TINTIN vs. ASTERIX

Agree that Gomer Goof is a terrible name - and I don't really buy Cinebook's justification that 'Gaston' means nothing to English speaking audiences. But if it's the price we have to pay for translated Franquin so be it, fugly computer lettering and all.

Aside from Idées noires (and all of Franquin's best Spirou volumes), what other major Franco-Belgian comics now remain untranslated?

has lucky luke been fully translated?

Pretty much - Cinebooks have published all of the Goscinny-written ones, and made a good dent on the ones produced before and after his run.

What idiot thinks "Gomer" is a more well-recognised name than "Gaston"? Sounds like a 1970s Beezer strip.

I'm glad to have the Spirous (very, very gradually!) in English but TBH I prefer reading the French ones even if my translation skills aren't quite there. It's ever clearer from reading their bland transliterations just what an incredible job the Tintin & Asterix translators did. (Actually I believe the Tintins are being retranslated, which is idiotic.)

Whoever's on the Lucky Lukes has done a better job on the dialogue, but that's Goscinny I guess.

Dailt Star and the Bounty Hunter are both vg non-Goscinny stories.

Gomer Goof is actually the name that Fantagraphics used when they ran a few Gaston strips in their anthology magazine Prime Cuts. But that was produced for a predominantly North American audience, who would be familiar with the name Gomer Pyle from The Andy Griffith show.

It's ever clearer from reading their bland transliterations just what an incredible job the Tintin & Asterix translators did.

Anthea Bell & Derek Hockridge's Asterix translations for Hodder Dargaud were great and v good with puns, yes! A remarkable achievement which I become more and more impressed by as I get older and fail to learn any languages with pun-spotting fluency.

So it surprised me that I actually prefer the Cinebooks translation of the first Iznogoud book to the B&H-translated 1970s edition which I found second-hand. The 70s edition has kept some puns which don't really make sense in English and the typesetting looks scrappy and doesn't fit the bubbles well in places. Not up to their Asterix translation standards but maybe a rushed job. The Cinebooks edition, on the other hand, was also not 70s Asterix standard but at least perfectly serviceable with no conspicuously literal pun translations.

(slightly vague as I don't remember the specifics, sorry - will have a look for the books over the weekend. Also apologies if I've already written this on ILX as it seems v possible that I have)

Gomer a jarringly odd name to me (plus Gaston perfectly pronounceable in English, and the Germans cope with him being called Gaston, after all) and "Gaffe" works perfectly well in English, with or without the "La", but oh well. Also "Mind the Gaffe" would have been an A+ pun and "Mind the Goof" is just, eh

(quick fact-checks: it's not the 1st Iznogoud that I have both editions of but the 2nd, "The Caliph's Vacation", and apologies for repeatedly & incorrectly pluralising Cinebook)

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/ed/Gaston_smirking.jpg

Anthea Bell interview here btw: https://www.connexionfrance.com/Archive/Making-Asterix-funny-in-English

I have one of those 70s Iznogouds too, they do seem like cheap knockoffs. Before Cinebooks, I had one English Lucky Luke that I read to death, "The Dalton Brother's Analyst" - translation is v. good, and Sic would prob approve of the hand lettering too.

Have many fond memories of avoiding the sun on childhood holidays so I could sit in a librarie and read Lucky Luke books for hours instead.

Great interview btw. This is amazjng:

Some of the later ones by Goscinny have long passages of extended literary allusions. In Le Cadeau de César [Caesar’s Gift] Asterix duels with a Roman soldier and he does it in the character of Cyrano de Bergerac, it’s wonderful, it goes on for almost a page. I sat looking at that and thought “the most famous swordfight in English literature is probably Hamlet and Laertes,” and the whole thing was done with quotations from Hamlet in the end.

I remember my secondary school French teacher (native French speaker) saying she thought the English translation of Asterix had better jokes than the original.