Quid? Quid?

A great shout of rejoicing ought to be going up throughout the land, because for the first time in a generation – perhaps the first time ever – the Asterix books are being re-printed in America. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get Asterix books in the States? Most of my collection comes from England or Canada, procured through E-bay or Amazon. Now Orion Paperbacks is rising to the occasion and printing the whole series, the English translation, at a very affordable price. This is the original series all right, with a few minor typographical changes, the most lamentable being the lack of diversity in the type (in the original English manuscripts, the Goths speak in Gothic script, the Norwegians speak in Norse script, and so on. Obliterating this twist removes a small but funny joke from the series).

Asterix can readily be described as high-class comic books, highbrow humour in a classic form. Each time I read through one of these books I discover something fresh to laugh at and am amazed anew at the profundity and wit, not only of the authors, but of the translators, who managed to pull off the most brilliant puns and classical allusions from the original Italian.

What I would really like to see, someday, is a complete annotated and footnoted Asterix collection, to explain to me things like the following:

In 'Asterix the Legionary' the pirates' ship is sunk by Asterix and Obelix (again). The image of the pirates on a raft in mid-ocean is derived from a 19th Century French Romantic painting, now in the Louvre, 'The Raft of the Medusa' by Géricault. In the French version the pirate captain says to the reader 'Je suis médusé' ('I'm stunned'). In English this is rendered equally cleverly as 'We've been framed, by Jericho.'

Even if these details escape one at first (or seventh) reading, surely the most unclassified mind can appreciate such lines as ‘This is a bitter pilum to take, by Jupiter’ (from a legionary about to get speared) or laugh at an Egyptian named Ptennisnet. If you haven’t yet had the pleasure of perusing an Asterix book, I offer you the advice of Scrooge re: the prize turkey: ‘Go and buy it, my boy.’