Leslie Lonsdale-cooper
Brilliant linguist who among many other endeavours was co-translator of Hergé’s Tintin books
LESLIE LONSDALE-COOPER, who has died aged 97, was one half of the translating team, with Michael Turner, who adapted the original French of Hergé’s famous adventures of Tintin comic strip into English.
The pair were junior members of Methuen’s staff when the publishing firm was offered two works by the Belgian author and illustrator (real name Georges Remi). “We saw straight away that they were something quite special,” Leslie Lonsdale-cooper recalled. “The artwork and drawings were very, very skilled. However, there were some problems with it being a cartoon. The publishers had to persuade teachers and libraries that these were attractive books, as at that time they thought cartoons meant horror comics.”
Their superiors at Methuen were opposed to getting involved in a genre seen as a bad influence on children. The children’s editor also objected to the extra costs of translation. The pair got their way only by volunteering to do the translating for nothing.
They began with the ninth volume, The Crab with the Golden Claws, hoping to convince their employers that Tintin could appeal to British readers.
It was not easy, Leslie Lonsdale-cooper remembered: “You couldn’t translate word for word. For a start, all the texts had to be fitted into the boxes, so if it said ‘Bonjour’ in French then the English ‘Good morning’ wasn’t going to fit.”
The launch of The Crab with the Golden Claws in 1958 made little impact at first until the Times Literary Supplement published a review, describing Tintin as “a really first-rate comic strip”. When Hergé did a signing session at Hamleys the police had to control the crowd. Methuen were convinced.
The translators developed a routine by which Leslie Lonsdale-cooper produced a first draft, Turner worked on it, and they then read it to each other before agreeing the final version. They had been given carte blanche by Hergé to adjust the plots and dialogue to appeal to British susceptibilities – “If you get the spirit right I shall be happy,” he told them.
The task, Leslie Lonsdale-cooper, explained, was to make the translations equivalent but not necessarily the same. The location of for example, first published in French in 1950, was changed from British Mandate Palestine to the imaginary Khemed.
The pair disagreed about what to call Tintin’s cynical fox terrier sidekick, Milou, but eventually settled on Snowy. Professeur Tryphon Tournesol (“Professor Sunflower”, the brilliant but profoundly deaf boffin) became Professor Cuthbert Calculus, and the inept bowler-hatted detectives Dupont et Dupond became Thomson and Thompson, their French spoonerisms rendered into suitably nonsensical English.
Obscure Belgian patois and words considered blasphemous or rude were also changed. Captain Haddock’s expletives were sanitised into such memorable expressions as “Blistering Barnacles!” and “Slubberdegullions!” Tintin was allowed only to say “Mon Dieu”, never “My God”.
They went to great lengths for accuracy, consulting the astronomer Patrick Moore to get rocket details right for Destination Moon, and the National Maritime Museum for authenticity for The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham’s Treasure. “Captain Haddock’s ancestor, Sir Francis Haddock, is depicted fighting a battle in the 17th century,” Leslie Lonsdale-cooper recalled, “so we had to get all the command words right and all the names of the bits of a 17th-century ship.”
Their co-operation on more than 24 books was to last almost half a century and their translations were used by US publishers, spreading the Tintin fan club around the English-speaking world.
“The fact they have been going in English for nearly 50 years, and overall for 75 years, shows how enduring [the Tintin stories] are,” she said in 2004. “I think they are just very good tales, with that constant element of ‘and what next?’ in the story.”
Leslie Lonsdale-cooper was born on January 17 1924 and named after her father, a Lieutenant Commander in the Royal Navy, who had served at the Battle of Jutland and won a DSC, but who had died aged 32 of cancer before his daughter’s birth. She arrived on the same day as his funeral.
Leslie was educated at the Royal Naval School near Twickenham, where she excelled at languages. On leaving, having learnt secretarial skills, she joined the US Embassy staff in London. She worked for General John CH Lee, who would oversee the build-up of American troops and supplies in preparation for the Normandy landings, and was in Paris in 1944 for the city’s liberation. She became fluent in French, Italian, German, Walloon and Flemish.
She transferred to the US Justice Department as personal assistant to the US Chief of Military Justice (Europe), and attended the start of the Nuremberg trials.
Returning to London, she became the private secretary to Lord Rothschild and spent two years cataloguing his library. Following a period with Sir Misha Black, helping him on the Festival of Britain, she took a job as a secretary to Raleigh Trevelyan at William Collins, where she became an editor after attending night school to learn the basics of publishing.
In 1956 she moved to Methuen as an editor, and was later rights director. In 1970 she joined the Open University, where she was the first publishing manager. She finally retired in 1986.
Leslie met Hergé many times and he and his wife visited her at her cottage in Wicken, Northants, where she was a well-loved figure who would entertain friends with stories from her life. She attended the village church and made wood carvings with religious themes. A friend described her as “brilliant… feisty, positive, clever”. News of her death only recently came to wide attention.
In 2011 the BBC’S Security Correspondent Frank Gardner made a documentary about Tintin, a childhood hero, and interviewed Leslie Lonsdale-cooper, who showed him a Tintin book with an inscription by Hergé which read: “To Leslie, who did so much for my little son.”