A Wall Street Journal article by Susan Bernofsky explains “Why Donald Duck Is the Jerry Lewis of Germany”:
Donald Duck’s popularity was helped along by Erika Fuchs, a free spirit in owlish glasses who was tasked with translating the stories. A Ph.D. in art history, Dr. Fuchs had never laid eyes on a comic book before the day an editor handed her a Donald Duck story, but no matter. She had a knack for breathing life into the German version of Carl Barks’s duck. Her talent was so great she continued to fill speech bubbles for the denizens of Duckburg (which she renamed Entenhausen, based on the German word for “duck”) until shortly before her death in 2005 at the age of 98.
Ehapa directed Dr. Fuchs to crank up the erudition level of the comics she translated, a task she took seriously. Her interpretations of the comic books often quote (and misquote) from the great classics of German literature, sometimes even inserting political subtexts into the duck tales. Dr. Fuchs both thickens and deepens Mr. Barks’s often sparse dialogues, and the hilariousness of the result may explain why Donald Duck remains the most popular children’s comic in Germany to this day.
Dr. Fuchs’s Donald was no ordinary comic creation. He was a bird of arts and letters, and many Germans credit him with having initiated them into the language of the literary classics. The German comics are peppered with fancy quotations. In one story Donald’s nephews steal famous lines from Friedrich Schiller’s play “William Tell”; Donald garbles a classic Schiller poem, “The Bell,” in another. Other lines are straight out of Goethe, Hölderlin and even Wagner (whose words are put in the mouth of a singing cat). The great books later sounded like old friends when readers encountered them at school. As the German Donald points out, “Reading is educational! We learn so much from the works of our poets and thinkers.” …
Not only young kids were reading it. Micky Maus became popular entertainment among a newly politicized generation who saw the comics as illustrations of the classic Marxist class struggle. A nationally distributed newsletter put out by left-leaning high school students in 1969 described Dagobert (Scrooge) as the “prototype of the monocapitalist,” Donald as a member of the proletariat, and Tick, Trick and Track as “socialist youth” well on their way to becoming “proper Communists.” Even Frankfurt School philosopher Max Horkheimer admitted to enjoying reading Donald Duck comics before bed.
I had no idea (though I expect Grumbly Stu did).
Remember Dorfman and Mattelart’s How to Read Donald Duck from the ’70s?
To repeat myself from the MetaFilter thread…
Yeah, the same applies in Iceland. Andrés Önd, as he is known, is chockfull of literary (and other cultural) references. For example, at one point, the greatest Icelandic poem of the 20th Century, Tíminn og vatnið (Time and the Water) by Steinn Steinarr is parodied expertly. In the original the first verse goes:
Tíminn er eins og vatnið
og vatnið er djúpt og kalt
eins og vitund mín sjálfs
Time is like the water
And the water is deep and cold
Like the consciousness of my self
Which goes thus in the Donald Duck version (where it is recited by a poet named Steina Steinsnar):
Síminn er eins og hakkið
og hakkið er allt í steik
eins og símtal til mín sjálfs
The phone is like the ground beef
And the groundbeef is all fried
Like a phonecall to my self
If it is in the German and Icelandic translations, I suspect that it’s in the original as well. Though there’s the possibility that the Icelandic translations are from Danish, which might be translated from German. It’s been a while since I’ve read any Don Rosa or Carl Barks in English, so I can’t say for certain.
I’m finding it a little hard to believe that this is, um, actually true… But if you say so, I’ll believe it.
All I know is what I read in the (funny) papers.
Donald is also huge in Holland (actually, many European countries, but the Netherlands especially). Daan Jippes from there is probably just behind the American Don Rosa as the most famous Duck artist to have taken up the mantle of Carl Barks (long known as the Duck Man before anyone knew who he was, since he never signed his work for the comics he did).
Barks wrote intelligent, funny stories that appealed to a lot of people, and I can see why translators would have jumped all over that and took it new places. You could say it’s similar going the other way with the English translations of Goscinny and Uderzo’s Asterix the Gaul, or Herge’s Tintin.
What bothers me is the suggestion that Donald Duck is a popular “children’s” comic. He’s popular with adults just as much as kids. Actually, I’m reminded of Kalle Anka, when almost all of Sweden watches a Disney Donald Duck special from the 1950s every Christmas Eve. I had questioned this when reading about it last year, but a Swedish friend confirmed it for me.
It’s quite true about the high-flown German in Donald Duck comics. I’m pretty sure I already mentioned this once in a blog comment here, but can’t find it now. The publishers are Egmont EHAPA. The publication series is LTB (Lustige Taschenbücher). Here is the catalog page of their fan website.
There are many adults who still read LTBs, but these are … well … not necessarily the same people who also read Sloterdijk and Luhmann. 99% of them are men, of course.
Here is a tiny example of dialog and segue. The second frame is segued into with “jedoch” [notwithstanding], not a word in everyday use even among adults. Donald says/thinks: “Keuch! Hätte ich nur meinen vorlauten Schnabel gehalten!“. Vorlaut [cheeky] is another word, usually applied only by adults to children, that children themselves would not use – unless they had learned it from an LTB.
WSJ article: Donald Duck remains the most popular children’s comic in Germany to this day
I was surprised to learn just now from the WiPe article on the Egmont EHAPA Verlag that most of their income is not from LTBs, although LTBs are a well-known series. Somebody told me recently that Microsoft makes most of its money not from the sale of Windows OSs, but from training courses for Word, Powerpoint etc.
I’m delighted to think that there is at least one language in which those tiresome Disney characters are funny.
“Funny” in a superior sort of way. Young minds are netted as they drift in an edifying undertow of wellspoken self-irony. This is Germany, after all.
Erika Fuchs sounds wonderful. Apparently she wrote her Ph.D. on the rococo plasterwork of J. M. Feuchtmayer, so you can see that she might have liked Donald Duck.
Was Feuchtmayer excommunicated ? His intent is apparently to distract the congregation from the message of the mass. On the other hand, perhaps he should be beatified (the queues move faster these days) for encouraging people to bow their heads in humility, eyes averted from all that frippery.
You better be careful with that Auxentius. He played on the wrong side in the filioque test match.
« Reading “Para leer al Pato Donald” in Japanese got me so confused I accidentally denounced a Dutchman. » —Matt of no-sword on twitter
His intent is apparently to distract the congregation from the message of the mass.
I never realized how important interior decoration could be until I attended a Quaker wedding held in a whitewashed room bare of any distracting imagery or ornamentation. To sit through what seemed like hours of dead silence while people waited for the spirit to move them to speak, with absolutely nothing to look at in the interim, was an introduction to entire new subbasements of boredom I had never dreamed existed. (No offense to Quakers; you have a wonderful religion whose pacifism I deeply admire, but I’m afraid your ceremonies can be tedious to those not raised on them.)
“Somebody told me recently that Microsoft makes most of its money not from the sale of Windows OSs, but from training courses for Word, Powerpoint etc.”
I think they misheard that. Revenue from selling the Microsoft Office products themselves may be larger than the revenue they earn from selling Windows, but the training revenue is an afterthought.
Revenue from selling the Microsoft Office products themselves may be larger than the revenue they earn from selling Windows, but the training revenue is an afterthought.
Now that sounds more plausible. I couldn’t really believe there were that many people paying to learn how to use Word.
It’s strange that nowadays people in the West are generally expected to want to do everything themselves – under the guidance of fee-charging consultants, of course. Division of labor has been shoved aside in favor of jack-of-all-trades personality development. The global village is a summer camp where people learn to create their own Powerpoint presentations and bake their own bread.
Note from her wiki page:
You have a point, Hat, but the opposite is just as bad: an elder opens up at 5 minutes after the hour and talks, and talks, and talks. And talks. And talks. And TALKS. This often happens at 15th Street Meeting, or used to when I used to attend decades ago. Perhaps they’ve changed. Change takes a long time among Friends, because they act by consensus: the Orthodox/Hicksite split (both terms are derogatory) lasted from 1827 to 1955.
Jeremy O.: She also used verbs shortened to their stem not only to imitate sounds (onomatopoeia), such as schluck, stöhn, knarr (gulp, groan, creak) but also to represent soundless events: grübel, staun (ponder, goggle).
Did you take that from an archived version of the website ? I just now found slightly different lists there: schluck, stöhn, knarr, klimper [gulp, groan, creak, jingle (money)] and grübel, zitter [ponder, tremble/shiver]. The word keuch in my example above stands for “pant/wheeze”.
klimper also has another meaning: “messin’ round on the piano/guitar”. A derogatory word for piano is Klimperkasten (the derogatory intention actually is directed towards piano players, not the piano – or only insofar as it enables people to play annoying music badly). The only English word I can think of here is “tinkle”, but unfortunately that misses the “play badly” connotation. Like klimper, it would be unambiguous only when accompanied by a (comic) picture showing (say) Scrooge jingling his coins, or somebody playing a piano/guitar.
Can anyone think of something better than “tinkle” or “jangle” for bad piano/guitar playing ? Letting my imagination fly, I see Joan Baez 50 years ago being contrafactually described as a “strumpet”.
Grumbly Stu: “Noodling” is a term frequently used for aimless playing in general. Aimless guitarists are a separate case, since they usually don’t know how to play melodies at all. So they fall into the categories of “strumming” or “thrashing” depending on the amount of energy thrown into the performance and the amount of squishing of facial features.
A separate class is “playing Embryonic Journey“.
Hooray, the first post in a week that I could understand! Won’t you please put up a link where we can see more of German Donald?
Oh, come now, surely you could understand “Uh-oh.” Anyway, I’ll let the Germanophones provide the ducklinks.
A separate class is “playing Embryonic Journey”.
Heh. (Jorma noodles, but man can he noodle…)
I see now that the English version of the WiPe page for Fuchs contains lists of “erikatives” slightly shorter than those of the German version. I have topped up the English-version lists.
Fuchs sounds like an exellent translator, but the idea that Donald Duck’s popularity is due to her seems very unlikely, as well as insulting to Carl Barks, a major figue in comics history. Barks did most Donald Duck comics for two decades, and his stories have been appreciated in most countries where they’ve been available.
Fantagraphics announced earlier this year they’ll publish the complete duck comics of Barks in 30 volumes.
http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2011/01/exclusive-fantagraphics-to-publish-the-complete-carl-barks/
I might – I don’t know – have mixed feelings towards Erika Fuchs if I were German, she’s apparently fairly unfaithful to the originals.
“Noodling” is a term frequently used for aimless playing in general
For the piano, “banging” now comes to mind. Or (tentatively) “bangling”.
I found a political sense of “piano playing” in the Ukrainian parliament:
I don’t quite see why this practice is called “piano playing”. It gives a new connotation to “card-carrying” in the sense of official membership in a party. Maybe one is supposed to associate the practice with player pianos. “Time-stamping” would be a more appropriate image.
David Weman: the idea that Donald Duck’s popularity is due to her seems very unlikely, as well as insulting to Carl Barks, a major figue in comics history.
“Insulting” is irrelevant, Barks is dead and besides that was another country. Only if you can read German are you in a position to judge the value-adding effect she had on Duck comics and their popularity in Germany. As the English WiPe article on Erika Fuchs says:
The original dialogs are plodding in comparison with her versions. Of course one has to take into account that “hidden quotes and literary allusions” would be lost on many American kids. Mad magazine catered to the more cultivated.
This is not about “being faithful”, but being funny and instructive while raking in the money.
As it says at my Egmont EHAPA Verlag link above, the publishers in 1948 acquired the rights to D*sney comics for several European countries. As a result, Disney wasn’t hurting, it was earning. Barks got his share, and was insulted all the way to the bank.
Sadly, Barks never got any royalties, and never got any recognition or credit until well after his retirement.
Wie weh! I don’t speak German (sigh), so going to the German websites here doesn’t help me. ;(
If there’s a link where I can see some pages of German Donald, would someone please put it up here?
Danke!
Sadly, Barks never got any royalties, and never got any recognition or credit until well after his retirement.
Then he was insulted by Walt Disney, not Erika Fuchs.
@Shelley: I linked one above: here it is again. Some more:
Jpeg:
Things are looking up
Slide shows on youtube:
You are Entenhausen (ends with a profile foto of Fuchs)
Donald
Daisy
Is Grumbly calling Mr. Barks a wench? I mean, nice allusion and all, but . . .
Thankfully I took legal advice before hopefully venturing on that sally.
Testing if I still get the error message.
Testing if I still get the error message.
Feine Sache, David meldet sich zurück. Jetzt bekomme ich ein bißchen Gegenwind !
That’s not how I’d put it. Let me start at the beginning.
*yawns from the audience*
The idea to crank up the erudition level was the publishers’. Fuchs adhered to it with frankly too much zeal, often delivering very free translations indeed.
For instance, Scrooge McDuck regularly uses terms like moolah. Dagobert Duck would never stoop to that level. Only criminals use comparable terms… OK, maybe Donald does, but I’m not sure, and he doesn’t hold money in the proper esteem anyway.
You read that right, BTW. There are no more McDucks. Fortunately this hardly ever matters, because Disney figures reproduce by nepotism…
Barks had the usual American lack of scruples about given names, using rare ones or hapax legomena for Scrooge McDuck, Daisy Duck, Gladstone Gander and Gyro Gearloose. Fuchs was inconsistent about this, while ruthlessly generalizing the principle of alliteration: Daisy Duck is left unchanged (like Donald Duck /ˌdoːnaldˈːak/), Dagobert is a name not used by anybody ever (I am not exaggerating) since two kings of the Franks in the seventh century, Gyro Gearloose turns into Daniel Düsentrieb with a surname that alludes to jet propulsion and a rather unfitting first name, and the poor lucky Mr. Gander… oh well… he turns into Gustav Gans. Not only is there a perfectly cromulent word Ganter, but there already is a literal “Gustav Gans” in the duck universe: Grandma McDuck’s farmhand Gus Goose. I suppose Fuchs first encountered Gus Goose long after the first Gustav Gans had been published. So what did she make of him? Franz Gans. Not only is he not related to Gladstone Gander, Fuchs even departed from the principle of alliteration, and that in a case where the alliteration is there in the original!
Grandma McDuck, Oma Duck, has her first name mentioned so seldom that Fuchs occasionally forgot it, using both Annette and Dorette.
The kids… *facepalm*
Original: Huey, Dewey and Louie. German: Tick, Trick und Track. These are nonsense words (well, Trick happens to have been imported from English, but this may well have occurred after Fuchs started publishing). Why make up jibberish that doesn’t even alliterate with Duck?
To Barks, the Ducks are ducks. Literal ducks. Scrooge is the richest duck in the world, and unfriendly authority figures (but I repeat myself) regularly address the Ducks as “duck”, compare “earthling”. In German, this is completely lost. They are all explicitly humans, Scrooge is the richest man in the world, and so on.
(OK, this last part does have one good side: die Ente ist Mensch geworden – the duck has become Man…)
Fuchs also took all the boldface out – Barks put about a word per bubble in boldface for emphasis, German Disney comics (even after Fuchs) never do that at all, even though other comics do in German. (In fact, Mortadelo y Filemón lacks boldface in the original, but the earlier-translated German issues are full of boldface in all-caps.)
While she was at it, Fuchs tried to take the America out of the duck universe. Duckburgh is a fucking suburb of fucking Hollywood, a fact that is made quite explicit in some of the oldest comics; Entenhausen isn’t even on a specific continent, its currency is 1 Taler = 100 Kreuzer, and Dagobert Duck has a great big T on his money bin.
Actually, in the earliest translations, Fuchs tried to move it to Germany. After a story which referred to the fucking Niagara falls as the comparatively laughable Rhine falls at Schaffhausen, this was deemed too embarrassing after all… Mark & Pfennig were used longer.
BTW, the English language distinguishes Duckburgh from Mouseville, doesn’t it? In German, both are Entenhausen. Mickey Mouse stories (not translated by Fuchs) regularly say so explicitly. In contrast, I’ve read a French story where Mickey and Donald need to travel to meet each other.
Of course, Donald is a big hypocrite, an ignorant, lazy, choleric petit-bourgeois who occasionally pretends to himself to be a grand-bourgeois. That’s part of the hilarity of it all. When he engages in hero worship, that’s meant to be something to laugh at, not something to imitate. This actually makes it strange that Fuchs put such things in Donald’s mouth with such regularity.
He wasn’t allowed to. Till very, very recently, Walt Disney Co. tried to maintain the fiction that Walt Himself was doing it all alone.
(Even decades after his well-documented death.)
Barks wasn’t forwarded any of the feedback either, except two critical letters. For decades, he drew and wrote into a black hole.
I’ll put it a little harsher than Grumbly Stu. In German-speaking places, adults are culturally not allowed to read comics. Comics are For Children™ – no matter how many political allusions there are in them.
Huh. Interesting. Never heard of that.
I suppose that’s because I’m not a child of the 1950s. It’s done in all comics, it’s not specific to Donald Duck ones or Disney ones.
HOW ARE YOU GENTLEMEN !!
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US.
YOU HAVE NO CHANCE TO SURVIVE MAKE YOUR TIME.
HA HA HA HA . . . .
The Duckipedia has a good article on the (many) Duck artists that carried on the Barksian traditions in (mostly) Yoorp.
The Dutch pockets are identical to the Cherman ones, apart from the text, as are the Danish and Zwedish ones. (I have some duplicates in assorted langwidges.) Sadly I am unresponsive to literary illusions in all of these languages – Duck comics were among my first exercises in reading most of them.
In the Netherlands, the Pockets are what children graduate too after they outgrow the Donald Duck weekly comic, which features short stories involving assorted characters from the Disney universe. (Our household rule is that you are always allowed to skip stories of the wretched Mouse.)
The LTBs have often featured parodies of literature, world-famous classics as well as obscure 17th-century plays from Italy. (…Italy because most stories are imported from Italy; most of the rest is from Denmark.) That’s how I read War & Peace… and the Divine Duck Comedy (an entire book of its own)… and Cyrano de Donaldac…
========================
For the Revier thread, which is closed:
Sanskrit has a technical term for each and every one of these types of noun compounds. There are something like ten, IIRC.
In English, noun compounds (…such as… …noun_compound) are masked by the orthography which usually keeps their components separate, but they can get very long, often longer than they normally become in German. They are hardly less common than in German.
Fabulously learnèd excursion, David ! Suspiciously so, since comics are For Children™ …
Dagobert is a name not used by anybody ever (I am not exaggerating) since two kings of the Franks in the seventh century
Your’re making it too easy for me. There’s Dagobert Mikusch, German translator of The Jungle Book and The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (so 20th C), Dagobert Lindlau, Publizist, Autor, Essayist, Medienjournalist … (1930 – ). But the name is very rare. I have gathered the impression over the years that people with Olde Teutonicke names such as Dagobert, Heidegard etc come from families associated with anthroposophy, Stefan George, soul-searching vegetarianism and sputtering torches in tunnels leading to underground libraries.
In English, noun compounds (…such as… …noun_compound) are masked by the orthography which usually keeps their components separate, but they can get very long, often longer than they normally become in German. They are hardly less common than in German.
Good point. But I did say only that German abounds in them, not “particularly abounds”. (*Schweißperlwisch*)
I used to work with a Dagobert (though her real name was Dagmar).
I mat a Polish refugee named Dagobert in 1956. He was about 12 then and is probably still alive.
There seem to be several famous Dagoberts, including a racehorse and one of Napoleon’s generals.
—
The latest spammer may have been attracted by Grumbly’s beads of sweat.
famous Dagoberts, I meant to say.
According to the Wikipedia notes, the Napoleonic general was one of a long line of Dagoberts:
Notes et histoire de la Famille Dagobert by Mme Destors, née Hayaux du Tilly (1962) non édité
Le Roi Dagobert. Histoire d’une famille et d’une chanson 1990, prix d’histoire de la société Académique de Nantes et de Loire-Atlantique
I don’t know what the chanson is all about.
I don’t know what the chanson is all about.
It’s a childish song “created in the epoch of the French Revolution, and was intended to ridicule royalty”. The king in question was one of the 7th C Frankish kings that David mentioned.
I couldn’t find a translation. In this animated cartoon with music you can figure out what’s going on.
Thanks, that’s at exactly my level of French comprehension.
David: Sanskrit has a technical term for each and every one of these types of noun compounds. There are something like ten, IIRC.
The WiPe has an article on Sanskrit compounds. It lists six major types. The number of leaves on the type tree is 9.
1) I’m only 28 years old.
2) By what measure am I grown up?
3) I’m too autistic to care about such artificial, pointless conventions. 🙂
You might try oughtism for a change. It makes conventions seem much more appealing.
Clearly, I have fallen among a punning clan.
Grumbly:
Doch an den flusse im schilfpalaste
Trieb uns der wollust erhabenster schwall:
In einem sange den keiner erfaßte
Waren wir heischer und herrscher vom All.
Süß und befeuernd wie Attikas choros
Über die hügel und inseln klang:
CO BESOSO PASOJE PTOROS
CO ES ON HAMA PASOJE BOAÑ
Gosh, it appears that not everything by George is cringe-making, at least when it’s excerpted. But what is this “an den flusse” ? It’s given that way here too.
dem.
Thanks, MMcM. That’s what the dative “-e” would require (discounting a multiple an/in die flüsse misprint). But I had wondered whether in dem Flusse was meant, with trieb uns being “carried us (down the river)”. I see now that they are
1) screwing (trieb uns die wollust)
2) in the reed palace (im schilfpalast)
3) on the riverside (am fluss)
That and the surrounding text at your link shows why I called George cringe-making. I would describe his work as unremittingly melodramatic preciosity. But hey, it’s a free country.
It may be that I’m the only person to use this site who made the connection between Ms Fuchs, Mr Duck and the popular English pub name. Or maybe to everyone else it was just too obvious to mention. LH – “Quaker … ceremonies can be tedious to those not raised on them” – read a few biographies of people born into Quaker families, and you’ll find the ceremonies could be pretty tedious to those who WERE raised on them. I found my own Quaker wedding highly moving, I have to say, even though I wasn’t brought up a Quaker. (Alas, the marriage ended in a very non-Quaker divorce, but the divorce did enable me to have the next wedding in that Wren marvel, St Bride’s, Fleet Street.
Zytho: There are only six(6) actual “Fox and Duck” pubs on that list?
A Russian court has ruled that “Der Fuehrer’s Face” is not, after all, Nazi propaganda:
The Lowering the Bar post linked above has links to the court site and the press release, but not the decision itself: perhaps one of our russophones can find it.