Mafalda has been international 50 years, but he had a barrier to overcome: the English language

Published For the first time in 1964the sharpness of his observations, his tragicomic vision of the world and the microcosm of children’s characters that he developed made it a Comic icon in Spanish. However, until now I had not been able to make the leap to another of the most widespread languages ​​on the planet due to a mixture of fear that their stories were very local since it would lose grace with translation. But the universal dimension of the character has finally reached the bookstores.

‘Mafalda’ was a relatively brief series for what are usually the successful comics, only nine years of life: he was born in 1964 and died in 1973, when its quino creator (about which, by the way, it premieres An excellent documentary today in Filmin) He decided that he was going to end. Despite the innumerable reissues and new incarnations (next year we will have Netflix animated series Directed by the Oscarized Juan José Campanella), he has never been continued.

Mafalda was born, in fact, a year before his first publication, such as part of an advertising campaign for some appliances that never got to. But Quino liked his creation and recycled it for the pages of the weekly ‘First Flat’. In his stories he told the Simple experiences of a girl, Mafalda, from a series of friends of her age (Felipe, Manolito, Susanita and Miguelito) and the adults around him. As in ‘Peanuts‘,’Calvin and Hobbes‘Or many others, the children’s environment hid the most adult of the reflections. In the case of Mafalda, dyed of sharp social criticism.

The development of Mafalda was deeply marked by the tense political situation that Latin America lived in general and Argentina in particular after the coup d’etat of 1976. The unwavering Mafalda’s pacifist position made it an antiauthority symbol, and some of its vignettes (such as Mafalda pointing out the porra of a policeman and saying “This is the stick of abolloing ideologies”) pages, and became symbols of the protests, even appearing with the victims of the tragic San Patricio massacre.

30 languages ​​… less English

Mafalda’s international success, which became a reference for the political comic (to such an extent that Quino had to exile for the content of his vignettes) It led her to be translated into 30 languages. And until today ‘Mafalda’ had been read in Poland, Greece, Italy, France, Taiwan and, of course, in all Spanish -speaking countries. However, English was resisted.

50 years later, the ‘mafalda’ strips are going to be published in the United States in a comprehensive collection translated by Frank Wynne, which has faced some problems it details In this interview: Of course, there are word games (milk cream leads Mafalda to wonder about the controls of Birth), but also the political context of the moment. Peronism or the situation in Latin America must be explained to the new readers, although others (Mafalda continually spoke of the Vietnam Guera) possibly relative to them.

However, those responsible for this new edition say something we already knew: Mafalda’s concerns are eternal and transcend borders. The brutality of the powerful to submit to the humble, the inequalities, the imbalance between genders … all that is in ‘Mafalda’ and remains valuable today. Anglophones readers will discover it now, but it is never too late for Mafalda to give you some lessons, as a good sabihonda that always was.

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