Le Tour du monde d’Astérix: actes du colloque tenu à la Sorbonne les 30 et 31 octobre 2009 (review)

That the indomitable Gauls should have breached the threshold of the Sorbonne Nouvelle, both for the 2009 conference that led to this publication and also as an output of the university’s press, is in itself something of note. Although bande dessinée is now an accepted object of scholarly attention in anglophone academia, in France output is still predominantly journalistic and grand public. The celebrations of Astérix’s Fiftieth included, predictably, stage shows, Air Force fly-bys, and a plethora of special numbers, but the Université de Paris conference, under the auspices of Bertrand Richet, came as a pleasant surprise. The current volume is unashamedly the write-up of the conference and as such has all the associated advantages and disadvantages: diversity and eclecticism, but an overall methodology and coverage that are sometimes tirés par les cheveux. The given theme, that of the World Tour, is a catch-all, allowing contributions to explore the global reception of the series, but also different theoretical approaches, conversion to alternative media, and — a major preoccupation — the techniques, challenges, and specificities of translation. The twenty-six authors represent a broad cross-section of disciplines, countries, and career stages, but noticeably, with the exception of two professional translators, all have university affiliations, even if only a handful of those could claim bande dessinée as central to their day job. Unlike Caesar’s Gaul, the work is divided into four parts: (1) reception and diffusion, including sales development in Europe and America; (2) theoretical approaches and readings — the most diverse section — including musings on political significance by reference to de Gaulle, medieval social structures reflected in the Astérix set-up, a close reading of La Zizanie drawing on communicative norms, the use of Latin jokes in linguistic terms, and the (non-)role of women; (3) translations, including into English, Latin, Greek, and Japanese; and (4) adaptations, particularly for cinema and video games. The volume does have a certain amount of detail overlap (for instance, on examples of challenging translations, such as the ‘Radeau de la Méduse’ scene in Astérix légionnaire), and at times can get dangerously close to ‘explaining the jokes’ while not broaching the pivotal place of the series in the broader evolution of BD as a genre per se. But on the whole there is as much erudition as diversity. Le Tour du monde d’Astérix stands as an indication of what is possible, as at last even the Gauls have fallen prey to a collective work with footnotes.