The Antarctic Mystery with Another Antarctic Mystery
In 1897 Jules Verne wrote An Antarctic Mystery. It’s a two-volume novel that is a sort of a sequel to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Sequels are pretty common, of course, but in this case Verne’s novel was a sequel to a book written by somebody else: Edgar Allan Poe. The book’s French edition had a much better title: Le Sphinx des glaces, or The Sphinx of the Ice Fields. If you’re interested in reading it, you can download a free copy from Project Gutenberg. But more to the point, in Chapter 10, Verne describes the reaction of penguins when the narrator comes near them:
“Whole ‘smalas’ of penguins, standing motionless in interminable rows, brayed their protest against the invasion of an intruder — I allude to myself.”
From that you might think that “smalas” is a collective noun referring to penguins in the same sense as “a pride of lions” or “a murder of crows” — but it’s not. In fact, if you look it up, you won’t find anything; it’s not in the dictionary. That is, you won’t find it in an English-language dictionary. “Smalas” is not an English word at all; it’s French for an entourage (which is slightly odd, since “entourage” itself comes from French). “Smala” comes from the Arabic “zmalah” (tribe), and originally referred to the large group that would accompany a sheik on a journey across the desert.
Verne wrote in French, a pretty common practice among French authors, which he was. His books were translated into English, and that suggests a question: why did the translator leave “smala” in its original French? It might be because “smala” was, at the time, well known to English readers so it wouldn’t need translation. This probably wasn’t the case, since the word is exceedingly rare in English publications. It might be because it was such a rare word in French that the translator didn’t know what it meant. This probably wasn’t the case either; it seems to be a perfectly reasonable French term. My guess is that Verne’s use of “smala” in that context wasn’t very clear; he meant “flock” or “herd,” and there are better words for those than “smala.” The translator might have intended to come back to it later and figure out what Verne was talking about, but in the rush to publication it was simply forgotten. That is, maybe it’s just a mistake.
If it was a mistake, Verne himself might have described it as something a penguin might do. It appears that he didn’t think very highly of them. Many of his references to penguins in An Antarctic Mystery are dismissive, along the lines of this one from Chapter 1:
“These stupid birds, in their yellow and white feathers, with their heads thrown back and their wings like the sleeves of a monastic habit, look, at a distance, like monks in single file walking in procession along the beach.”
As far as anybody knows, Verne never saw any live penguins. He wrote a ooks about great voyages, he never undertook such travels himself. So another puzzle is where he came by his antipathy toward a bunch of innocent birds. Maybe he just hated wearing tuxedos and took it out on them.
