Asterix and His Secrets

Books

By ANTHEA BELL
May 7, 2008

Do the same readers like both Tintin and Asterix? Some prefer one to the other, but surely they don't have to be rivals; there's room for both. (My own sons, who were inevitably accompanied through their childhood by my own work on the Asterix translations, also read Tintin avidly.)

In French, Tintin easily predates Asterix; in English by only about 10 years, the time it took for an English-language publisher to venture on a translation of the first pun-packed, wisecracking adventure of the proto-French Gauls as they defy Julius Caesar and his conquering legions, maintaining a provincial but proud Gallic outpost in what is now northwest France. The series was thought just too French to be transplanted. But quintessentially French as it is, the appeal of Asterixian humor has turned out to be pan-European.

For a start, the drawing speaks for itself. I've seen a party of 8-year-olds who knew no French at all immersed in a pile of French Asterix albums: They could follow the basic story line from the pictures. And Albert Uderzo's graphic gifts were perfectly matched by René Goscinny's inventive, witty dialogue. On Goscinny's sad death at the age of only 51, his colleague Mr. Uderzo decided not to import another writer but to continue the series on his own. Theirs had been a very close partnership, and Goscinny would indeed have been a hard act to follow.

The great treasure of the Asterix saga is its inventive wordplay, which has forced translators such as me to adapt freely and creatively. Tintin also contains wordplay, but not nearly as much as Asterix, and the volume of Goscinny's gags increased as time went on. At first he relied heavily on the simple joke that the Romans spoke Latin: On the first page of the first adventure, after a bruising encounter with the Gauls, one legionary declaims, "Vae victis!" However, his concussed friend has perdu son latin, literally "lost his Latin," but with the colloquial meaning of being "baffled, at a loss." The Germans use the same expression; we don't have it in English. "It's all Greek to me," a close equivalent, was no use here. It was done with grammatical references in English: "Accidence will happen" and "We decline." ("Funny way to spell accidents," a puzzled German student once commented to me.)

Later on, while there were still many jokes aimed at younger readers, others became more ingenious, sometimes even convoluted and tortuous — and yes, one Roman character is called, in English, Tortuous Convolvulus, a troublemaker sent by Caesar to sow discord in Gaul. There were topical references to politicians and figures of stage and screen. There were flying visits from characters in other comic strips, including the twins Thomson and Thompson, and even extended literary gags. The last volume with text by Goscinny, "Asterix in Belgium," features a pitched battle accompanied by quotations about Waterloo from Victor Hugo's "Les Châtiments." You might think that as we Brits, with a little help from our Prussian friends, won the battle, we'd have an epic poem on the subject somewhere, but although Sir Walter Scott did indeed write one ("The Field of Waterloo"), his muse must have deserted him. An anonymous critic wrote, at the time: "On Waterloo's ensanguined plain, / Full many a gallant man was slain. / But none, by saber or by shot, / Fell half so flat as Walter Scott." For the English version, literary quotations had to be instantly recognizable, so we resorted to a mixture of Byron ("Childe Harold") and appropriate warlike lines from Shakespeare and Milton.

Translating puns and wordplay is an odd process, more akin to compiling a cryptic crossword than anything else — and I should know, since my father Adrian Bell compiled the first ever crossword for the London Times, when it felt forced to adopt what I'm told the editor of the time called "this newfangled American craze." If asked what I translate, I used to say that my work ranged from Sigmund Freud to Asterix the Gaul. My title in the New Penguin Freud series, however, was "The Psychopathology of Everyday Life," centering on the famous Freudian slip or Fehlleistung, and one day it struck me that while the Freudian slip reflects the workings of the unconscious mind, in translating wordplay — and particularly puns — the conscious mind is trying to reconstruct the same effect, but coming from the opposite direction. Freud and Asterix may not be so far apart after all.

Ms. Bell is an essayist and translator of Sigmund Freud, W.G. Sebald, Stefan Zweig, and Asterix the Gaul — among others.