Tintin Forums

I finished re-reading Benoît Peeters' Hergé Son of Tintin last night, and spotted an interesting detail in one of the endnotes. In the chapter discussing the start of Prisoners of the Sun in the Journal Tintin, it's mentioned that Hergé's fortieth birthday fell on 22nd May 1947, and that a few months earlier, he had "marked this birthday... playfully in a scene. [...] In the port of Callao, the Pachacamac hoists a flag. "Billions of blistering blue barnacles!" exclaims Haddock. "The sign of the fortieth!" "Is to celebrate the commandant's birthday?" Thomson asks him ingenuously."

I was baffled by this, so referred back to the album and realised that it's an error on the part of this book's translator. Haddock actually says "She'll be quarantined!" («le signal de la quarantaine!»), and the original joke in French arises from Thomson confusing quarantaine (quarantine) and quarantième (fortieth). I've read Prisoners of the Sun countless times and never thought there was any more to the mix-up than Thomson assuming a ship puts out flags for the captain's birthday!

This is very amusing. Is it really a translation error or did they think it worked as it was? Certainly in French it has more meaning, especially with regard to Hergé's 40th birthday.

Apart from the Captain explaining what putting a ship in quarantine really means in reply to Thomson, I also think it works just as well with Thomson assuming flags were for the festivities!

No, I meant an error in the biography itself – in the endnote Haddock's «le signal de la quarantaine» is translated as "the sign of the fortieth". The translator mixed up fortieth and quarantine, inadvertently making the same error as Thomson!

The celebratory flags assumption in the English edition of Prisoners of the Sun does work and is a suitably silly idea from Thomson which gets around the fact that the original wordplay doesn't work in English (similar to Calculus' mishearings needing equivalents rather than direct translations). I'm just impressed the joke functions on a deeper level than I'd previously realised.