TEHRAN – The Persian translation of the 1885 adventure book “Mathias Sandorf” written by the French writer Jules Verne has been released in the bookstores across the country.

Sogol Farahani has translated the book and Afarinegan Publication has brought it out in 635 pages, IRNA reported.

The book employs many of the devices that had served well in Jules Verne’s earlier novels: islands, cryptograms, surprise revelations of identity, technically advanced hardware, and a solitary figure bent on revenge. 

Verne planned Mathias Sandorf as the Mediterranean adventure of his series of novels called “Voyages extraordinaires.” He dedicated the novel to the memory of Alexandre Dumas.

The story takes place in Trieste in 1867, when two petty criminals, Sarcany and Zirone, discover a carrier pigeon bearing a ciphered message. Locating the recipient of the cipher, they devise a plan to take advantage of their discovery. Sarcany tells Silas Toronthal, a corrupt banker, that he suspects the cipher is part of a plot to liberate Hungary from Habsburg-Austrian rule. Together, they form a plan to unlock the cipher and deliver the evidence to the police in exchange for a reward. 

The three Hungarian conspirators, Count Mathias Sandorf, Stephen Bathory, and Ladislas Zathmar, are arrested and sentenced to death. They plot an escape, but Zathmar is captured while trying to escape, and Bathory is apprehended the next night. Both are executed. Sandorf flees the police and jumps into the Adriatic, where he is assumed drowned.

Fifteen years later, Sandorf, who has survived and taken on the identity of Dr. Antekirtt, a renowned physician, sets out to avenge his friends. Enlisting the aid of two French carnival performers, Pescade and Matifou, he searches the Mediterranean for those who engineered the betrayal of his planned uprising. Wealthy and powerful, he rules an island fortress filled with advanced weaponry. He devotes his life to exacting justice from those whose greed brought his friends to their death.

Jules Verne (1828–1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the “Voyages extraordinaires,” a series of bestselling adventure novels including “Journey to the Center of the Earth” (1864), “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas” (1870), and “Around the World in Eighty Days” (1872). His novels are generally set in the second half of the 19th century, taking into account contemporary scientific knowledge and the technological advances of the time.

In addition to his novels, he wrote numerous plays, short stories, autobiographical accounts, poetry, songs, and scientific, artistic, and literary studies. His work has been adapted for film and television since the beginning of cinema, as well as for comic books, theater, opera, music, and video games.

Verne is considered to be an important author in France and most of Europe, where he has had a wide influence on the literary avant-garde and on surrealism. His reputation was markedly different in the Anglosphere, where he had often been labeled a writer of genre fiction or children's books, largely because of the highly abridged and altered translations in which his novels have often been printed. 

Jules Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, ranking below Agatha Christie and above William Shakespeare. He has sometimes been called the “father of science fiction,” a title that has also been given to H. G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback.

SS/SAB