“Yong-hanger”
The Chinese eternal user will be called “Yonghanger” and its launch will be in October, while it is planned to distribute it in Chinese schools, a story that began two years ago, when a group of independent publishers launched the Lucidabooks firm, with the idea of disseminating unknown literary gems in the Asian giant.
From an essay on comics written by Fan Ye, a well-known translator of books in Spanish, they discovered the existence of a piece that was presented as the greatest science fiction adventure in the southern hemisphere and the best comic in the history of Argentina.
The official birth date of “The Eternal One” for Chinese readers was October 8, 2020, when editor Zhao Lei changed his old email address to yonghanger: “The editing work was huge because we had to design all the images and their texts one by one. With almost 130,000 characters, the first typesetting took us months and each subsequent adjustment was very cumbersome,” Zhao said.
What interested them most was the idea of showing an antagonistic version of the American superhero, with ordinary people willing to fight from their everyday places to save the world. They fell in love with the concept that Oesterheld well summarizes in the prologue of the work: “The true hero of ´El Eternauta´ is a collective hero, a human group? never the individual hero”.
“When I read this comic for the first time – Zhao recalled – I was fascinated not only by its exciting plot, but also by the world the authors created. And as I gained a deeper understanding of the political and social environment of Argentina at the time, I was surprised further the implicit metaphor of the play and its praise of the spirit of justice”.
Another aspect claimed by the Chinese publisher was “the courage and indomitable struggle of a generation in the face of adversity,” referring to the persecution suffered by Oesterheld and Solano López during the Argentine civic-military dictatorship.
Zhao was impressed by the paragraph in which the protagonist, Juan Salvo, speaks of the possible disappearance of the population, “as if Oesterheld had foretold his own destiny”, at the hands of a task force, 45 years ago.
“The reason why it transcends the limitations of a comic strip and becomes a classic is because it transmits the spiritual power of its creator and the collective memory of the entire Argentine nation. And this power is indestructible,” concluded.
Launch
The official launch of “The Eternauta” in China is scheduled for October, with an initial print run of 6,000 copies. The translation was carried out by Xuan Le, a renowned specialist in Hispanic literature who has already worked on works by Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Gabriel García Márquez and Juan José Arreola, among others.
The publishing project had the support of the Argentine Embassy in China and there is a project to distribute the work in the schools of that country, the ambassador told Télam Sabino Vaca Narvaja.
“I am very happy with the publication for the first time in Mandarin of a wonderful work, which is very significant for all Argentines. In these times when we so need the figure of the collective hero, our intention is to spread this version of ´El Eternauta´, to continue strengthening cultural bridges between countries”, highlighted Vaca Narvaja.
“I still -added the diplomat- I keep passages of ´El Eternauta´ in my head. I left Argentina when I was two years old and returned in ´89 and in all those years that I was abroad, sometimes in situations of non-schooling or of isolation for security, ´El Eternauta´ always accompanied me”.
The Argentine ambassador to China considered that the possibility of disseminating the work of Oesterheld and Solano López in that country “is a way of keeping alive the memory of those great militants who, from their art, fueled the flame of resistance and commitment as a transforming action and collective action as the only way to achieve it”.
Considered a universal cartoon classic, “El Eternauta” was reissued in several languages and the Netflix platform even announced the completion of an ambitious series, the start of which was postponed due to the pandemic.
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Anniversary
For the Argentine publisher William Bravo, founder of the Mil Gotas bookstore in Beijing, Chinese readers can come to identify “with that idea of struggle, resistance and epic in the face of adversity that ´El Eternauta´ transmits”, in addition. “Foreign hero stories are often attractive in China and sell,” he noted.
“El Eternauta” was published for the first time in 1957 in the magazine Hora Cero, with a script by Oesterheld and illustrations by Solano López, telling the story of an alien invasion of Earth that wipes out most of the population and motivates the resistance of the citizens of Buenos Aires.
Its protagonist, Juan Salvo, is the eternal traveler who travels back in time to reunite with his family and ends up at the forefront of a struggle that is shown as a metaphor for the forms of survival that emerged in Argentina in times of dictatorship.
Source: Ambito
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