Riviere Blanche :: TARZAN VS SATURNIN FARANDOUL

JM Lofficier · Posté le: Jeu Déc 10, 2009 10:25 am Sujet du message:

Edgar Rice Burroughs was once accused by the German press of having plagiarized SATURNIN FARANDOUL when he wrote TARZAN

http://www.erbzine.com/mag16/1683.html#plagiarism

Black Coat Press' edition of THE ADVENTURES OF SATURNIN FARANDOUL in English, introduced and translated by Brian Stableford, with 150 original illustrations, is now available:

http://www.blackcoatpress.com/saturninfarandoul.htm

So readers can at last decide for themselves.

I think the German article (if accurately translated) was incorrect in labeling Robida "an almost unknown French author" considering his successful career -- although he might have been better known as an illustrator. But "unknown" he was not.

The similarities between FARANDOUL and TARZAN are indeed striking (although the German articles mentions "gorillas" while Robida has his hero raised by Orangs), but it is quite obvious that Burroughs and Robida are on totally different paths, pursuing totally different objectives. The fact that the two characters share similar origins is really the only thing they have in common. To call Tarzan a plagiarized version of Farandoul only shows ignorance.

That said, it does show that Burroughs wasn't the "first", but then again neither was Robida. Burroughs fans should note two other French works also anticipating the Tarzan meme,in which a human becomes a king of the jungle and ruler of an animal empire.

One, mentioned by Brian Stableford in his intro, is Léon Gozlan’s Les émotions de Polydore Marasquin or trois mois dans le royaume des singes (1856; variously tr. as The Emotions of Polydore Marasquin, A Man Among the Monkeys and Monkey Island), a satirical Robinsonade in which the castaway achieves his temporary dominion by deceit after adapting the skin of a giant gorilla as a costume. The other is Jules Lermina’s To Ho le tueur d’or [To Ho the Gold-Killer] (1905), which we hope to publish someday, which is closer to Burroughs, but much more obscure than Robida's work.

That publisher Artheme Fayard claimed that they had researched the matter and found no evidence of THE ADVENTURES OF SATURNIN FARANDOUL is literally unbelievable.

Granted they didn't have search engines back then, but a cursory search under Robida's name at the Bibliotheque Nationale would have come up with that title. I simply do not believe Fayard, or Burroughs, or both. I think someone lied to cover an embarrassing similarity in origins, even though the two works are completely different.