About "Introduzione a Paperino"

[Luca Boschi]

Hello, Mr. Ault, and hallo all!

I'm happy to be here to talk with you. Maybe it's not necessary to introduce
myself, indeed, for mr. Ault (whose interview with Calr Barks I appreciated
very much in an old issue of "The Comics Journal") I can say that I
currently work for The Walt Disney Company-Italia, in the "Zio Paperone"
monthly magazine, devoted to Bark's' art and to his "heirs"' one. I also got
the honor to organize Barks' oil paint exhibition in Milano, in 1994, and to
introduce him officially to the Italian Press in an interview-conference
during his European tour,in that July.
In the pas ten years or so, I also translated some stories by Barks into
Italian and wrote tens of articles about him...

My appreciation for Barks' "corpus" of stories grew even more, after reading
the 1974 Italian book you are discussing about. "Introduzione a Paperino" is
a very good and detailed survey on the barksian Ducks comics, but is
affected by some problems.

The first one is that the three authors were properly fond about the Italian
translations of the Barks' stories, but (with some exceptions) they ignored
the original version of them. Exceptionally, they compared the Italian and
the American versions to point how bad (or "interpolated") the Italian
version generally was.
You know that the Guido Martina's Italian Ducks stories were affected by
more violence than the Barks' ones. More, characters' personalities were
changed (Martina's stingy Scrooge is closer to the Italian mask of Pantalone
than to Barks' sympathetic Scrooge). To match with the Italian "fumettis",
Martina and his colleagues translated some Barks original dialogues in an
altered way, to obey to this trend. I hope this concept is clear enough...

In the book, there are also some mistakes that must be correct. One of the
bigger is that for the authors J. Rockerduck and Flinthearth Glomgold are
the same character. In 1974, an Italian reader had to be very smart and full
of comics books knowledge to distinguish them, because the same Disney
editors didn't pay attention so much. You must think that the same
Flinthearth Glomgold's name was translated into four different ways in
"Topolino", and when his first story made in Italy with him was produced, he
got a fifth one!

So, to translate "Introduzione a Paperino" giving the book all the merit it
deserves, I think it'd be necessary "to translate and correct or rewrite
some sentences", elighted by knowledges impossible to be reached by an
Italian 1974 reader and scholar. And, for an international audience, maybe
is better to skip some paragraphs, adding some notes, too.

That's all, for now, from myself.
Let's go on discussing...

Ciao!

Luca Boschi