Tintin

[Levin]

Is the North American Asterix translation the same as the British/Irish one?

[ursus arctos]

I'm not sure that there is a North American translation

I've only ever read it in French

[ad hoc]

Whoever translated the Asterix books into English for the UK market did an absolutely superb job

[Fussbudget]

I've never been keen on Asterix, but I love Tintin. The artwork makes a big difference for me, I love that modernist ligne claire style whereas the characters in Asterix just look like crap seaside caricatures.

Also I've always found the jokes in Asterix a bit lame, but I've never read it in English and I guess the translators have had to freestyle a lot of them, so the English version might be a lot funnier for all I know.

[ursus arctos]

That comparison speaks to me. The drawing is just a different class.

I may may need to find one of these English translations of Asterix.

[Guy Profumo]

That comparison speaks to me. The drawing is just a different class.

I may may need to find one of these English translations of Asterix.

Derek Bell and Anthea Hockridge?

[ursus arctos]

[ursus arctos]

[Patrick Thistle]

The popular theory of why Asterix didn't travel well to America is because it's all about an indomitable village holding out against an oppressive imperialist culture. Rome = America in this analogy.

[Patrick Thistle]

Bell & Hockridge often inserted their own jokes and puns into translated Asterix stories. Goscinny was an admirer.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

The Big difference I found was that Asterix and Obelix were just having such a good time, just being themselves. No-one is having a good time in tintin. That and the jokes. There's often so much detail going on in the background of an asterix frame. They've gone to great lengths to make the big piles of concussed romans look just right. Something that's important to remember though looking back at these comics is that they're not for us. They're for children

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

The popular theory of why Asterix didn't travel well to America is because it's all about an indomitable village holding out against an oppressive imperialist culture. Rome = America in this analogy.

If Only america had a tradition of the small locality trying to live free of the dictates of a big centralized state.

[Patrick Thistle]

If Only america had a tradition of the small locality trying to live free of the dictates of a big centralized state.

As opposed to systemically overwriting existing cultures and destroying the current inhabitants way of life?

In all seriousness though, Asterix & Obelix visited America as often as they visited Britain.

[Guy Profumo]

Thank goodness someone's paying attention

[Nefertiti2]

Bell & Hockridge often inserted their own jokes and puns into translated Asterix stories. Goscinny was an admirer.

Anthea Bell also translated WG Sebald

[Levin]

I've just reread the Tom McCarthy book over the weekend as a result of this thread and also bought The Casterfiore Emerald. I've got to admit that as a child I didn't really get Tintin, Asterix was just funny and I was into my classics while Tintin seemed dry but now I don't know which I prefer. As an aside how strange is it that these two strips made it to the mainstream and nothing else has had the same impact? Are they that much better than Lucky Luke or Blake and Mortimer? But I spend far too much time wondering about the decisions that go into translating books.

The ligne claire is a beautiful style, much more appealing than that of Asterix.

Is there something to the way that Hergé maintained such tight control over the series (to the extent that his workshop team never got the credit they deserved) that adds to how it's seen as such a high point in comics? I mean in the sense that it's easier for critics to regard the series as the work of one man and that fits in better with the idea of the author? I do think that the series having a definite end, heightens this, that there is a Hergé oeuvre. Or perhaps I'm overestimating the way that collaborative works are slightly looked down on.

Translations are odd aren't they? Not just changing names or making different jokes but the whole Haddock family history. Why did the translator make him English and have Marlinspike an award of Charles II? Are we expected to think of Tintin as English? That Moulinsart is situated somewhere in the home counties?

[ursus arctos]

ursus minor was profoundly troubled by each of the questions in your last paragraph.

I wonder if the translators ever addressed it.

Your evocation of the auteur theory is intriguing, especially given the time period we are talking about.

Lucky Luke is huge in Italy, much more so than either Tintin or Asterix.

[Patrick Thistle]

Bought 2 Tintin books to fill the gaps in my collection today. Both 50p from Oxfam.

Flight 714 to Sydney is even more out there than any of the other Tintin stories.

Not read The Black Island yet. It's one of the earlier ones that was originally a serialised strip so I expect it will jump about a bit and not make much sense, like Cigars of the Pharaoh.

[Patrick Thistle]

Just read The Black Island and it all hung together fairly well. Tintin gets shot a lot doesn't he?

[Levin]

The black isle was redone a couple of times wasn't it? I know that a lot of the art was redrawn so that it would look specifically British but I don't know if the plot would have been edited as well.

[Various Artist]

I really must read Tintin again one of these years. I was lucky that my local public library in South Wales when I was growing up had a shelf full of both Tintin and Asterix, all of which I devoured – though the difference was that I often read the Asterixes (Asterices?) over and over, whereas I didn't tend to go back to the Tintins nearly so much.

The titles of the latter are certainly evocative still, from The Castafiore Emerald to The Red Sea Sharks to King Ottakar's Sceptre – not least because the latter lent its name to Ottakar's, a chain of local bookshops like the one I frequented in Aberystwyth while I was living there years afterward, and where there was a giant blown-up version of the cover high up on the wall behind the shop counter. But I can't recall any of the books individually aside from a couple of very distinctive milieus: it's probably only Cigars of the Pharaoh (Egypt), Prisoners of the Sun (Inca) and Destination Moon (duh) that I can identify distinctly from memory alone.


I guess it was the humour content, plus the endless amount of little visual details to pick up on, that kept me going back to the Asterix stories again and again – and layers of jokes I certainly wouldn't have understood on first reading... nor perhaps on the third or fifth. Not the least of which is the meanings of various names, some of [the more subversive of] which took me years to get as a kid and some of which I'm sure I'd only get now.

Seconding (or thirding) comments upthread, the English translations are really quite brilliant. It never struck me at the time, of course, but the amount of things that had to be changed is huge, and the skill and wit with which this was done is a massive tribute to Anthea Bell (in particular) and Derek Hockridge. Asterix in Britain is a prime example: there's one glorious joke about "rather[,] old fruit" that was invented from wholecloth, for instance, that not only effortlessly replaces but also easily trumps the (completely different) original French conversation going on in those panels.
Incidentally, I've only just discovered this minute (from linking to a recent interview cited on the Wiki page for ...in Britain) that Anthea is the sister of Martin Bell, the former BBC correspondent and MP a.k.a the 'Man in the White Suit'. Nice!

I must've started reading them when my dad first passed me his own copies of three of the earliest books, which originally came out in English when he was about 11-14: Asterix the Gaul, Asterix and the Goths and Asterix the Gladiator. I acquired my own copies of Asterix in Britain (in a mini-sized version half the size of the regular volumes) and the Uderzo-only Asterix and Son, but literally everything else came from the library, I believe. As I recall I read all bar two of the Asterix volumes that way, up to and I think including 1991's Asterix and the Secret Weapon. (I know one of the 'missing' ones was Obelix and Co, I'm not sure about the other: going by the Wikipedia list I think it might have been Asterix and the Roman Agent.)

With hindsight, that's quite an amazing total: we must be talking about 21 or 22 library copies here, many of which I know I took out multiple times, and then you can add probably about 15 different Tintins as well. It must have been at least 35 books between the two series. I owe a debt to whichever inspired person decided to stock all those.

[Patrick Thistle]

There's also an Asterix thread https://www.onetouchfootball.com/for...terix-the-gaul

[Patrick Thistle]

The black isle was redone a couple of times wasn't it? I know that a lot of the art was redrawn so that it would look specifically British but I don't know if the plot would have been edited as well.

Redrawn in 1965 apparently. (Originally published in 1943)

What is odd to me are the digressions. An entire page of the fire brigade trying to unlock the fire station door. A page of Tintin and adversaries stepping on rakes in the dark.

There is humour in Tintin, just not in the dialogue. Herge hated puns, but Thompson and Thomson handcuffed together in the Black Island is pure slapstick. Same with the rakes scene.

[Wouter D]

Asterixes (Asterices?)

Asterisx?

[Flynnie]

Tintin wasn't a huge thing in America. I only found out about it due to my cousin having a bunch of the comics, and it was only really nurtured because a Tintin-themed store came to SF in the mid-90s and remarkably stuck it out for 20 years. It did branch into more European comics as time went on, and is a good example of San Francisco's declining oddness in the face of the tech onslaught.

Anyway, the reason it stood out was the ligne claire style and the excellent Tintin series made by HBO, which is about as faithful as is realistically possible. They got rerun on Nick a lot when I was a kid, and it got noticeably easier to buy Tintin books after that.

The first time I visited Brussels was interesting. I only had an hour between trains so not much to do but walk around, but everything felt weirdly familiar. It only hit me later that it was because I'd seen everything in Tintin books. 26 rue de Sancerre (aka rue de Terreneuve/Nieuwlandstraat) is pretty close to Brussel-Zuid station.

Tbh I feel The Secret of the Unicorn is the watershed in terms of quality. Everything up to then is patchy.

King Ottakar's Sceptre is not patchy!