Balthazar Moderator
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#2 · Posted: 19 Sep 2007 12:00
I wouldn't want to question the reasoning of the English transators for bringing out the books in the order they did. Launching with the more sophisticated, well-plotted adventures from the 1940s and late 30s such as Unicorn, Red Rackham and King Ottokar (rather than the earliest, more crudely-plotted stories like Congo and America) no doubt helped hugely in persuading British children and comics-hostile British parents, book reviewers and librarians that the Tintin adventures were books of real quality. But I'm not sure that the internal continuity tweaks they added ever really made the UK editions flow as a fully coherent alternative chronology in the way that you suggest, jock.
The continuity tweaks surely weren't applied consistently enough for that. The example you give of Snowy mentioning Marlinspike at the beginning of Cigars may indeed have convinced a few British readers that Cigars happened after Red Rackham, but no British reader could have thought that The Crab with the Golden Claws happened after Red Rackham since it's clear that this book contains Tintin and Haddock's first meeting. I suppose the English translators could have tried to tweak the dialogue of this first meeting to suggest that Tintin and Haddock had become estranged since the end of Red Rackham, and that Haddock had bizarrely returned to a life of drunken wrechedness, and that Tintin' and Haddock's encounter in the cabin was in fact a reunion rather than a first meeting. But wisely the translators left this one as Hergé wrote it! That's just one example of where the translators decided not to force something into the order the books came out, which surely indicates that chronology tweaks were applied somewhat on the hoof, on the merits of each case - ie: to fudge and smooth over some of the inconsistencies between the order of the books coming out and their actual order, rather than to attempt to create a completely new internally logical chronology to the UK editions.
In any case, I think most of the tweaks simply added confusion. My brother and I quickly worked out that there were pre-Haddock Tintin adventures and post-Haddock ones and it really didn't bother us that we weren't buying or reading them in the right order. Apart from the double-album adventures, we were quite happy to jump from one part of the cannon to another, since each adventure is pretty much self-contained. What did confuse us, when out of interest we began to try to work out which order they actually went in, were some of the English translator's tweaks, such that reference by Snowy to Marlinspike in what was clearly, to us, a pre-Haddock adventure.
I'm not saying that the translators were wrong at the time to attempt these chronology tweaks to parts of the dialogue. But now that the whole series is available in English, I think it would significantly improve the UK editions to simply take all these tweaks out. It could have been done recently when the books were all relettered digitally.
I know that Michael Turner has said that he doesn't want to revise his original translations in this way, but I think he's being over-defensive when it comes to these chronological tweaks, since they now serve to make the books less consistent and logical, rather than more so.
Still, maybe I shouldn't mind about these chronological ideosyncracies in the English translations. After all, it was Hergé himself who stuck a copy of Destination Moon into his 1950s redraw of Cigars, even though he left its 1930s British Empire setting entirely intact. So clearly he liked messing up the logical chronlogy of the books himself!
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