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contours provocations
journal - 2002-0820 - tue 2000 Possibly More Than You Want to Know about Tintin Well, I'm writing again, so it must be Tuesday. Last week, a co-worker showed up with a "Tintin in Cambodia" tee. I didn't think too much about it save I'd never seen a Tintin tee before. For that matter the only other piece of Tintin clothing I've seen was on an HBO special reuniting the Monty Python troupe. One of the performers had a wonderful Tintin sweater. It later dawned on me that Tintin never went to Cambodia. The closest he got was Tibet and China. My co-worker said he had picked up the shirt in Cambodia when he was on vacation in February. So we finally figured that the shirt maker WANTED Tintin to come to Cambodia. Several years ago, I read a view of Chaplin's "the little tramp." The article said he was among the 20th century's existentialistic icons. A being seemingly without background or ancestry who is a victim of the "benign indifference of the universe." (I'm more or less excepting this on face value, since my knowledge of existentialism is limited.) After chatting with my co-worker, I began re-reading some of the Tintin books I have. And within the last day or so, I've concluded that there are similarities between "the little tramp" and Tintin. We know nothing about either's background. Although the first Tintin story was the "The Blue Lotus," he appears as an already established character. Neither expresses doubts about their existence or questions their past - they simply are beings of the present.
Many times when I've picked up a Tintin book, I've noticed the list of languages in which the stories are published. The obvious ones are there: Spanish, French, English, Danish, Chinese, German, Greek, Italian, Swedish. (No Russian, I see.) In addition to these, there are several I'm not familiar with. So I sat down the other evening and looked them up. Afrikaans - South AfricaIn a way, the most intersting is Esperanto. I had no idea that anything was published in Esperanto. I also learned that Esperanto in Esperanto, I guess, means "one who hopes." I'm assuming that the English versions I'm reading were translated from the original French. One of the oddities of translating the comic book format from one language to another is the relationship of the print to the speech balloon. About the only way to change the size of the balloons is to redraw the panels, which could be a very difficult and messy job. Given the number of languages available for Tintin, it would prove a very daunting task. This is one of those issues, I'm sure most people don't think about. And in most cases, it makes little difference. Although, I've seen a couple of balloons in which the text was definitely a tight fit. My first encounter with this curious problem was several years when I bought a set of hard cover books that were collections of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck stories. I then read that the panels has been re-drawn for Italian. Then the books were translated back into English, but the balloons were not re-drawn. So you have cases in which there's enough room to write the "Gettysburg Address," and all it says is, "Ouch!" PAX!
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