ENG - Ataúd Ed Johnson y Sepulturero Jones

Les cookies assurent le bon fonctionnement de nos services. En utilisant cernivous acceptez l'utilisation des cookies.

Ataúd Ed Johnson (Ataúd = coffin) and Sepulturero Jones (Sepulturero = grave digger) are the names of the two inspectors in the Spanish translations of Himes’ crime novels or his Harlem domestic novels as he used to call them.

If we look at the Spanish titles of these novels, we can see they have been translated very faithfully from the titles in the American editions. They therefore do not take up the puns of the original French editions in the Série noire collection.

Original Himes' title	Title in the Série noire	Title of the subsequent American edition	Title of the Spanish edition
The Five Cornered Square	La reine des pommes	1. For Love of Imabelle (1957).  2. A Rage in Harlem (1965)	Por amor a Imabelle
If Trouble Was Money	Il pleut des coups durs	The Real Cool Killers	La banda de los musulmanes
A Jealous Man Can’t Win	Couché dans le pain	The Crazy Kill	El loco asesinato
The Big Gold Dream	Tout pour plaire	The Big Gold Dream	El gran sueño de oro
Don’t Play With Death	Imbroglio négro	All Shot up	Todos muertos
Be Calm	Ne nous énervons pas	The Heat’s On	Empieza el calor
Back to Africa	Retour en Afrique	Cotton Comes to Harlem	Algodón en Harlem

Translating Himes is never easy. For the blog Mis detectives favoritos, "it is a

challenge to translate the language of Harlem into Spanish. Some translators keep the original nicknames of the inspectors, others translate them. The translation of Bruguera (Por Amor a Imabelle, 1980) has not aged very well because it used the slang of the time (and slang, which evolves more quickly than the common language, always ages worse) ".

The blog Cuaderno de trabajo presents Himes as follows: "Chester Himes is a North American writer who was very well known in his time and who is now a bit out of fashion and little present in journalistic references." We can but subscribe to this comment.

We saw in the article Cidade escaldante; What can be learned from a Portuguese edition of Himes’ The Heat’s On? that Himes, in his position of author working on commission for the Série noire collection (with a 220 page imposed format, for example) had also accepted – or anticipated – the formulation of titles conforming to the line or the style of the collection: the example of Ne nous fâchons pas (Be Calm), later renamed The Heat's On, is the most striking. Between the French title and the title of the subsequent American edition, we are dealing with two types of puns and humor (traditional French vs hardboiled American). The difference also tells us about the distance between the language of Himes and that of his translations.

 Unlike the titles of the Série noire, the titles of the Spanish editions do not take the risk of the pun: a pity because The Five-Cornered Square – the  title given by Himes to the manuscript of the novel later titled For Love of Imabelle or A Rage in Harlem – with its pun on “square” (naïve), had given in French a very good La reine des pommes.

See the blogs

El blogo de Juan Carlos

Cuaderno de trabajo

Mis detectives favoritos