Elke Brems

Road Block in the Streets of Brussels. Hergé in Translation

Abstract This paper examines the translations of Hergé’s comic strip Quick & Flupke during the period 1940–1990. When Quick & Flupke was first published in a francophone Belgian newspaper in the 1930s, it portrayed the complex linguistic character of Brussels, where the adventures of the street boys are set. Hergé’s characters employed the type of linguistic code-switching between French and Dutch that was typical for the inhabitants of Brussels at the time. The original comic strip also contained cultural references to Brussels and Belgium. A comparative analysis of the first French version and the first Dutch translations of the comic, which appeared in Flemish newspapers in the 1940s, with the most recent Dutch and French translations from the 1990s reveals important changes in both the intralingual and interlingual translations. In particular, the analysis reveals how economic and cultural-political factors have led to the increased standardization of textual (and some pictorial) aspects of the comic strip which has made it less Belgian and more international. The paper demonstrates how different translations of the comic strip operate at the micro level as an indicator of the changes that have taken place in the linguistic and cultural identities of Belgians and Brusselers.

Very Feminine, Yet Unmercifully Intelligent. A Portrait of the Dutch Critic and Translator Elisabeth de Roos (1903-1981)

The Dutch author and translator Elisabeth de Roos has largely been ignored by literary historians. Nevertheless, she played a major role in the literary scene in the Netherlands between 1925 and 1955. She was a very productive and respected essayist, critic, journalist and translator, but in the rearview mirror of literary history her husband Eddy du Perron outshined her. The contemporary gender discourse, in which de Roos herself took part, created a blind spot for the contribution to innovation and poetical conceptualisation of female authors. The infamous journal Forum to which both she and her husband contributed was a mouthpiece for a masculine discourse: being a fellow was the highest goal. After their marriage her husband pursued his writing career, whereas de Roos took care of the household and was the family breadwinner by writing journalistic pieces instead of literary work. After her husband’s death at the start of the Second World War, de Roos started to work as a translator, a profession in which she soon gained a high degree of expertise and professionalism. She wrote lengthy and substantial essays as prefaces to her translations, revealing her thoughtful literary ideas that preferred intellect and lucidity to melodrama and sentimentality and partis pris to half-heartedness. An analysis of her translation of Wuthering Heights suggests she didn’t smoothen the source text to please the target audience, in accordance with her poetics.