The History of the Sevarambians

Denis Veiras

Description

Reminiscent of More's Utopia and Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Denis Veiras's History of the Sevarambians is one of the great utopian novels of the seventeenth century. Set in Australia, this rollicking adventure story comes complete with a shipwreck, romantic tales, religious fraud, magical talismans, and supernatural animals. The current volume contains two versions of Veiras's story: the original English and the 1738 English translation of the expanded French version. Veiras's work was well known in its own time and has been translated into a number of languages, including German, French, Russian, and Japanese, while the English version has been largely forgotten. The book has been read to teach a variety of political doctrines, and also has been cited as an early development in the history of ideas about religious toleration. It reveals a great deal about early modern English, Dutch, and French attitudes toward other cultures. One of the first utopian writings to qualify as a novel, it can be interpreted as a metaphor for human life, in all its complexity and ambiguity.

Introduction
Notes
Bibliography

The Original Texts

The Prints

The History of the Sevarites or Sevarambi

The Publisher to the Reader
Part I (1675)
Part II (1679)

The History of the Sevarambians (1738)

The Author’s Preface

Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V

Index

Sujets

• Fantastique
• Epic Fantasy
• High fantasy
• Heroic fantasy

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 février 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780791481684
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

The History of the Sevarambians

A Utopian Novel

Denis Veiras edited and with an Introduction by John Christian Laursen and Cyrus Masroori

The History of the Sevarambians

This page intentionally left blank.

The History of the Sevarambians

A Utopian Novel

Denis Veiras

Edited and with an Introduction by John Christian Laursen and Cyrus Masroori

State University of New York Press

Woodcuts courtesy of Beineke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. Yale University.

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

© 2006 State University of New York

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.

For information, address State University of New York Press, 194 Washington Avenue, Suite 305, Albany, NY 12210-2384

Production by Kelli Williams Marketing by Anne Valentine

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Vairasse, Denis, ca. 1630-ca.–1696 [Histoire des Sévarambes. English] The history of the Sevarambians : a utopian novel / Denis Veiras; edited and with an introduction by John Christian Laursen and Cyrus Masroori. p. cm. Includes “The history of the Sevarambians” published in French (5 parts) and translated into English in 1738; and “The history of the Sevarites or Sevarambi,” part one published in 1675, and part two published in 1679. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–7914–6777–5 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 0–7914–6778–3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Voyages, Imaginary—Early works to 1800. 2. Utopias—Early works to 1800. I. Laursen, John Christian. II. Masroori, Cyrus. III. Vairasse, Denis, ca. 1630-ca. 1696. History of the Sevarites or Sevarambi. IV. Title: History of the Sevarites or Sevarambi. V. Title.

G560.A4513 2006 843.4—dc22

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

2005021346

Introduction Notes Bibliography

The Original Texts The Prints

Contents

The History of the Sevarites or Sevarambi

The Publisher to the Reader (1675)

Part I (1675)

Part II (1679)

The History of the Sevarambians (1738)

The Author’s Preface

Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V Index

v

vii xxii xxii xxvi xxvii

2 9 57

118 125 161 203 259 315 387

This page intentionally left blank.

Introduction

J OHN C HRISTIAN L AURSEN AND C YRUS M ASROORI

t is part Thomas More’sUtopiaand part Jonathan Swift’sGulliver’s I Travels. But the English-speaking world has too often forgotten the great utopian novel from the late seventeenth century, Denis Veiras’s The History of the Sevarites or Sevarambi, despite the fact that it appeared first in English in 1675 and 1679 and then in an expanded edition asThe History of the Sevarambiansin 1738. It livened up the sometimes-staid genre of utopian writing with romantic tales, detailed explanation of reli- gious fraud, and, in one version, magical talismans and supernatural ani- mals. Veiras’s work was well known in its own time and for at least the following century. After a complicated gestation in both English and French, explained below, translations came out in German (1689, 1717, 1783), Dutch (1682, 1701), and Italian (1730). Modern editions appeared in German, French, Russian, and Japanese in the twentieth century (see the bibliography). What purports to be a third volume of Jonathan Swift’sGulliver’s Travels, dated 1727, continues the story, telling us of Gulliver’s adventures in the land of the Sevarambians, but it was not by Swift. Famous philosopher Immanuel Kant grouped Veiras’s work together with Plato’s Atlantis (in theTimaeusandCritias), More’sUtopia (1516), and Harrington’sOceana(1656) as brilliant ideas that have never been tried in practice (Kant 1991, 188).

A UTHOR

There is an element of mystery about the identity of the author of our utopia. His name did not appear on early editions of the work, and we have no collateral evidence such as letters or other testimony from the man himself. Early commentators nominated a variety of possible authors such as Isaac Vossius, Johann Gregor Pfeiffer, Sir Philipp

vii

viii

Introduction

Sidney, Simon de la Loubère, and even the philosopher G. W. Leibniz. The consensus of writers eventually attributed authorship to Denis Veiras (also spelled Veyras, Vairasse, Vairrasse, etc.), who styled himself Sieur (or Lord) d’Allais, a village in Languedoc in the south of France. Jean Le Clerc wrote that Veiras was a particular acquaintance of John Locke, who told Le Clerc that he was a native of Provence (Le Clerc 1712, 402). One piece of evidence of authorship is that Veiras also published a French grammar in 1681, and the description on the title page of the author’s residence is the same as the description of the author’s residence on the title page of an early edition of ourHistory(D’Allais 1681, 1683). The hero of our book, Captain Siden, and the name of the founder of the country, Sevarias, are anagrams of the name Denis Vairasse. The 1675 preface to part I is signed “D.V.”. Together with other evidence such as Le Clerc’s report on the testimony of Locke, we can be fairly sure the author was Veiras. However, it is not clear that all of the book came from the same author. Part II of the original English version, published in 1679 after part II of the French version (1677), is very different from the rest of the work. It is full of titillating sexual reports as well as descriptions of the magical powers of talismans, perhaps the seventeenth-century equivalent of the twentieth-century literary genre of “magical realism.” Some schol- ars have concluded that Veiras did not write it, but no one has advanced any theories as to who the author might have been (Rosenberg 1999, 20). It might have been Veiras, who may have calculated that the voyeurism and magic would work for the English market but not for the French. Word of the success of the first volume in English and demand for a second volume could have inspired him to write a new second volume in that language and for its market, rather than translating his French ver- sion. We include it here because of its intrinsic interest, because English readers of the time would have known it as a continuation of part I, and because it is an example of what one author—whether Veiras or not— thought would be a likely continuation. Little is known about Veiras. He was a Huguenot, or French Protestant. He is known to have been involved, perhaps as a spy, in the circles of the Duke of Buckingham in London during the years 1665 to 1674, including the period when Buckingham and his colleagues in the “Cabal” ruled England. A letter from him to government official and diarist Samuel Pepys dated 1680 can be found in the Rawlinson manu- scripts at the Bodleian Library (Braungart and Golawski-Braungart 1990, 68*–71*). Judging from the grammar books he was living in Paris in the 1680s, and later, he seems to have returned to his homeland in the south

Introduction

ix

of France. Following up on the fascination with hydraulics and fountains in his fiction, in 1696 he presented a proposal to the Estates (Parliament) of Languedoc for canals and locks to render navigable the Gardon River and irrigate the plains around it (Joucla 2000; Braungart and Golawski- Braungart 1990, 24*–25*). He dedicated the French version of his book to Pierre Paul Riquet, originator of the Canal du Midi, France’s greatest water project of the period.

P UBLICATION

Part I appeared first in London in English asThe History of the Sevarites or Sevarambi(1675). Then parts I to III appeared in French in Paris as L’Histoire des Sévarambes(1677; some volumes of part III have 1678), followed by parts IV and V in French in 1679, the same year that the English part II appeared. The English part I and part II were repub- lished in English in 1700, but the first full version in English, a retrans- lation from the French version, appeared in London in 1738 asThe History of the Sevarambians. The present volume contains a transcription of the first English volumes (1675 and 1679) followed by the 1738 second edition. Part I of the 1675 edition overlaps substantially with part I of the 1738 edition, but part II of the first edition is very different from part II of the second.

C ONTENT

The preface sets the book in opposition to the works of Plato, Thomas More, and Francis Bacon (Lord Verulam), which are said to be inven- tions, whereas the present work is true. A narrator—the preface is signed “D. V.”—purports to tell the story of a shipwreck onTerra Australis, the southern continent, based on the papers of the recently deceased Captain Siden. Verisimilitude is established by what purports to be a letter passed on from a Dutch lawyer confirming that a ship namedThe Golden Dragonwas indeed wrecked on the coast of the South Continent. Readers could have found extratextual confirmation: scholars have found mention of the disappearance of a vessel with this name in 1 the Dutch newspapers of the time. The first part in both versions is the story of the shipwreck of the vessel after it is blown off course on its way to the Dutch colony of Batavia in what is now Indonesia. Captain Siden’s credentials are estab- lished by a short description of his education as a soldier and lawyer and his decision to travel abroad. The ship goes aground near the shore, but no one is killed. When the castaways organize, Siden is chosen to be