Tintin turns 94 today. As a kid, my first introduction to Tintin was in Bengali through the magazine 'Anandamela'. In 1975, Nirendranath Chakraborty obtained permission to publish the comic strip in Bengali.
#Tintin 🧵
#Tintin 🧵
Since then no Bengalis ever really lost touch with this Belgian journalist. In fact, the first Indian translation of Tintin was in Bengali. Herge himself was quite surprised by the popularity of Tintin in Bengal.
After receiving quite a few letters from Calcutta, he often wondered what can there be common between a Calcutta boy and Tintin? Well, the credit entirely goes to the translator who made Tintin unique in Bengali.
Nirendranath Chakraborty while translating Tintin added his poetic essence as he renamed Snowy Kuttush and Captain Haddock’s “Jotto sob gneri-gugli-r jhnaak (billions of blue blistering barnacles)”.
As a kid, I was always fond of Tintin in Bangla. Another major reason was we could buy them much cheaper from Golpark book stalls as the English translations were quite expensive. To me, Tintin will be more of a Bengali boy than anything else, who never gets old.
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