578: Translating Mafalda

This week, Emily Hart speaks to multi-award-winning translator Frank Wynne about Latin America’s most beloved cartoon - Mafalda - and how he brought her to life in English. 

 

Dubbed ‘a hero of our time’ by Italian philosopher Umberto Eco and ‘Charlie Brown with Socialism’ by the New York Times, Mafalda is a precocious six-year-old girl living in 1960s Argentina - full of questions and observations about the world and the adults who surround her. She loves democracy; she hates soup and yoyos.

 

Though often lighthearted and sprinkled with slapstick and wordplay, her curiosity and questions are more than they initially appear: illustrator Joaquín Lavado, known as ‘Quino’ uses her seemingly innocent interrogations to skewer the hypocrisies and nonsense of contemporary politics. 

 

In the voice of a cartoon child, these questions and criticisms ran under the radar, but in 1970s Argentina, even her voice felt too critical: Quino left the country, which then suffered a coup and a subsequent military junta. He later said he would have been arrested had he continued to publish Mafalda; many of his friends and collaborators were.

 

Though the cartoon strip only ran for ten years, and Quino himself died in 2020, Mafalda has a huge and lasting legacy across the world - from Argentina where it began, to Chile where it was banned, and here in Colombia too: you can see statues and graffiti of her in Buenos Aires, and buy her merchandise down the banks of the River Seine. 

 

Frank will be telling us about this Latin American icon and the process of translating her into English – the first translation ever published, which came out in June of this year. He'll be tackling the tensions inherent in translating comedy – especially in cartoon strip form – as well talking about the stealthy satire and societal critique which Mafalda was able to enact: a crucial humanist and critical voice, disguised as a child.

 

We’ll also talk about how Mafalda’s relevance reaches way beyond her context and time, about modern censorship and satire amid deepening repression, and why now is the perfect time for Mafalda to reach English-speaking audiences - particularly (perhaps) in the United States.

 

Frank also tells us who Mafalda would have been if she was born today, and who she’d have been if she grew up… 

 

Plus the Colombia Briefing - also reported by Emily Hart.