Publisher Zhao Lei changed his old email address to “Yonghanger”, the title “The Eternal” would have for Chinese readers. / Photo: courtesy Telam
65 years after the publication of the The eternal, the emblematic work of Héctor Oesterheld and Francisco Solano López -published for the first time in 1957- has been translated into Mandarin by an independent label from Shanghai, in an unprecedented edition that will go on sale from October. “We were interested in the validity of his concept of a collective hero and felt it was a pity that there was no Chinese version of such an important work,” revealed the editor of the edition, Zhao Lei.
The story of The eternal inside China started two years ago when a group of independent publishers launched the Lucidabooks company, with the aim of spreading small pearls of literature unknown to the Asian giant.
In fact, from an essay on comics written by Fan Ye, a well-known translator of books in Spanish, they discovered the existence of a work that was presented as the greatest science fiction adventure in the southern hemisphere and the best comic in the history of Argentina.
“As I gained a deeper understanding of the political and social environment in Argentina at that time, I was even more impressed by the play’s implied metaphor and its praise of the spirit of justice,” says Zhao Lei.
The official birth date of the project was October 8, 2020, when editor Zhao Lei changed his old email address to “Yonghanger”, a title it would have. The eternal for Chinese readers.
“The editing work was huge because we had to design, one by one, all the images and their texts. With nearly 130,000 charactersthe first composition took months and each subsequent adjustment was very cumbersome, ”acknowledged Zhao.
What interested them most was the idea of showing themselves an antagonistic version of the American superhero, with ordinary people willing to fight from their daily places to save the world. Or, in other words, they fell in love with the concept that Oesterheld sums up well in the prologue of the work: “The true hero of ´El Eternauta´ is a collective hero, a human group … never the individual hero”.
“When I first read this comic,” Zhao recalled, “I wasn’t just fascinated its compelling storyline, but also the world created by the authors. And when I gained a deeper understanding of the political and social environment in Argentina at that time, I was even more struck by the work’s implied metaphor and its praise of the spirit of justice. “
Another aspect claimed by the Chinese publisher, in fact, was “the courage and indomitable struggle of a generation in the face of adversity”, in clear reference to the persecution suffered by Oesterheld and Solano López during the Argentine civic-military dictatorship.
In this regard, Zhao acknowledged that he was struck by the paragraph in which the protagonist Juan Salvo talks about the possible disappearance of the population, “as if Oesterheld had predicted his own fate” at the hands of a task force, exactly 45 years ago.
“The reason it transcends the limits of a cartoon and becomes a classic is because it conveys the spiritual power of its creator and the collective memory of the entire Argentine nation. And this power is indestructible, ”concluded Zhao.
The official launch of El Eternauta in China is scheduled for October, with an initial circulation of 6,000 copies.
The translation was done by Xuan Le, a recognized specialist in Hispanic literature who has previously worked on works byand Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Gabriel García Márquez and Juan José Arreola, among others. The whole process had the support of the South Program of the Argentine Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Source Telam
Fernando Capotondo
Source: Clarin
