Jacovitti's "Pa and Ma"

Marriage, Jacovitti Style

Taking my dictionary into my hands, I've made a stab at translating a couple of later Jacovitti strips. Pa e Ma is a concept familiar to American newspaper strips: a catalog of the miseries of married life. I must say Jacovitti takes misery to a level seldom achieved in American comics.

The Grattasassi family comprises Mr. Grattasassi, a henpecked accountant whose idea of heaven is sitting working crosswords; his ball-busting wife Giangiovanna, whose verbal abuse of her husband makes the Lockhorns seem an ideal couple; his daughter Georgina, a fiery student radical; his son Atilla, a super-genius; the baby Cicciantonio, who nurses on salames; Mr. G.'s horny old grandfather; their TV-obsessed maid Audia, and the family dog Eccellenza.

The family is bizarre to the extreme, but the art and many of the jokes are pretty funny!

Amateur translator's note: I was defeated by Mr. G.'s expletives. Some examples are "Mondo vigliacco!" "Mondo caimano!" etc. They really don't make much sense in Italian either. "Mondo" means "World," so the phrases translate as "Coward(ly) world!" "Crocodile world!" and so on. After trying many ways to approximate them in English I gave up and left them as they were.

Chip (Cip) by Benito Jacovitti

A Cip off the Old Block
I've spent a while working on this, so I hope it will please some readers.

Benito Jacovitti (1923-1997), though a legend in Italy, doesn't seem to have caught on in other countries. Certainly few American fans have heard of this crazy cartoonist, whose unique style and manic energy filled thousands of pages from 1940 on. Perhaps Jacovitti's use of puns and invented words contributed to this situation. At any rate, Jacovitti (usually signing himself  "JAC") created lots of very funny, very weird, comics.

Jacovitti by Joe Zatt, from Wikipedia

Jacovitti's first major gig was for the Catholic kids' weekly Il Vittorioso (The Victorious). He created many characters for them, including Pippo, the leader of a kid gang, and Cip l'arcipoliziotto, a cross between Sherlock Holmes and hardboiled private eye. What follows is Cip contro Zagar (Cip vs. Zagar), in which the detective grapples with his nemesis, super-criminal Zagar. In terms of the artist's career it's an early piece (1945-1946), before Jac had abandoned himself to cramming each panel with word play and joky detail. A beneficial side effect for the amateur linguist is that the dialogue is therefore easier to translate.

As mentioned above the Cip character (the name is pronounced "Cheep") began as a Sherlock Holmes parody. Cip's pipe is a token of that heritage. But Jacovitti's rough-and-tumble spirit was more suited to in-your-face characters, and the detective moved quickly into the hardboiled arena. He's quite a character: self-important, arrogant, bombastic, violent, often very stupid and never owning up to the fact that he's largely incompetent. He pretends to be cool and brave, but as we see here, Zagar scares the pants off him.

Cip and Zagar hint at the origins of Jacovitti's cartooning style. Cip himself is strongly influenced by Segar's Castor Oyl, and Zagar is Mickey Mouse's enemy The Phantom Blot. But Jacovitti's personality was so strong that he soon left influences behind. In this story his unmistakable character design is almost fully-matured. So is his obsession with sausages.

Source: Il Faro del Glifo  blog

As an amateur translator I feel the need to justify a few things. First the names. I changed Cip to Chip because it's close to the original and easier to read in English. Other character names were changed for the same reason. Chip's sidekick was originally named Gallina, or "hen." With a nod to Douglas Adams I renamed him Roosta  because it was still a chicken name and it sounded better than "Hen." I gave the dog Kilometro ("Kilometer") his original name because, again, it had a nicer sound. Jacovitti tended to give secondary characters rhyming names: Raimondo il Vagobondo (Raymond the Tramp), Mario il Veterinario (Mario the Veterinarian). I tried to give them English names that followed the same pattern. One exception was Easterly, the castle administrator. He started out "Pasquarello." Early on Jacovitti played on the first part of his name (Pascua=Easter) by having Chip call him "Nata-something" (Natale=Christmas). I called him Easterly to access some of those puns. Most troubling was Chip's label l'arcipoliziotto  ("the arch-policeman.") It just doesn't make sense in English, where "arch" has come to imply evil (arch-enemy, arch-criminal). I finally gritted my teeth and called him "the super cop." While unlovely, it carries the original meaning.

But enough of this stalling. I hope you find as many laughs in this as I did, from the first page to its preposterous conclusion. It's show time!

 

 

 This story was scanned from the 1974 reprint by Camillo Conti.

Corriere dei Piccoli

A window onto a past window onto the past
This weekend I was excited to receive a gift of 38 tearsheets from Corriere dei Piccoli, the legendary children's supplement to the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. A friend had owned them forever, forgetting just where they came from; having no idea what to do with them, he gave them to me! From hints in the articles I gather they were originally published in late 1933 and perhaps early 1934.

The pages were from two series of educational color pages illustrated by an artist whose signature I can't make out. The first series, "Come vestivano" ("How They Dressed"), pictured costumes from different regions and historical periods. Most of the subjects were Italian, though topics included things like "Costumes of the French Revolution" and "Costumes of Characters in The Three Musketeers." The example below presents Italian dress in the late 1300s. The text characterizes the "trecento" as having planted the seeds of modern united Italy. The drawings are rather nice and are given plenty of space.
The other series, closely related to the first, was "L'oriente favoloso" ("The Fabulous East"). Like the first series the pictures concentrated on costuming. The text presented general information about various Asian countries and their culture. This example discusses India, with an emphasis on how the caste system creates strife between classes and ethnic groups.The reverse sides of these pages provide an interesting glimpse into Italy of the 1930s. The pages are divided between a long article on some kid-related subject (this one is about "The World of Toys") and display ads. The ads are a mixed bag: many are directed at the kids themselves, but most seem to be aimed at their parents. In the sample below we find ads for a meat extract, a salt solution for soaking tired feet, a dentifrice (available as liquid, paste or powder), and a supplier of uniforms for the several Fascist youth organizations (flags and badges, too!).I have a particular fondness for Corriere dei Piccoli (roughly, The Children's Courier), because through it I was introduced to the world of European comics. In the late 1960s an Italian deli near my university stocked a handful of Italian magazines, among them CdP. Though I didn't know it, by that time CdP was in its final decline after running over half a century (the supplement began in 1908). It had long ago transformed from a newspaper supplement into a glossy weekly magazine of some 60 pages. Most of its comics were translations of Belgian Tintin features: Bruno Brazil, Bernard Prince, Michel Vaillant, etc. Being ignorant, I assumed at first these were Italian series. Only later did I discover the Belgian connection. 48-page adventures were serialized several pages per week. Occasionally a special issue would run a long story in its entirety; for example an adaptation of The Great Locomotive Chase by Argentinian cartoonist Arturo del Castillo.

Though a minority, original Italian material appeared, too. It was in CdP that I first encountered Aldo di Gennaro, Giorgio Trevisan, irrepressible Benito Jacovitti, and above all the incredible Dino Battaglia. Even Hugo Pratt popped up from time to time, though I didn't appreciate him until later when I discovered Corto Maltese.

During the time I was reading Corriere dei Piccoli signs of change appeared. The biggest change came in 1972 following a reader referendum. The venerable magazine's title was changed to Corriere dei Ragazzi. In 1908, piccoli, like its English equivalent children, was commonly applied to all pre-teens. But by the 1970s youths found the term demeaning. Ragazzi carried a connotation similar to kids in English. (Interestingly, children/kids went through a similar process in America about the same time.) Interior pages began appearing in black plus one color rather than full color. Going through a succession of editors, cost-cutting, and format changes, CdR finally limped to a conclusion in 1985. By that time I'd lost track of it.

Here's to dear old Corriere dei Piccoli, to which I owe a great debt...if only for introducing me to Battaglia and Jacovitti. As for also introducing me to I Puffi... well, we can't win 'em all.