For whom Anthea Bell toils

The Adventures of Tintin comes to the cinema next week, so I thought I'd write about the cartoon character people who don't like Tintin are said to prefer: Asterix. The series' co-creator, Albert Uderzo, announced last month he was retiring from the comic-book frame, 52 years after the plucky Gaulish hero's debut, alongside special chum Obelix, pet Dogmatix and chief Vitalstatistix.

Recently I had the chance to hear the books' English translator, Anthea Bell, talk as part of the Institut français' excellent, inaugural BD & Comics Passion festival. The translator of several works by Stefan Zweig and WG Sebald's Austerlitz, Bell was especially concerned with the problems of conveying the puns and cultural references that populate the Asterix books thanks to wordsmith René Goscinny, who died in 1977 - since when Uderzo worked alone.

Bell sees the books as a comic version of Odysseus - with its journey, quest and homecoming - and was keen to play up the historic accuracy of Uderzo's artwork, something Tintinologists tend to emphasise in the work of the boy reporter's creator, Hergé. One slip, however, was drawing the villagers' houses with chimneys, as they would have only had smoke holes.

There is controversy, too: in the same way Hergé is pilloried for his depiction (visually, dramatically and linguistically) of any number of non-European characters, the Asterix albums have a black pirate who speaks a sort of patois, something Bell would have no truck with in the English editions.

She pondered Asterix's lack of success in the USA. Accepting these were huge generalisations, Bell suggested that irony doesn't work on the other side of the Atlantic, and that Americans don't have enough history to be anachronistic about. The translator transposed the Gauls for William the Conquerer (our comedy equivalent being 1066 and All That), Byron for Victor Hugo, and Hamlet for Cyrano de Bergerac...

Bell claimed to have been accused of corrupting youth in her naming of the druid Getafix, though she justified this as druids 'get a fix' on the stars. Observing that people often say 'asterix' instead of asterisk, and the same for 'obelix' she said, 'I think I've done violence to to the English language.' As to the future of Asterix, following Uderzo's announcement: 'What is going to happen to the series now, one doesn't quite know.'

Tintin fans may be interested in a lecture, 'Tintin - Ace Reporter', by Michael Farr at the Wigmore Hall this Saturday afternoon, click here for details.

Austerlitz and the power of memory

When I was studying in Liège, southern Belgium, for a year, my younger sister came to visit and a friend suggested we drive up to Maastricht, Holland, for the day. What I didn't realise was that he intended to stop at the site of a former concentration camp on the way. I'm not sure if my sister has ever forgiven me, she probably still has nightmares about the trip.

WG Sebald's remarkable Austerlitz, which was published in 2001, begins with the German emigré to East Anglia adrift in Belgium. I've written before about English-language writers' view of the Low Country but Austerlitz features many landmarks that locals and visitors will recognise: Antwerp's magnificent Centraal Station, from which Sebald draws a compelling line to Belgium's dark colonial past, and the hideous, massive block that is the Palais de Justice overlooking Brussels, 'the largest accumulation of stone blocks anywhere in Europe'.

The opening narrative includes a visit to Fort Breendonk, a Nazi penal camp that has been preserved as a memorial. It is near where my grandfather lives. 'The passenger train I boarded… took a good half-hour to travel the short distance to Mechelen, where a bus runs from the station to the small town of Willebroek.' I've taken this same bus, but never to Fort Breendonk as I have little wish to repeat the experience of that afternoon in Holland.

The fort's shape and the formation of battlements is a theme of Austerlitz; as the narrator descends further, a darkness spreads over him: 'When I look back at the crab-like plan of Breendonk… the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed.' It is for this reason we preserve, and visit, these places: when imagination fails us.