Etude du succès de la série des Astérix à l'étranger: sa traduction en Anglais.

1) What was Astérix at first ?

Authors’s will, the birth of the gaulish hero

Story of “Pilote”

Story of the first appearance of Astérix.

2) Why did it work (in France) ?

Key characters, role of authors (text & drawings)

Gosciny’s part

Uderzo’s part

Context (1961)

                 3) Why translating it  ?

Who decided (1969)?

Who did the work? (A. Bell & D. Hockridge previous works)

4) Why did it work (abroad)  ?

How was it translated?

General vision of translating litterery works (notion of equivalence)

Characteristics of comic strips (equivalence applied to translationof comic strips cf A. Bell)

Characteristics in Astérix

à Names

    Songs

    Puns

    Other (accents…)

                5) Results & effects of translations (n° translations, n° albums sold)

For the Astérix serie

à for the reader

    for the authors

What was Astérix at first ?

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From official site:

Mais un grand projet monopolise nos deux amis : pour la création du journal Pilote, mis en œuvre en collaboration avec François Clauteaux, qui en sera le rédacteur en chef, Albert et René recherchent un héros “bien de chez nous”. La décision est prise : ce sera le Roman de Renart.
Mais, bien vite, on leur apprend que le projet est déjà en cours, à l'initiative de Jean Trubert. Qu'à celà ne tienne, il faut trouver une autre idée. Après avoir exploré les âges, nos deux compères s'accordent sur la Gaule et les Gaulois.
Ainsi, le 29 octobre 1959, le numéro UN de Pilote présente en page 20 la première planche des aventures d'Astérix le Gaulois à ses lecteurs captivés. Le journal connaît un succès immédiat : plus de 200 000 exemplaires vendus !
Pilote (mâtin, quel journal !) connaîtra ses heures de gloire et bercera la jeunesse de nombreux lecteurs.
Puis, il subira quelques aléas et nos deux amis passeront la main en 1960 pour y revenir en 1963. René Goscinny collabore alors à de nombreuses bandes dessinées : Astérix, bien sûr, mais également Iznogoud (Tabary), Le Petit Nicolas (Sempé), Lucky Luke (Morris), Valentin (Tabary), les Dingodossiers (Gotlib), etc.

Les deux auteurs continueront quelque temps certaines séries, chacun de leur côté ou ensemble. Mais à partir de l'album “Le Bouclier Arverne”, Albert Uderzo décide de se consacrer uniquement au petit héros gaulois et abandonne ses autres personnages.

Astérix devient un héros majeur de la bande dessinée française. Son succès va croissant d'album en album.
Il remplit de bonheur nos deux compères, qui ont également créé un studio de dessins animés, le studio Idéfix. Pourtant, c'est le malheur qui les attend au coin du bois.
Le 5 novembre 1977 tombe la sinistre nouvelle : René Goscinny est mort lors d'un test d'effort effectué dans le cadre d'un bilan de santé. Il avait 51 ans. Le choc est terrible.
L'album “Astérix chez les Belges” en était à la planche 37.

A partir de ce moment-là, c'est Albert Uderzo qui reprendra, seul, les aventures du héros gaulois.
Il créera dans la foulée les Editions Albert René, dont il s'occupe aujourd'hui avec sa fille Sylvie.

Astérix est devenu en quarante ans un phénomène du monde de l’édition.
Les chiffres parlent d’eux-mêmes : 30 aventures traduites en 107 langues ou dialectes, 8 films, un parc de loisirs à son nom, des produits dérivés par centaines, et beaucoup d’autres projets...

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From AB02 p1:

" Originally, the idea was to make Asterix a genuinely heroic Gaul –a huge hunk of a warrior. Then René Goscinny thought it would be more amusing to make him smaal and weedy in appearance, apparently insignificant but in fact very cunning and Albert Uderzo then came up with the idea of his inseparable friend Obelix (…) who is indeed big and enormously strong (…). " (Anthea Bell)

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From IUBD p 280:

" In 1956, René Goscinny, Jean-Michel Charlier , Jean Hebrard et moi avons décidé de réunir nos compétences et de former une société d’édition et de publicité (EdiFrance, EdiPresse). C’est là que tout à commencé. François Clauteaux, alors directeur de al régie publicitaire de Monsavon-L’Oréal, est venu nous voir. Il avait le projet de faire un journal de jeunes, mais n’étant pas du métier, il nous a proposé de la réaliser. Nous avons sauté à pieds joints dans ce projet. C’est ainsi qu’est né Pilote (…). " (Uderzo)

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Why did it work (in France) ?

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Targetted strictly french readers even if Uderzo had some italian roots, Goscinny had russian and polish ones, and they were leading a new belgian society. From IUBD p 282:

" En fait la volonté de François Clauteaux était de faire un journal exclusivement destiné à un lectorat français. Aujourd’hui, cette volonté aurait un sens particulier. " (Uderzo)

" On le (avoir réconcilié le tout publique avec la BD) doit au grand génie et au grand savoir de René Goscinny. Quand nous nous sommes rencontrés, nous avions envie de faire une bande dessinée d’humour. La tarte à la crème ne nous suffisait pas. " (Uderzo)

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p 283 :

" (…) si nous n’avions pas eu l’opportunité de créer Pilote, sous notre responsabilité, jamais je n’aurais pu imposer Astérix. Il aurait tout le temps été refusé par les éditeurs. "

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From AB01 p1 :

" It (the Asterix series) has one of the greatest storylines of all time: I think of Asterix as a comic version of wily Odysseus " (Anthea Bell)

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From IUBD p177 (answer to quelle est la qualité essentielle d'une bande dessinée?) :

" L'émotion. (...) c'est bien cette émotion qu'un auteur transmet à un lecteur par son dessin. Uderzo est un maître dans ce domaine. Quand il dessine Astérix énervé, en plan américain, il n'y a plus de décors. Il y a juste un fond rouge. La couleur explicite l'énervement. Le dessin est une écriture à part entière." (Coyote)

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Context, from IUBD p 283:

"(...) j'ai toujours fait des gros nez. Ce qui m'a causé de nombreux soucis, car les éditeurs n'accetaient pas les gros nez. A l'époque, Tintin marquait trop les esprits pour qu'un Obélix "juste un peu enveloppé" puisse avoir sa place." (Uderzo)

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Context, from IUBD p282:

"J'étais prêt à tout illustrer, mais toujours dans la plus grande moralité. Les censeurs de l'époque étaient les gouvernements d'alors et le ministère de la Jeunesse. Morris en a fait les frais. On lui a interdit de montrer des pistolets dans Lucky Luke. Cette interdiction venait de la France, pas de la Belgique . Il était fou de rage. Son cow-boy avait le poing fermé! C'était d'un ridicule effroyable! Cela n'a pas duré longtemps, mais symboliquement, ça a marqué une époque." (Uderzo)

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From A02 p1:

"A national survey in 1969 suggested that two-thirds of the population had read at least one of the Astérix books; and by the time of Goscinny's death total sales in France are said to have amounted more than 55M copies, putting Asterix substantially ahead of his main (Belgian) rival, Tiintin. The first French space satellite, launched in 1965, was names in his honour (the US later matched this with spaceships called Charlie Brown and Snoopy)." (Mary Beard)

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From A02 p1:

"Pilote had the financial backing of Radio Luxembourg; and the instant success of the magazine and its cast of charcters can hardly have been unconnected with the barrage of publicity provided by the radio station." (Mary Beard)

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From A04 p1 (http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~janl/ts/asterix.html)

 

In spite of Uderzo's great drawings and it's undesputable commercial success it was criticized even in France. Under the easily accessible surface of Asterix some say they can see that Asterix, and thus Goscinny, and later also Uderzo, is a nationalist, racist and ``progressive party'' member (akin to the politics of France's own Le Pen), woman hater, and exponent of de Gaulle's imperialism.

It seems that Cæsar is the exponent of de Gaulle, and the biggest racist in the little village is Senilix (Translators note: His Norwegian name. English: Geriatrix). But he seems more like a classic EU resistor than a racist. He dislikes everyone not from his own village, and as he puts it: ``You know me, I've got nothing against foreigners. Some of my best friends are foreigners. But these particular foreigners aren't from this village!''. The most chauvinistic nationalism in Asterix is presented by Obelix, the figure with the lowest IQ, when he constantly proclaims that the Romans, Britts, Goths and Egyptians are quite mad; He is the only person that's not mad. Other nations have their own mix of egotism and home love, like when the Spaniards claim that Romans (when beaten up) taste best at home in Spain... (Finn Bjorklid, traduced by Nicolai Langfeldt)

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Why translating it (q AB01) ?

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From AB01 p1:

"Translating the text had once seemed to UK publishers an impossible task. The Humour was so French; surely it would never cross the Channel? The original adventures first appeared in book form in 1961, jointly produced by René Goscinny (text) and Albert Uderzo (drawings). It was not until 1969 that, at la English publisher bravelydipped a toe into the icy waters of the Mare Britannicum, and I was co-opted as a translator." (Anthea Bell)

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From AB02 p1:

The history of the English translations: several English-language publishers initially turned

 the series down, on the grounds that it was too French to cross the Channel successfully.
 Eventually Brockhampton Press, the name at the time of the children’s department of Hodder  & Stoughton, decided to make the venture. To translate the books they recruited a team  consisting of Anthea Bell (i.e. me) and Derek Hockridge, Derek as a lecturer in French and  expert on all the French topical references, Anthea as a professional translator with, at the  time, a special interest in translation for children. ." (Anthea Bell)

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Why did it work (abroad) (q IUBD p 286) ?

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Equivalence = valeur égale...

From IUBD p286:

"Je suis constamment émerveillé de voir le succès de ces personnages. Aujourd'hui, trois cent sept millions d'albums ont été vendu à travers le monde. C'est trop abstrait... pour y croire. Le langage de la bande dessinée est arrivé à s'exporter même chez ceux (Coréens, Chinois...) qui sont éloignés de nos mentalités de Gaulois. Goscinny le disait souvent: comment expliquer que ces personnages ont mieux fonctionné que les autres? Il n'y a pas de réponse scientifique! Nous voulions un produit purement français. En dehors de la France, qui connait les Gaulois? C'était un sacré pari, et je pense que nous y sommes arrivé sans trop y croire." (Uderzo)

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From A02 p1:

"People laugh at Asterix, Goscinny once pronounced, "because he does funny things, and that's all. Our only ambition is to have fun." On one occasion a desperate interviewer on Italian television suggested (not very subtly) that the appeal of Asterix's struggle against the Roman Empire was something to do with the "little man refusing to be crushed by the oppressive weight of modern society". Goscinny crisply replied that, as he didn't travel to work by the Métro, he didn't know about little men being crushed by anything." (Mary Beard)

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From A02 p1:

"Asterix doesn't beat brute force by superior cunning and intelligence – he does it thanks to his unexpected access to even bruter force than the enemy can deliver. In adventure after adventure, most of the Gaul's over-ingenious schemes misfire as badly as the bes-laid Roman ones. The reassuring fantasy is that, thanks to the magic potion, Asterix and his friends can mess things up and still win out." (Mary Beard)

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From A02 p2:

"Parents read Tintin after their children: they read Asterix before the chidren can get their hands on the books." (Olivier Todd by Mary Beard)

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From A02 p2;

"The basic storylines also reinforce the series' interational appeal, at least in Europe. Intentionally or not, Goscinny and Uderzo exploited the legacy of the Roman Empire across most of the continent. For wherever Roman conquest reached, there are still tales of heroic resistance and glamorous native freedom-fighters. If, for the French, Asterix is inevitably keyed into the story of Vercingetorix; the English can read him as a version of Boudicca or Caratacus; the Germans as a version of their own Hermann (known in Latin literature as Arminius). As for the Italians themselves, they are usually happy to enjoy a joke about their Roman ancestors – particularly when they are presented, as Asterix's adversaries are, as rather amiable bad guys, held back from serious evil by sheer inefficiency." (Mary Beard)

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About unsuccesful Asterix in the US, from A02 p2;

"This gap in the market has been endlessly and implausibly theorised. Cultural chauvinists in France have liked to believe that Asterix is simply too sophisticated for the Disney-fed masses of America; and they have pointed the contrast between the relatively elegant, up-market and very French Parc Astérix and the vulgarity of his neighbour, Euro Disney.

Others have tried a political explanation, reading the cartoon conflicts between nice Gauls and nasty Romans as a thinly veiled attack on Américan imperialism and the dominance of the new superpower (hence , they suggest, the unexpected niche market for series in China and the Middle East). But the bottom line is that Asterix is indomitably European. The legacy of the Roman Empire provides a context within popular culture for the different countries of Europe to talk with, and about, each other, and about their shared history and myths. It would be hard to penetrate that from the other side of the Atlantic." (Mary Beard).

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From http://www.republique-des-lettres.com/u1/uderzo.shtml , repris par http://perso.wanadoo.fr/olga.bluteau/ORCULTURE/29octobre.htm #ASTERIX

"Le premier album, Astérix le Gaulois, sortit en 1961 (6 000 exemplaires seulement). Déjà, le second, La Serpe d'Or, était tiré à 20 000 et le troisième, Astérix et les Goths à 40.000. La courbe fut ensuite exponentielle et le dernier en date, le 34ème, La Galère d'Obélix, est sorti le 10 octobre 1996 simultanément dans toute l'Europe avec un tirage cumulé de 8 millions d'exemplaires (dont 2,8 millions en France).
En tout, les Astérix représentent 250 millions d'albums vendus, traduits en 40 langues dont le breton et le latin."

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From A04 p1 (http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~janl/ts/asterix.html)

Perhaps this shows exactly how French Asterix really is, and that not everything in it will always be appreciated outside France. It seems as if Asterix is firstly a French comic, and secondly a European comic, at least it has never been accepted in the homeland of comics USA, where it's been introduced several times. Maurice Horn's The World Encyclopedia of Comics states that ``There are a few good things in Asterix (the clever use of balloons, drawing which is clean and uncluttered, and some genuinely funny situations) but the basic plot is tiresome and Goscinny's endless stream of bad puns and chauvinistic asides make this quite unpleasant as a strip.'' (Finn Bjorklid, traduced by Nicolai Langfeldt)

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From A04 p1 (http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~janl/ts/asterix.html)

It seems strange that Asterix has become as popular as it is, and that it can be read outside France at all. It's so full or references to French history and modern French society. Almost all supporting characters in the comic are caricatures of actual French persons. But, even without speaking French, or without good knowledge of French society, you can decode symbols, and characters, both in the pictures and the text, and not all are specific to France. (Finn Bjorklid, traduced by Nicolai Langfeldt)

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From A04 p1 (http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~janl/ts/asterix.html)

Many have wondered what to make of the Romans, and incidentally Asterix. Is it only a violent comic, or is the violence only a parodic sport, a necessary rite to keep the story going? Are the Romans and Gauls only a allegory of the second world war, the Romans being Nazis and the Gauls the French resistance?

An other theory puts the Romans in the role of the central government in today's France, and the Gauls in the role of the outlying regions, more specificly the cultural resistance in Bretagne. That makes the Romans us, the technical, progressive modern society, and the little village, surrounded my enemies, is status quo, the dream about the past and the hope that things will stay as they are.

An important reason for Asterix' European success is their visits to their close EU neighbors. Asterix has taught Spaniards bull fighting, the Swiss mountain climbing, taken part in the Olympic Games in Greece, caused civil war in Germany, dropped by Rome a couple of times, followed the route of Tour de France (Translators note: Tour de France is a (in)famous bicycle race, sometimes called Tortour de France, because of the physical tests it presents to the bikers), and even discovered America before Leif Eriksson. (Finn Bjorklid, traduced by Nicolai Langfeldt)

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From AB01

On the whole, we in these islands share the French view of such stock figures as the obsessively tidy Swiss and the proud Spaniard - but what about those phlegmatic characters, our own ancestors, the ancient Britons? (Anthea Bell)

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à How was it translated?

From A01 p3:

"[We] tend to chase fast through an album on the first draft of translation, making notes to ourselves along the lines of  "Joke needed hre" or "Equivalent song to be found" – or simply, "Help, what are we going to do about this?" Then we get down to the really hard work. For individual passages of wordplay, one usually isolates the essence of the situation that has to be conveyed – the idea that must come across – and works on that until something with a usable double meaning surfaces." (Anthea Bell)

" Ther is an indefinable habit of mind which is part of the translation process: a small mental area in between the source and the translation, where only the idea conveyed and the general grammatical shape of the passage exist, not the words in either langage. The translator's mind seems to pause briefly in that area, gathering itself, so to speak, for the shift into English." (Anthea Bell)

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From A03:

"They gave the British characters the same sort of speech patterns as Air Force pilots from World War One, or from any character in a Jeeves and Wooster novel – both of which used antiquated words and phrases. They were also albe to put in a few stereotypes that were lost on the original authors, respectively giving the Caledonian and Hibernian characters some Scottish and Irish mannerisms." (?)

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From http://www.republique-des-lettres.com/u1/uderzo.shtml , repris par http://perso.wanadoo.fr/olga.bluteau/ORCULTURE/29octobre.htm #ASTERIX

"D'ailleurs, les Italiens ont trouvé un gag prodigieux : ils ont traduit le fameux SPQR (Senatus Populus Que Romani) fièrement arboré par les insignes des centuries romaines par Sono Pacci Questi Romani soit 'Ils sont fous ces romains'. C'est formidable !" (Uderzo)

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From AB01

"The Asterix strip cartoons are crammed with jokes. For we Brits, again like the French, enjoy the dreadful puns in which the Asterix stories abound. But if you translate a pun straight, it is no longer a pun. You have the situation, you have the facial expressions of the characters and the size of the speech bubble, and you must devise a new pun to fit."

The lateral thinking of the cryptic crossword clue is not far removed from the translation of wordplay.

Then there are the songs: like those of the French originals, they have to be both recognisable and capable of anachronistic distortion. Hence such lyrics as "I'm dreaming of a white Solstice," and "Wonderful, wonderful Durovernum." Believe it or not, people write dissertations on this kind of thing: one German student complained to me that she had consulted English songbooks, but could not find any of them. (Anthea Bell)

 

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                Results & effects of the translation (n° translations, n° albums sold)

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From A02 p1:

"Ther was also, predictably, a more mundane range of Astérix spin-offs, from mustard to washing powder, that flooded the French market in the 1960's and 1970's. The story goes that Goscinny's partner, Albert Uderzo, once saw three advertisements side by side on a Métro station, for three completely different products each endorsed with equal enthusiasm by Asterix and his cartoon comrades. From then on, they put much tighter limits on the products they would allow their hero to advertise." (Mary beard)

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From A04 p1 (http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~janl/ts/asterix.html)

"In Germany, which was somewhat unkindly caricatured as a warlike Preusian country with a taste for torture and intrigue in Astérix et les Goths (1963), the series was published by the big piblisher Kauka in the 60's. Rather freshly they made main characters the western Germanic Siggi and Barrabas, and the mentioned Gothic album was published in a translantion that made the story a kind of anti-communist crusade against the east Gremans, the DDR behind the Berlin Wall of that time. Goscinny got this rape against his work stopped after a few albums." (Finn Bjorklid, traduced by Nicolai Langfeldt)

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From AB01

Goscinny kept a close eye on his translations, and rejected the first German version for being too nationalistic. (Anthea Bell)