Tintin in China, legally

2001-05-23 13:38

Beijing - The first legal Chinese version of Tintin's 22 adventures was officially launched on Tuesday, at a ceremony worthy of one of the world's most popular cartoon characters.

Belgian Foreign Minister Louis Michel and the Chinese Minister of Culture Sun Jiazheng were present when the colourful albums were unveiled at the Belgian embassy in Beijing.

Praising his illustrious compatriot, Michel said Tintin is "Belgium's most famous ambassador in the entire world" and revealed that General de Gaulle himself considered Tintin his only real competitor.

Tintin is not unknown in China, where pirated pocket-sized issues, printed in a rough black and white, have circulated since the early 1980s and have now become treasured collector's items.

The new edition, made possible by a contract between Belgian publisher Casterman and China Children Publishing House, is a closer adaptation of the original.

The Chinese version uses the same format, same-quality paper and same layout as the original in French.

But in a bow to local patriotic feelings, the Chinese title of Tintin in Tibet has been modified to Tintin in Chinese Tibet, to reflect Beijing's claim that the area is an inalienable part of China.

The Chinese publisher has also decided not to market Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, deeming it and its criticism of early Bolshevik rule in Russia too anti-communist.

Tintin first went to China in 1936 in The Blue Lotus, where the young reporter emerged victorious from a fight with Japanese-funded opium smugglers, aided by a young Chinese called Chang.

Chang is the only character in the Tintin series with an exact counterpart in real life - late Chinese artist Chang Chong-jen who helped Tintin creator Herge in the preparations of The Blue Lotus.

Chang gave Herge new and more realistic insights into China of his day, in the hope that he would not succumb to racist stereotypes as had been in the case of Tintin in the Congo five years earlier.

He was successful as, according to Michel, thousands of young Belgians and Europeans got their first taste of China through Tintin's adventures in the world's most populous country.

"Herge wished to defeat some of the clichés that were circulating among Europeans at that time," said Jacques Simon, an executive with Casterman.

More than that, he showed the stark realities of a Chinese suffering at the hands of Japanese aggressors, said Zhang Feifei, the daughter of Herge collaborator Chang.

Translating Tintin has been a formidable challenge, and finding names for the main protagonist and his dog - "Dingding" and "Baixue" - was just the easy part.

Captain Haddock's imaginative swearing was a tougher task, and the language used by Africans in Tintin in the Congo, deliberately rendered primitive and childlike by Herge, simply could not be translated into Chinese, according to Lu Xiao, the translator of the Congo album.

"Thomson and Thompson" have been rendered into "Dubang and Dubang", their names pronounced exactly the same and differentiated merely by a slight variation in the writing of the characters.

- SAPA