Translation and censorship

[Donald D. Markstein]

> I have to agree with Francesco on this translating issue. When I was 
> younger, I used to enjoy the cross-references to Barks and Rosa 
> stories that David Gerstein and Geoffrey Blum would toss into their 
> translations of European stories, and the various literary allusions, 
> but now I dislike it on principle.
>

Well now, isn't that the whole controversy in a nutshell! Kids enjoy the 
stuff that's adapted to their time and culture (which includes Barks and 
Rosa references, of course). But when they get old enough to develop 
ideas about what's "good" in some abstract way, "beyond" mere 
entertainment (which is all the real purpose a story has), they get 
picky about what might have been the "intent" of the original author 
(which, of course, they can only speculate about -- for all they know, 
Scarpa may have, and probably did because he was a professional 
entertainer and not a sensitive "artiste" demanding that every jot and 
tittle be exactly as he created it, have taken my own attitude toward 
translation) and object on "principle" to such tampering.

But let's try to remember that despite our own love of the material, 
it's intended for the entertainment of children. It stands or falls on 
whether kids, not adult aficionados such as you and me, enjoy it. If the 
grown-ups like it -- great! But if catering to us requires even the 
tiniest compromise of its main mission, then it's wrong. Sorry if that 
offends anybody's mature, sophisticated sensibilities, but that's the 
way it is.

If you want to appreciate Scarpa's work precisely as he originally made 
it -- read it in Italian. Of course, a comic book story undergoes a pile 
of revision and compromise before it ever sees print, much less 
translation (and the compromises start before the first line goes on the 
paper), but at least you can fool yourself into believing it's pure.

John Lustig gets it. Of course, he's a professional, and has not only 
seen first-hand how stories get twisted and tweaked by many people in 
being prepared for print -- he's also experienced, in his own work, the 
fact that every word and every line is contingent on an incredible 
variety of factors, conscious and un-, up to and including what the 
writer and artist had for breakfast.

I hate to get all elitist on you guys, but it does seem to boil down to 
a professional's point of view versus that of those who don't work in 
the field and therefore have only a hazy knowledge of how the field 
itself works. Many people have creative input; and while the story is 
primarily the writer's, his "vision", if you will, is only one of those 
that affect what you read on the page.

Like it or not, the translator is part of the creative process. If the 
final product isn't influenced by his creative input, then he's not 
doing his job.

>  The Scarpa translations in Gladstone's first run, by Byron Erickson, 
> Dwight Decker, and others, seemed to me to do a much better job of 
> "Americanizing" the dialogue while leaving the translators' 
> personalities out of it. A translator should be seen and not heard.
>

I don't know about Byron's Gladstone work (tho I do know he's a very 
creative person and the fact shows up in his editing of my own stories 
for Egmont -- to the stories' benefit, let me add -- so it seems likely 
to turn up in his re-dialoguing too). But this contradicts conversations 
I've had with Dwight. If you had access to the originals, you'd see that 
there's a great deal of him in his translations -- not just in comics, 
but in prose as well.

This is because Dwight is a good translator. He understands that if you 
simply go word-for-word, you won't convey the flavor of the whole, which 
was created for the foibles and idiosyncracies of another language. This 
may be a virtue in translating a technical manual, but not for anything 
that's intended to be enjoyed.

And being enjoyed is the bottom line. In comic books of all types, the 
story's the thing -- not a tedious and inevitably futile attempt to 
duplicate a version that, in many fundamental ways, is alien to the reader.

Quack, Don