Donald Duck in Berlin

[Leo Schulte]

Greetings!

The Weekend "Wall Street Journal" for May 24/25th has a nice article about the popularity of Donald Duck comic books (and Uncle Scrooge) in Germany:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203771904574181722075062290.html

One complaint: Carl Barks is hardly mentioned at all as the originator of the Duckburg Universe, and Don Rosa is completely invisible.  To be fair, the purpose of the article is to show how the erudite translations of Erika Fuchs turned the Barks comics into minor classics in Germany.

An excerpt:

"Donald Duck’s popularity was helped along by Erika Fuchs, a free spirit in owlish glasses who was tasked with translating the stories. A Ph.D. in art history, Dr. Fuchs had never laid eyes on a comic book before the day an editor handed her a Donald Duck story, but no matter. She had a knack for breathing life into the German version of Carl Barks’s duck. Her talent was so great she continued to fill speech bubbles for the denizens of Duckburg (which she renamed Entenhausen, based on the German word for “duck”) until shortly before her death in 2005 at the age of 98...

Dr. Fuchs’s Donald was no ordinary comic creation. He was a bird of arts and letters, and many Germans credit him with having initiated them into the language of the literary classics. The German comics are peppered with fancy quotations. In one story Donald’s nephews steal famous lines from Friedrich Schiller’s play “William Tell”; Donald garbles a classic Schiller poem, “The Bell,” in another. Other lines are straight out of Goethe, Hölderlin and even Wagner (whose words are put in the mouth of a singing cat). The great books later sounded like old friends when readers encountered them at school. As the German Donald points out, “Reading is educational! We learn so much from the works of our poets and thinkers.”

Dr. Fuchs raised the diction level of Donald and his wealthy Uncle Scrooge (alias Dagobert Duck), who in German tend to speak in lofty tones using complex grammatical structures with a faintly archaic air, while Huey, Louie and Dewey (now called Tick, Trick and Track), sound slangier and much more youthful."

Best Wishes to all!

Leo Schulte



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