Keskustelujen arkisto

DANIEL, about Barks' story "Horsing Around with History":

> The second illogical part is the one in which the ducks discover a
> message. It's a *cryptical* S.O.S. What??

This was a *normal* S.O.S. of course, thousands of years ago. The reason
that it looks cryptical to the Ducks is that noone today knows exactly what
the ancient language means (except the JW guide book...).

--Harry.

--Harry:
>
>Speaking of Wilmer Rivers: I hope our Norwegian members have not flooded away!
>(Every time there's a flood in the news, I think about Wilmer Rivers
>and Even Flood.. 8-)

Thanks for concern - in Trondheim we are still on our feet.
- that big flood was not me! It was the southeast
that was hit worst, for a while both railroad and roads were out
and that combined with the punks at SAS acting up cut Oslo
off from the north.

Now Norway is coming back to normal - except kindergarten strike,
the main railroad from us to Oslo is still out, the water is *starting* to
go down again - yesterday there was a HUGE threat of a bank strike -
the air pilots in SAS are at it again.

And the weather has been terrible.

>--Harry.
>

Even Flood
Reference Librarian "Come, and take choice of
Norwegian DIANE Center all my library, and so
Technical University Library of Norway beguile thy sorrow."
N 7034 Trondheim, Norway (Shakespeare)
Phone: +47 73 59 51 62, Fax +47 73 59 51 03
even.flood at ntub.unit.no

> On Tue, 13 Jun 1995, H.W. Fluks wrote:
> > DIE BESTEN COMICS AUS LISTIGE TASCHENBUECHER Band 2 (German pocket book)
> >
Uhm...aren't those Lustige Taschenbucher? Listige Taschenbucher would
be sly and devious pocketbooks (not impossible, I suppose...).

> > This German comic contains Italian reprints... "Der Liebe
> > zarte Bande" (don't know how to translate this).

I'd have to see the context, but at a guess it would be something like:
"The Dear Sweet Gang."

--Dwight (der Uebersetzer bin ich ja!) Decker

On Mon, 12 Jun 1995, Mattias Hallin wrote:
> Now, there has to my knowledge never been any mention by name of a brother of
> Daisy's; but she must have at least one sibling since she has nieces (April,
> May & June).

Correct me if I'm wrong, but at the first appearance of AMJ (the Flipism
story), Daisy is visiting her _sister_, implying that they are her
sister's daughters. Or is she visiting someone else in the English
original?

/F

HARRY:

> DANIEL, about Barks' story "Horsing Around with History":
>
> > The second illogical part is the one in which the ducks discover a
> > message. It's a *cryptical* S.O.S. What??
>
> This was a *normal* S.O.S. of course, thousands of years ago. The reason
> that it looks cryptical to the Ducks is that noone today knows exactly what
> the ancient language means (except the JW guide book...).

Oke, I admit, I didn't think of that. But even if that was a way to
send S.O.S.'s in the past, why should Barks include it in his story?
It's only a lot of irritating delay (and someone here once said that
the theory with those stars isn't right). Barks could have omitted
this all by using something more simple, making the story "flow"
better...

What do you think?

--- Daniel

FREDRIK:

> Correct me if I'm wrong, but at the first appearance of AMJ (the Flipism
> story), Daisy is visiting her _sister_, implying that they are her
> sister's daughters. Or is she visiting someone else in the English
> original?

Also in the original she's visiting her sister, who's living on Dizzy
Street _or_ Coma Way, no. 1.

About this "family business"... In Holland children sometimes also
call *friends of their parents* "uncle" or "aunt". Is that also a
"habit" in other countries? This could mean then, that Daisy doesn't
need to be family...

--- Daniel

- "Now, what did you start to say?"
(- "I've forgotten! Let's go to the movies!")

This turned up on an alternative comix mailing list that I am on. I
naturally thought the members of this list would be interested in reading it.
===============================================================================
Date: Wed, 14 Jun 1995 09:50:02 -0400
From: WITEK at suvax1.stetson.edu
Subject: Kunzle on "How to Read Donald Duck" (long)
To: comix at world.std.com
Message-Id: <01HROURQL8LY0000HC at suvax1.stetson.edu>
Sender: comix-approval at world.std.com
Reply-To: comix at world.std.com

-Poster: WITEK at suvax1.stetson.edu

During the discussion of Dorfman & Mattelart's Marxist polemic a while back
I mentioned that I had an unpublished essay in which David Kunzle, the
book's English translator, explained a bit about how the book made it into
English. While he doesn't address CH's original point (D&M were critiquing
_Chilean_ translations, often inaccurate and highly tendentious ones, of
Barks's work), the piece does give some context on the book. I hope some
of you will find it of interest.

************************************************************
David Kunzle

THE PARTS THAT GOT LEFT OUT OF THE DONALD DUCK BOOK, OR: HOW
KARL MARX PREVAILED OVER CARL BARKS

All of us, whether we know it or not, write art history from a
subjective political position. Occasionally, that position
obtrudes upon us with such force that we discover--perhaps to our
surprise--our scholarship as part of a larger and bitter
political struggle, which spins it out of our control. This is
the story of dilemmas and compromises faced in the course of a
collaboration between myself, moving gradually and hesitantly out
of bourgeois ideology towards Marxism, and true Marxist
revolutionaries with a totally different background. I am not, I
hope, engaging merely in an autobiographical self-indulgence, but
making a self-criticism designed to come to grips with my own
subjectivity.

Three years ago, on my way to Chile, I discovered a book just
published in that country called _How to Read Donald Duck_ (Para leer al
Pato Donald). In Santiago at the University I tracked down Ariel
Dorfman, one of the two authors, succeeded in reassuring him I
was not C.I.A., befriended him, proposed myself as translator,
and engaged to look for a U.S. publisher. I soon discovered that
publishers in this country were leery of the copyright problems
relating to Disney illustrations, but eventually there turned up
an eccentric, one-man, Paris-based publishing firm called
International General, who wanted to produce the English-language
edition.

I started work on the translation in intensely emotional
circumstances. I had just returned from two months in Cuba,
which made socialism seem so viable; yet there had just been the
fascist counter-revolution in Chile, which was destroying a whole
socialist culture, and I feared for the safety of the authors of
the book, as well as for that of so many other friends I had made
in Chile. I had just been fired for political reasons from the
University where I had taught for eight years; I had no paid
employment then, or in the offing; and I had lost my house in a
divorce settlement. Suffering from a great sense of
dispossession, personal and political, I set about possessing
myself of and being possessed by the Donald Duck book and its
ideas. I added the subtitle _Imperialist Ideology in the Disney
Comic_, and determined psychologically to repossess Chile as I had
known it and wrest it from U.S. fascist-imperialism.

I acquired, at express speed, a new language and whole ideology
based on a range of primordial Marxist concepts which, although
not entirely strange to me, I had never seen applied to the
comics, and never to any cultural material in so rigorous,
impassioned and imaginative a fashion. In making this work my
own, I saw my chance to become a true Marxist art historian, and
throw in my lot with the Third World.

I began to impose myself on the book. I made some minor
editorial changes, and questioned (in the margin of my
typescript) some of the authors' statements. I spit and
polished, and labored over Dorfman's weird metaphors (Dorfman is
also a noted novelist). Then I wrote a long Introduction, to
research which I used two primary sources, apart from a few
volumes of Disney comics I managed to find in an academic
library: Disney Productions archives, and Carl Barks. The
Burbank HQ of Disney Productions, where I twice visited the
comics editorial offices and the archives, chilled me to the
bone. Both the stiffly courteous guard of the comics editor, and
the puzzled, cautious helpfulness of the archivist, in whose
cramped office I searched sheaves of back issues for the U.S.
originals of stories used by the Chilean authors, made me feel
like an enemy spy, as indeed I was. Despite my pose as an
innocent, Disney-struck comics historian, the archivist and
editors might rumble, from my requests for Latin American
editions and my cautious questions about attitudes to copyright,
that I was working for the enemy, those Chilean commies they knew
about from a hostile, politically scandal-mongering AP dispatch
issued when the book first made news in Chile. Would I clumsily
blow my cover, and be thrown into a Disney or Duckburg jail, and
by Scrooge McDuck himself, like one of those naughty, thieving
Beagle Boys? Was I not also out to steal Private Property
(inside information and pictures I planned to add to those in the
Chilean edition) from the Rightful Owners thereof?

With Carl Barks, my experience was totally different. Barks,
single-handed creator of the best Disney comics for thirty years,
lives in retirement, modestly (of necessity) in a small house in
Santa Barbara. He was all old-world graciousness, flattered that
I should consider him worth visiting, open, freely lending me
unique copies from his own collection, telling me stories about
himself, his failures, Disney (the "machine" he half-escaped when
he turned from animation the comic books), his painstaking mode
of creation, and the tyrannical time-schedule and pay-rate
imposed upon him. I liked Barks, marvelled at the way he had
quietly repressed his anger at Disney, and became entirely
sympathetic to him. I incorporated into my Introduction a very
favorable estimate of his work, which really is aesthetically
superior to all other children's comics of its time, and reveals-
-to me at any rate--a very significant ambivalence towards the
Disney-capitalist ideology of which he is both victim and critic.
I established the artist as an example of economic exploitation
more typical of industrial than cultural workers, as we normally
understand the terms. The immensely industrious and
conscientious Barks, the slave to his drawing-board, enriching
the bosses with his labors, was exploited by ruthless Uncle Walt
Disney like Donald Duck is exploited by the tyrannical capitalist
miser Uncle Scrooge McDuck. I saw Barks projecting his self-
portrait, and that of the oppressed bourgeoisie, into poor
frantic neurotic Donald, and this in itself as an act of
unconscious rebellion, from which intelligent children might
learn to despise capitalist ethics, as Barks truly despises
Disney and the avarice of the system which seeks to grind him
down. I saw many of Barks' best stories not as justifications of
imperialist adventure, like the Chileans did, but as satires upon
it, in which the imperialist Duckburgers come off looking as
foolish as--and far meaner than--the innocent Third World
natives.

I sent off my Introduction, studded with statistics about comics
sales to the Third World and brilliant insights about Barks and
Scrooge, to the publisher in Paris. Soon the bad news filtered
back: first the publisher, then the one author, finally the
other, all objected to my "heroising" the enemy, to my apparent
effort to supplant Karl Marx with Carl Barks. Rendered obstinate
by praise from friends to whom I had shown my piece, I resisted
and fought back with every argument I could muster: the Barks
bit was the most original part, it provided the necessary bridge
from the "rigid" Third World Marxist viewpoint of the authors, to
a U.S. audience generally well-disposed towards Disney Comics,
especially Barks'; the book had to reach progressive bourgeois as
well as Marxists;; I was mediator, moderator (in two senses), I
was *me*. I wrote to the publisher long, rambling defenses, high-
sounding political manifestoes about the need to reveal
subjectivity of critical viewpoint, open up contradictions within
Left perspectives, admit ambivalence, plurality, etc. etc. I
stressed the importance of showing that a production process in
art was subject to the same kind of exploitation as any other
kind of production, and that it is possible to resist from within
that process itself. But it was three veteran Marxists
(including two whose steel had been hardened in the fire of
revolutionary struggle) against one wobbly neophyte Marxist, who
didn't mind if his bourgeois slip was showing.

Still obdurate, I found myself in Paris, and reunited with
Dorfman. Our friendship deepened. I witnessed, at first hand,
the terrible plight of the Chilean exiles. They were trying to
save lives; I was trying to save a few pages of my writing, and a
bit of my ego. I became part of the planning for a great
international Anti-Fascist cultural Conference, which made our
dispute over Barks seem very unimportant. Scholars, even
politically committed ones, usually work from the periphery; here
I had the feeling what it was like to be in the center. Dorfman
told me how he had seen on television, from his hiding-place in
Chile after the coup, the Donald Duck book burning on the
bonfires of socialist literature and posters made by fascist
soldiers. He had been stimulated, as well as worried, by my
Barks bit, and began to plan a novel in which Carl Barks would be
taken by the Duckburgers on a great adventure tour of the Third
World, and find himself confronted with real revolutionary
natives. He went over my typescript, and objected to many
changes introduced not by me, but the publisher and his co-
author, who held to a slightly different political position,
further Left. Proudly, I pointed to my faithful translation
underneath the pasted-over changes, hoping to garner enough good
will to gain a reprieve of the execution of Barks. In vain.

Painfully and reluctantly, I agreed to rewrite and cut back
drastically. Alas, on my return to the U.S., I discovered that
even this was considered insufficient. Finally I received a
long, carefully worded ultimatum from the authors, who signed
jointly. Tactfully but firmly I was told, as it were by a Party
hierarchy, to snap back into line, and accept a virtual
elimination of my "dissident" view. By this time, fortunately,
my sense of personal possession of the book had diminished, and I
was ready to accept a situation I cold not influence. I felt
chastened and even proud of a self-sacrifice which became,
retroactively, voluntary. I had sunk my ego in the higher
political purpose; maybe this was a true revolutionary self-
denial, true Marxist self-discipline. And when the book finally
appeared in print, I was grateful and gratified to see that a
short but pungent paragraph about Barks-the-great-exploited-
artist had survived, after all.

Cleansed of its bourgeois dross, politically purified, the book
has met the political fate we feared all along, without being
able really to anticipate: it was seized six months ago by U.S.
customs when the publisher tried to bring a shipment of 6,000
copies into New York. Despite our efforts, and those of the
Center for Constitutional Rights which is defending it, and
without Disney himself having to raise a (public) finger against
it, it remains blockaded. This on the highly dubious legal
technicality that we may have violated copyright by quoting
"Disney's" cartoons.

Disney's? Carl Barks', surely. In the course of my
conversations with Carl Barks, I asked him, in anticipation of
the copyright problem, whether he would refuse permission to
reproduce his work in a book critical of it and Disney, if he
rather than Disney were the copyright holder (as of course he
should be). "No," he replied, "not as long as it was serious
criticism." How to Read Donald Duck is very serious indeed--
--too serious, ironically, to accommodate a more favorable
view of the very man whose work it attacks, and who would free it
if he could.
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End of transcript.
___________________________________________________________________
Mark Mayerson Catapult Productions
Internet: mayerson at sidefx.com Toronto, Ontario, Canada
(416) 504-9876