Asterix

I was interested to read in the obituary page in Saturday's DT about the life of one of the two translators of the Asterix books into English, books which both sprogs consumed in large numbers in their day. One Anthea Bell, from a family of letters (although her father is said also to have been a farmer), who did French and German at school, English at Oxford and who went on to translate mainly from German. As well as raising two sons - and after that going on to breed Birman cats somewhere in or near Cambridge - although there is no-one at all listed for Cambridgeshire at reference 1. Perhaps she never paid her dues.

But Asterix must have been what paid the rent - and a very good job of it she did too - managing to render the tricky French into very decent English. It had not occurred to me that the translator might have been a women. But then, I had not picked up that there were two of them either.

My own stock of Asterix books seems to be down to two, snapped above. The first clearly identifies the two translators, while I cannot remember how I came by the second. Clearly of German origin, a place I have only visited on two or three occasions altogether, but with a pencil price inside which might be '£6,31-' or '€6,31-', with the comma and the hyphen both suggesting foreign.

PS: more memory tricks. I had conflated Asterix with Tintin and thought the author Goscinny a Belgian. While in fact he was French of Polish origin, with his family coming from somewhere in what is now the Ukraine.

Reference 1: http://www.birmancatclub.co.uk/.