Asterix

Puns abound in the French. Whether or not one agrees with Freud that puns are the lowest form of humour, they are certainly difficult to translate, and will not usually translate straight at all. They come thick and fast as the athletes from all over Greece enter the Olympic stadium in Astérix aux Jeux Olympiques / Asterix at the Olympic Games, p. 38.

The pass of Thermopylae can still be referred to in English translation (French défilé means both a ‘pass’ or mountainous gorge and, in the stadium, a ‘procession’). So can the connotations both ancient and modern of Marathon. But the use of the French past participle venu from venir = ‘come’ with its adjectival masculine plural ending to make venus, thus creating a pun on the Venus of Milo (the island of Melos), will not work in English, nor will the reference to the title of Watteau’s famous painting L’Embarquement pour Cythère. The Macedonian reference would not translate straight either, since the culinary macédoine of chopped mixed vegetables or fruit retains its French form in English. These losses, then, were replaced by topographical Greek references to Magnesia (Milk of Magnesia, the indigestion remedy), Cos lettuce, Salamis to play on salami sausage, and the Mysteries of Eleusis (in the region of Attica) for a pun on ‘elusive’.

That leaves the interesting case of the Spartans, who are pieds nus, a reference in the French to a type of sandal. At the time of translating this book, there was a particular brand of hard-centred chocolates on sale called a Spartan Assortment. It is no longer manufactured or sold.

This raised issues of what is to be done when a reference becomes obsolete? Should this play on words be rethought, and if so with what? In the case of a revision, it is not absolutely essential to have ‘Sparta’ on the board carried by the athlete in the second frame, since it comes out of the black film, although it should not be replaced by any very long Greek place name, or it would not fit.

Similarly, where Obelix has been turned to stone a string of jokes in French, some but not all with stony references, is rendered with a different but parallel set of jokes in English, this time all stony because the English languages offers a good number of possibilities here:

La Galère d’Obélix / Asterix and Obelix All At Sea (p. 13)

The High Priest of Atlantis in this title is Hyapados in the original French — ultimately from Il y a un os, literally ‘there’s a bone’ = ‘there’s a snag in it’, but here there is no snag, Il n’y a pas d’os. His English name of Absolutlifabulos was deliberately chosen to be reasonably obsolescence-proof, because even when the TV show Absolutely Fabulous fades from memory, Atlantis still was a purely fabulous continent.

But obsolescence can be a real problem in translating this kind of material — for the series uses the humour of anachronism to introduce twentieth-century themes into the time of Julius Caesar. What if anything should be done when a series has proved popular enough to remain in print for nearly forty years, in France, thirty years in the UK, and around the same length of time in other major European languages? Some visual themes cannot be changed: cf. the faces of characters from Pagnol’s Marseille films in Le Bouclier Arverne / Asterix and the Chieftain’s Shield, and the Monkees in Astérix et les Normands (American imitators of the Beatles, although in English, rendered as ‘The Rolling Menhirs’, made to refer to the Rolling Stones, who have proved a lot more durable than most groups). But should verbal topical references be allowed to stand as witnesses to their period, or should some attempt at revision be made?

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