»Tintin in Tibet

The Dalai Lama will honor Tintin with an award.

Tintin is a comic-book character, created by Hergé. One of my earliest memories is of the Thompson twins ("Thomson and Thompson. No, without a p, as in Venezuela. Yes, with a p, as in psychology.") falling down the stairs, probably from "The Secret of The Unicorn" which my mother read to me on a road-trip across the western United States. From these books I developed a keen appreciation of colourful profanity -- I knew coelocanth as a derogatory epithet a long time before I found out it was a long-vanished fish; similarly for carpetbagger, ungulate, troglodyte, and so many more (not only in English, either!). Much of my geography (but not, I hope, cultural knowledge) came from Tintin's travels: to America, India, the Congo; to Shanghai, to Scotland, through Switzerland. In fact, some years ago I arrived on a train in Geneva to see a huge reproduction of Tintin's adventures in that same train station (in "The Calculus Affair"). The many and wonderful translations, not the least of which are Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner's beautiful rendering into English, have become a fixture of my bookshelf. A few weeks ago I put some books on the counter of a bookstore in Amsterdam. The clerk looked at me as she came to the Tintin book, and said: "It's in Dutch. Is that okay?" and I told her how I like to pick up a Tintin in each country, in each language, and she smiled and said she would start doing that for her nephew, who also loves the books.

In a case of life imitating art, this award echoes the respect paid Tintin in his adventure "Tintin in Tibet". In that story, Tintin follows his intuition across Asia to rescue his old friend Chang. He gains the respect of a secluded monastery for his devotion and sincerity.