CBLDF- Articles: Banned Books: CHE
2008/02/27/1244RTFA: http://www.cbldf.org/articles/archives/000026.shtm…
In 1967, Ernesto Che Guevara was executed by a Bolivian soldier after his capture during a failed guerilla uprising. Che was attempting to duplicate the success he, Fidel Castro, Camillo Cienfuegos and the rest of the tiny crew of the Granma had achieved in Cuba start in a remote location, then build support amongst the peasants to create a people’s army that can throw out the fascists and establish a new socialist republic. But the model that worked so well in Cuba was a complete failure in Bolivia, and Che died in the tiny village of Vallegrande. His ideas about socialism and guerilla war, however, didn’t die with him.
In 1968, Argentine comics writer Hector Oesterheld (1919-1977) and artists Alberto Breccia (1919-1993) and Enrique Breccia (Alberto’s son, 1945) produced a biography of Che in comics form. (To find out more about the amazing Breccia family, check out www.mundobreccia.com.) This book, called simply Che, was told in alternating chapters those drawn by Enrique showing the campaign in Bolivia, while Alberto showed Che’s life before the Bolivian expedition, and the forces that shaped his socialist revolutionary ideology.
According to the Wikipedia article on the comic’s author Oesterheld:
In 1976 [Oesterheld] disappeared, and a year later his daughters, Diana (21), Beatriz (19), Estela (25) and Marina (18), were arrested by the Argentine armed forces in La Plata, and were never seen again. His daughters’ husbands were also among those that vanished. One grandson, Martín, was born in captivity and recovered from the government by Oesterheld’s widow, Elsa Sánchez, and raised by her. A second, Fernando, born earlier, was raised by his paternal grandparents. Sanchez also participated in the protests of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and became of the spokeswomen for the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, which advocates for the return of children of the disappeared to their birth families.
When the Italian journalist Alberto Ongaro enquired about Oesterheld’s disappearance in 1979, he received the reply: “We did away with him because he wrote the most beautiful story of Ché Guevara ever done”.[1] Argentine journalist Jacobo Timmerman, in his memoir of his own captivity, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, recalls seeing Oesterheld across the hall in a prison in 1977. In a report to the Argentine National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, which published its findings in 1984 entitled Nunca Más, Eduardo Arias recalls seeing Oesterheld between November 1977 and January 1978 in terrible physical shape at the secret detention center El Vesubio, which they sardonically named “the Sheraton”.
According to this installment of “Comic Book Urban Legends” from Comics Should be Good:
COMIC URBAN LEGEND: A writer was killed by the Argentinian government over his comic book work.
STATUS: Essentially True
It would not be much of an exaggeration, if one at all, to call Héctor Germán Oesterheld the greatest comic book writer Argentina ever saq. Heck, it might not be a stretch to say he was the greatest comic book writer South America ever saw.
In the discussion thread attached to this article, one poster laments:
15.Lynxara said …
Hearing the story of Héctor Germán told like this makes me want to read his work, badly. Unfortunately, it is a bit beyond my means to teach myself Spanish to do so.
Time and again I wonder– when we know so much about the fantastic comics produced in Europe and South America, why are there no scanslation groups translating them into English? Obviously many of these works just aren’t viable properties for commercial publication, but it makes no sense that fans and admirers wouldn’t want to spread knowledge of them among English-speaking readers.
It just baffles me. If groups of barely literate fifteen-year-olds can make Naruto a marketing force by translating new volumes into patchy English weeks after they street in Japan, then why can’t the entire comics community produce scanslations of stuff like the work of Héctor Germán? Or all the wonderful Disney comics only published in Italian? Or the tons of highly literate French comics we hear about all the time? Virtually all of these languages are more widely studied than Japanese, and the material’s a lot more worthy than a lot of manga that see scanslation!
Scanlation, according to Wikipedia, is the process of distributed scanning/translating comics through some medium like IRC.
The original plates of this comic have been destroyed. It appears to be unavailable in English - only Spanish. So, here we have a story about an Argentinian writer, who chronicled the story of Che, a Cuban revolutionary, where Che was killed by the Bolivian government (in Bolivia), and Oesterheld writer was killed during the Argentinian Dirty War.
I have a few questions:
1. Is there any copyright in existence that could possibly apply to Oesterheld/Breccia/Breccia’s “Che”?
2. Is there any barrier, at all, to reproducing the Spanish version of Che?
3. Is the production of an English translation simply a matter of connecting someone in the scanlation community with someone who is willing to scan a copy of Che?
4. In the scheme of things, isn’t an English translation bound to happen sooner or later?
5. Given the history and context of Oesterheld/Breccia/Breccia, isn’t this a work of historical significance, and arguably deserving of translation?
With these questions in mind, I wish to conclude on this note: Internet!
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