of translation Sometimes you get when compiling the Dr. Nikola texts a little to ponder. For example, the first volume,
A Bid for Fortune, or The Revenge of Doctor Nikola .
Because, Guy Boothby's first-person narrator Hatteras über seine Eltern berichten:
"
She, poor soul, died of fever in the Philippines the year I was born , and he went to the bottom in the schooner Helen of Troy, a degree west of the Line Islands, within six months of her decease ; struck the tail end of a cyclone, it was thought, and went down, lock, stock, and barrel, leaving only one man to tell the tale. So I lost father and mother in the same twelve months , and that being so, when I put my cabbage-tree on my head it covered, as far as I knew, all my family in the world. "
Nur um dann im nächsten Absatz zu behaupten:
"
Any way you look at it, it's calculated to give you a turn, at fifteen years of age , to know that there's not a living soul on the face of God's globe that you can take by the hand and call relation. That old saying about "Blood being thicker than water" is a pretty true one, I reckon: friends may be kind -- they were so to me -- but after all they're not the same thing, nor can they be, as your own kith and kin. "
Und einen Absatz später:
"
However, I had to look my trouble in the face and stand up to it as a man should, and I suppose this kept me from brooding over my loss as much as I should otherwise have done. At any rate, ten days after the news reached me , I had shipped aboard the Little Emily, trading schooner, Papeete for "
That does not really the first and the second paragraph could be interpreted together with some good will so that he was 15 years his plight only really aware of, but in the third he said clearly.. Ten days after it has received the message, he takes his fate into their hands. Now, you could (without the second section) assume, Mr. Hatteras really would have been extremely precocious and has hired even as a small child on a schooner. Or it has fourteen years time before he heard the news from the shipwreck reached. Or he has a very different message and wants to get not only reveal which ones.
Well ...
Man has to solve as the processor of the text in principle two options, the consistent (because they can not will simply be transferred into German):
The formulations:
the year I was born and Ten Days after the news reached bite me. One of them has gone. A tiny little thing, like the famous three little words, with enormous consequences.
I chose the first path and Mr. Hatteras by yourself a happy childhood.
"
you, poor soul, died of a fever in the Philippines, and he went with the schooner" Helen of Troy 'under' one degree west of the Line Islands, no six months after its demise. The remnants of a cyclone caught the ship and sank it with all the trimmings, sparing only one man who could tell the tale. So I lost mother and father within a year and was left without any family.
There I was, at fifteen, with no living relatives, who would have to take care of me. It is said that "blood is thicker than water", and that is true: Friends may be good, and were it to me, but are not nearly the same as your own flesh and blood.
I had to ask me to my fate, and did it, how it should be a man, and I suppose it saved me from being on my Loss of despair. In any case, ten days after the news had reached me, I embarked on the trading schooner 'Little Emily' after Papetee one ... "
The translation of Carl Perlsee," The man with the black cat ", not as proceeds from the second formulation feundlich Perlsee and reported about.
"
My poor mother died in the same year in which they bore me had, in the Philippines by the yellow fever. Six months later, my father embarked on the sailing ship "Helen of Troy", which came into the area of a cyclone, and with all hands perished. So I lost within twelve months, father and mother and was left back in the world.
I can tell you it is very sad when one stands on God's earth and has no living soul, to which one can turn a relative. The old adage "blood is not water," is really a true word, and friends may well be very kind - and they were there with me - but nevertheless, relatives or even parents can not replace them.
When I was fifteen years old, I wore my fate as a man, and had realized that it does not help, as do others, to quarrel with fate and brood over it. I embarked on the 'Little Emily', a commercial vehicle, according to Papert one ... "
We see very similar Translations (I wonder in hindsight why I have some of the wording of the translation Perlsee not even occurred to ...), but in terms of childhood, which had to spend the hero of the novel, but they go very far apart.
