Thursday, September 10, 2015
There were a few things that stuck out to me while reading the first volume of Tintin. The first and most obvious was the portrayal of the non-Caucasian characters. After Tintin is framed for a bank robbery we see the real perpetrator run off; based on the image we can see that he is hispanic. For whatever reason his speech is not in proper English. I wondered here, and in general other places in the text, how much liberty the translator was given. I don't know French but at first I thought about how the bad English would translate to French, but in class we learned that the whole character was a censored substitution. The Native Americans were also portrayed unintelligently. There were easy to convince, and quarreled with each other for no good reason. What really stood out was the stereotypical name choices of the Native Americans, to me it didn't sound like those choice were made uninformed, but rather purposely with negative intentions. I think one thing that I would have expected more of is like a racist caricaturization of people of color. I haven't read too many different comic series' in my life, only Little Orphan Annie, and the Archie Comics. From what I can remember there didn't seem to be any racism (to be honest I can't remember Little Orphan Annie at all) in terms of physical stereotypes. However, I did have to read an Asterix (Asterix and Cleopatra) comic for a class in college and the Asterix comics were filled with physical racial stereotypes. It makes me wonder why Asterix was so much more racist even though it began to be published decades after Tintin. Something to think about...
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One of my contemporary French history classes actually uncovered something very interesting about Hergé’s translation in Tin-Tin in America. The name of the tribe that Tin-Tin encounters is called the “black-feet”. This might seem like a random, albeit wildly offensive and laughably stereotypical name for a Native American tribe, but this was not chosen haphazardly. Interestingly, Hergé might be referencing the Algerian war of of the 50's. Algeria, a former satellite nation of France began waging a war of independence in the years following the Second World War after frustration with the French bureaucracy reached a boiling point. However, there were many French nationals that, even before the war officially began, decided to denounce their French citizenship and condemn European neo-colonialism. These Algerian sympathizers were called “des pieds-niors”, which directly translates to “black-feet” in English. In fact, many of the first “pieds-niors” were in fact the product of mixed marriages, creating a parallel between the Native Americans in the bande-dessiné and the African-Europeans in Algeria. Hergé might have been making this connection to perpetuate the easily-persuaded and fallible nature of these dissidents as perceived by the French (and Belgians). But that is just a theory…
ReplyDeleteVennesa you raise a good point about censorship influencing language. How much of the broken, infantilized English speech patterns of the Native Americans can be contributed to Hergé and how much of it was tweaked or changed by a translator? Perhaps the translator also had a hand in including racist dialogue where Hergé may have not intended it to be so obvious. In the mid 1900s, with TV westerns being very popular on American television, we can't disregard any potential biases an American translator may have had in emphasizing an unintelligent depiction of Native Americans.
ReplyDeleteVennesa I find that very interesting that decades after Tintin, Asterix comics are filled with physical racial stereotypes. Do you think it may relate to what was happening socially and culturally at the time? Or are their illustrations solely based off films? Or do you think the original text give a better understanding of the illustrations and some how in translating the text we're missing a large chunk of the story.
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