"... A leader who leaves his people without a plan and lets himself
be captured like a child in order to solve what was a personal
matter doesn't seem very competent to me."
As celebrated and beloved worldwide that Hugo Pratt may have been - and still is - his writing and the dialogue of his characters surely sounds unique and unusual to an English speaking ear. I'm not sure how much of his sarcasm and irony gets lost in translation, but it's easy to notice how some of the words and sentences spoken by his protagonists and antagonists come of as too literary, or even too illiterate, if you catch my drift. Perhaps his works read really well and come off as liquid smooth when read in Italian or French, but in English they still sound as too cynical and unnatural, as if those who translated his original words into English didn't quite know how to do it properly. However one may look at it, his Corto Maltese series is a wonder to behold, whether the reader loves him, merely admires him, or despises the cynicism of the world-famous earring and side-burn wearing free spirited Captain of the world's oceans.
In Under the Sign of Capricorn (Euro Comics IDW Publishing, 138 pgs), Corto finds himself in the Dutch Giana, San Salvador de Bahia, Maracatoqua, and a few other islands and beach-front villages, where he helps young Tristan Bantam, a British boy, search for his half-sister Morgana. Accompanied by Professor Jeremiah Steiner, a well-known drunk, Maltese will sail various parts of Atlantic Ocean in search of possible treasures of decades and centuries past. He will also help his newly discovered friends look for the lost continent of Mu, a mythical place that was researched and studied by young Tristan's deceased father, Ronald Bantam. Along the way they will encounter sailors from the German navy, Cangaceiro rebels, and even an old acquaintance, Captain Rasputin, who has a unique "I-love-you, I'll-kill-you" kind of relationship with Corto. An arch-enemy of the highest order, Rasputin is Maltese's eternal foe who will keep popping up in this serial not because his presence will threaten our hero fatally, but because Pratt's created him to be a complete antithesis of our protagonist, a person representing all the vices that our hero possesses, but to a more dangerous extreme.
"... I don't know how they did it, but they got me involved in
a game that until last night I was completely indifferent to..."
A fascinating aspect of Corto Maltese is his interaction with female characters to whom he has an attraction. In the final act of Under the Sign of Capricorn, Corto finds himself on a small island, stranded among the rocks with his memory having abandoned him, while a mysterious foe shoots at him from a distance. With no clue as to who he is and how he got there, he is eventually discovered by a young and lovely woman with golden hair, Soledad Lokäarth, who comes from a family of Evangelists. She reminds Corto of Pandora Groovesnore, the young lady who shot him in his previous adventure, The Ballad of the Salt Sea. Just like Pandora before her, Soledad also shoots Corto (what's with this guy getting shot by every woman he shows interest in?), albeit accidentally, and after nursing him back to health and helping him recover, she finds herself having to bid him adieu. Charmed and clearly smitten with her innocent, naive beauty, Corto tells her, "... Soledad... you must leave now... it's not easy to say goodbye to you...".
Unlike some phrases and expressions, which, at least to me, appear to have been lost in translation from Pratt's original language, this one, I imagine, sounds exactly as its author intended it to. I suppose it is just as they say: love has only one spoken tongue, which is understood by all universally. Or perhaps the author's language, irrelevant of translation, is simply starting to grow on me. Just as Corto Maltese's adventures.
B+
"... but dreams remain dreams, Steiner, and you are one
who dreams too much. Let's go drink our beers and thumb our noses
at those who would do us harm."
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