Pipeline and Sundry: Asterix Translations, Dogmatix the Star, Awards Season, and More
Actual Asterix NEWS
Just announced today on the Asterix Facebook page: They’re making an animated tv show starring Dogmatix, set two years before he met Asterix and Obelix (in “Asterix and the Banquet” in Lutetia, of course).
Will this ever air in English in America anywhere? Well, Cartoon Network imports the Garfield series from France currently, so I suppose it’s possible. But Garfield is a much bigger property over here.
I’m not holding my breath, but I am crossing my fingers and hoping for good news. The promo image that came with the news (excerpted above) looks pretty good.
Asterix in Translation
This blog entry from 2012 shows some examples of the lengths Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge went to in translating “Asterix.” She has sample panels and explains how the French jokes translated — or didn’t — into English. It’s an interesting dissection. Bell and Hockridge were geniuses at this stuff.
I don’t have a link for this, but I did just read in an old “Amazing Heroes” magazine that Bell and Hockridge also translated “The Smurfs” for Random House in the early 80s, when publishing tried to capitalize on the Saturday Morning cartoon’s popularity. NBM uses their own translations on those books today.
Awards Season Is Upon Us
Before the comics festival returns to Angouleme, the French organization of comics critics and journalists (ACBD) have their awards.
The winners will be announced in December, but BDGest.com has a breakdown of the 15 finalists now for book of the year.
Sean Murphy’s “Batman: White Knight” is in the running. It’ll face tough competition from the likes of “The Golden Age” by critic-favorite Cyril Pedrosa and Emile Bravo’s new “Spirou” book.
American winner of all other awards, “My Favorite Thing Is Monsters” by Emil Ferris, is also on the list. If any book could pull off an upset, there’s your candidate.
The blog post on translating Asterix has some great examples of the challenges Bell and Hockridge faced and how they triumphed over them. Goscinny’s original text is so full of both French wordplay and French cultural references that reproducing these in English was an amazing achievement. In some respects Anthea Bell* must have put more effort into an Asterix book with all those little references than she did into her more serious literary translating work! (*As far as I understand it, the way the partnership worked was that Bell was the leading “writer” of the bulk of the translations, while Hockridge was an expert on French culture and history whose main role was to pick out all the nuances of meaning and connotations in the original French text.)
In modern parlance, Bell was a bad-ass. She’s just as good a writer as a translator, as it turns out. She did write a book or two of her own. I don’t know how well they did, but the fact that she could wrap her mind around this stuff and come up with new stuff out of thin air where necessary is ridiculously impressive.
I had never heard about the work breakdown between her and Hockridge. That sounds like it would make sense, though. Thanks for that. I’ll keep my eyes open for confirmation on that point in the future, too…